Google launches wire service for Google News

Google has recently announced that they are launching a new service allowing direct access to wire services such as the Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), UK Press Association (UK AP), and the Canadian Press (CP). In the past, content publishers have complained about, while at the same time benefiting from, the links on Google news and the brief overview of the content hosted on the site. Several newspapers and sites have threatened to sue Google over the issue, some having said outright that Google is attempting to kill traditional print media. Maybe now Google is looking to force the issue, scrubbing their index by removing duplicate links that most of these sites use to get listed.

“Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News,” Josh Cohen of Google said in the announcement for the new wire service. “However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives,” he added.

Those cloned articles, known as reposted wire feeds, are what many sites use to gain traffic to their website, thus gaining readers and profit from advertising. There is nothing bad about this, but when those same sites blame Google for their lack of revenue or loss of readership, then there is an issue.

Not too long ago Google News faced all sorts of problems when print media attacked them. Several newspapers said Google News was to blame for the loss of print reporting and the shift to ad heavy news websites. Anyone who uses Google News to read news and visit sites online knows this to be false. If it were not for Google News, the rants of how bad the service was would never be seen or read. Yet, they complained. Regardless, Google moved forward with a year old deal they had worked out with the Associate Press. This time however, they added more to it. The bulk of the plan is content and duplicate detection.

“Duplicate detection means we’ll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. Instead of twenty ‘different’ articles (which actually used the exact same content), we'll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist. (We launched a similar feature in Sort-by-Date and got great feedback about it.) Of course, if you want to see all the duplicates on other publisher websites with additional analysis and context, they’re only a click away,” Cohen wrote.

Google explained that by, “removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers' most highly valued content: original content.”

“The amusing back story here is that AP is owned by the newspapers, who are screaming the loudest about the collapse of the newspaper industry, and that Agence France-Presse (AFP), sued Google for alleged copyright infringement on the News site, despite the clear and present rules regarding Fair Use,” reads the Raving Lunacy blog.

“The question AP member papers should now be asking is not how Google could be so mean, but how they, themselves could be so blind about their relationship with the AP,” writes Steve Boriss over at thefutureofnews.com. “Being a member of the AP made sense when papers were necessary middlemen for people to get their news — papers would pay the AP for electronically-transmitted stories, then reprint them and sell them for a profit to a public that had no better access to the freshest news. But now that the Internet and Google News have essentially installed an AP News Terminal on the PC of everyone with broadband service, newspapers who are members of the AP are funding their own destruction.”

The original content is what gets the most views; there is no loss of fact there. The little websites who post only wire feeds in order to gain traffic will suffer; this includes the small local newspaper websites. Therefore, by removing much of the fuel for their recent attacks by the press they have both helped and hurt them. Sites will need original content to get listed on Google News. Those who serve only feeds will be lost to the fold. For the professional reporter, this is good news as their work will get the credit due and their publisher will get the readers they claim to have lost because of Google.

Another point that was mentioned in several articles about the recent move by Google is that most of the smaller local papers who complained about this deal with the AP and others covered world news in wire reports. If the local paper cannot cover local news, why are they worried about the world news feeds? Readers will want local headlines first, and will then skim over the wire reports for international news.

Say what you will but Google has just made a move that will ultimately help the way news is reported online, many have often complained that the wire reports were slanted and biased, so with a focus on original content that could add some balance to what you read online.
Source : http://tech.monstersandcritics.com