Google Shift on Handling of News

Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press, the company said Friday, setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News.

The news agencies — the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. — now have their articles featured with the organizations’ own brands on Google News. The companies have agreed to license news feeds to Google.

The five-year-old Google News service previously searched the Web to uncover links to news articles from thousands of sources, and clustered links on similar subjects together.

Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the agencies’ articles.

The changes will not affect the ranking of articles in search results on Google News, Mr. Cohen said. If an Associated Press article ranked eighth among different versions of an article previously, it would still rank eighth under the new service.

To avert legal challenges, Google does not now run ads next to automatically generated links. Agence France-Presse recently dropped a suit against Google for using its text and photos on Google News without permission.

The four news agencies act as wholesalers supplying news to other news organizations, and do not try to attract customers to destination sites of their own. Google News has inevitably linked to the customers of the agencies instead.

For example, an article on Google News credited to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could in fact have been originally from The Associated Press.

The changes will have little impact on news organizations that receive traffic directly from Google News, Mr. Cohen said.

Google’s licensing of articles from news organization partners is similar to the way rival news sites like Yahoo News or the MSNBC portal of Microsoft have licensed news from news organizations for more than a decade.

Jane Seagrave, vice president for new media markets at The Associated Press, which is based in New York, declined to comment on the terms of the deal, and on whether Google would run ads alongside AP articles.

Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.
Source :http://www.nytimes.com