Real-life experience with the new Google News

by Mathew on September 11, 2007 · 5 comments

Update:

Associated Press spokesman Paul Colford emailed me about this post, and said that “only a tiny fraction” of the content that the newswire shares with aggregators such as Google and Yahoo comes from its member papers. Here is his comment in full:

“AP’s state wires, which include member content, are not licensed to Google and other online aggregators.

As a result, only a tiny fraction of the national and international stories sold by AP to aggregators originated with members of the cooperative – typically scoops credited to the members.

Except for this tiny fraction, the stories sold to Google and others are original AP reports by agency staffers.”

Colford also said that the Nashua Telegraph yearbook story described in the post below moved on the AP wire with a tagline that gave credit to the newspaper (although I didn’t see any such credit on the Google News version).

Original post:

I got a comment on one of my posts today from Damon Kiesow, the managing editor of the Nashua Telegraph, and I thought it was worth highlighting here because he talks about a real-world example of what the new Google “hosted news” deal with Associated Press is like for newspapers such as his.

According to Damon, his paper wrote an offbeat story about a girl and her problems getting a picture into her high-school yearbook, and Associated Press picked it up — and now is ranked as the top source. Here’s his comment:

Our first experience with the new AP/Google partnership:

The yearbook story was an offbeat piece that was picked up by the national wire. So, instead of Google giving our version (NashuaTelegraph.com) top prominence – the AP/Google page gets the traffic.

As Damon points out, even the other newspapers that picked up the wire story — such as Boston.com — are given preferential treatment in Google News, and the original Nashua Telegraph story comes up at the bottom of the search results. But there’s a silver lining, says Damon:

“Despite our angst at this, we have the last laugh as Fark.com ended up pointing at our version, driving 40 – 50k pageviews to that one story this morning.”

Welcome to the ever-changing world of Google-driven news. Steve Yelvington has some worthwhile perspective on the Google AP deal here.

Tagged as: , ,

  • http://drumsnwhistles.com Karoli

    I’m glad Fark picked them up. It seems wrong to me for AP and Google to syndicate a story from a newspaper and not link back to the paper’s page.

    That’s the equivalent of scraping, in my opinion. If newspapers’ online bread and butter is page views and clicks, then it seems like it should be an obligation on Google/AP’s part to link back to the original source.

    Besides, it drives me crazy when I do a Google news search on a story happening in Santa Barbara, for example, and end up with the top result being an East Coast paper. It makes no sense whatsoever for me to link a blog post to an out-of-the-area secondary source.

  • http://www.hmtk.com HMTKSteve

    Perhaps it is time for a journalistic code of conduct in regards to sourcing for online content?

    Google should also put something in place on Google News so that the original source of a news story gets top billing rather than the most popular source.

    In this particular case, was the story written by a local staff writer and then the AP “picked up” the original staff writer’s story or did they write their AP version based on new research and all? If the AP just scraped the story from the news papper than I feel it is up to AP to properly credit the story and provide a link to the originating story. Of course I have no idea what the contracts say in regards to AP grabbing your content…

  • http://www.fark.com Drew Curtis

    The AP’s been scraping stories without giving credit to the original source for years. Can’t imagine why the news community doesn’t rise up and give them a black eye about it. Especially now that the AP is trying to cut everyone else out with this new google deal

    Glad we got the original source on the link, we try to do that when possible

  • http://blogoscoped.com Philipp Lenssen

    They should really figure out where a story cluster originated, and give continuous preference to that URL. Not necessarily always display it on top — the story might age after some hours — but always somewhere visible in the story cluster. Perhaps they should even clarify this with some “source report” link next to a story cluster taking you to the first mention. In fact, they should probably assign “NewsRank” or something for a source known to scoop often :)

  • Mathew

    That’s a good idea, Philipp — maybe someone at Google will read this :-)

    And Drew, I agree — I find it odd that AP is supposed to be a collective and yet it is clearly acting in its own interests and not those of its members.

Older post:

Newer post: