A timely interview with Google News’ Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, following Google’s submission of a micropayment model for newspapers.

paidContent asks Cohen about publishers’ attitudes to Google, whether its become a scapegoat for the industry and about the search company’s discussions with publishers.

He also talks about adding more ’sources’ to Google News – following experiments with adding Wikipedia to the aggregator:

“As new, different sources for news and information begin to develop we will want to try to incorporate that as much as possible. What is a news source? It is increasingly grey. As much as possible we try to stay out of any sort of editorial or qualitative judgments. [The] aggregation of pubic information data – that certainly didn’t exist a few years ago.”

Full interview at this link…

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Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google, helpfully reminds news publishers that they can stop Google from indexing their webpages by usint the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). Publishers can also set a time period for indexing, for example if content goes into a paid archive after a certain time.

Cohen’s comments follow a declaration from the European Publishers Council last week demanding new intellectual property rights protection.

“Some proposals we’ve seen from news publishers are well-intentioned, but would fundamentally change – for the worse – the way the web works,” he writes.

“Our guiding principle is that whatever technical standards we introduce must work for the whole web (big publishers and small), not just for one subset or field.

“There’s a simple reason behind this. The internet has opened up enormous possibilities for education, learning, and commerce so it’s important that search engines makes it easy for those who want to share their content to do so – while also providing robust controls for those who want to limit access.”

Full post at this link…

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Google News respects copyright and is not looking to move into content creation, Josh Cohen, content specialist for the search giant’s news channel, has said in a Q&A with the Toronto Star.

“…[I]t’s really about helping people to find the content that’s out there. We just don’t see ourselves as content creators. We’re more of a platform for that content,” he said.

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