Late on Friday Google announced the launch of ‘News near you’ for Google News on mobile, offering location-based news in its US English edition.
Location-based news first became available in Google News in 2008, and today there’s a local section for just about any city, state or country in the world with coverage from thousands of sources. We do local news a bit differently, analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.
The Wall Street Journal has followed in the Financial Times’ footsteps by teaming up with Foursquare. As part of a new focus on New York City, FourSquare users who ‘check in’ to a location around the city will receive a link from the Journal relating to that location.
Some media observers have been critical of the partnership, focusing on the addition of a few new WSJ-related badges that Foursquare users can now add to their collection. That might seem like an underwhelming feature for a media giant like the Journal to add, but the addition of location-specific, hard news stories as tips is a very intriguing experiment that could point to a big new future for news. It also looks like a lot of fun.