Just how important is it to get your site into Google News? Robert Niles raises the question on the Knight Digital Media Center’s Online Journalism Review.
“For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index.
(…)
“But is inclusion in that index or other search engines’ news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I’m going to argue… no. (Well, at least it’s not worth making a fuss over.)”
So what’s a blog and does it matter? Google News has started – arbitrarily it seems – applying the ‘(blog)’ label to some sites and not others.
It’s all a bit weird, says the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward.
“On both technical and philosophical levels, there’s no meaningful difference between blogs that publish news and news sites that aren’t published as blogs. Many news organizations place material on both types of platforms without considering the content any different. Some use blogging software like WordPress to produce sites that look nothing like blogs.”
His analogy explains it brilliantly:
“Dividing content along these lines is like classifying brownies based on whether they were baked in aluminum or glass pans. There’s no difference, and it obscures what you really want know: if they contain chocolate chips.”
Last week Journalism.co.uk reported on Futurity.org, publicised as an online news service through which US university departments will publish their scientific findings directly online in a digestible format – a project designed to combat a reduction in science reporting in mainstream media.
We were interested to learn that the site would be included in Google News and asked Lisa Lapin, one of Futurity’s founders and assistant vice president for communications at Stanford University, for more information.
“Google News is recognising Futurity as a news organisation and will be capturing our news for search, and for display within Google News, as they would another news organisation,” she told Journalism.co.uk.
A release initially announced 35 partners, although we now count a total of 39 participating universities featured on the site. All are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an association of leading public and private research universities in the United States and Canada.
We asked Lapin if they would be adding even more to the service:
“As for partners, we wanted to begin with a reasonable size and institutions that have strong research programmes – thus it was natural for us to include AAU universities,” she said.
“To be elected to the AAU is quite an accomplishment and there is already criteria that we didn’t need to develop. There are 62 AAU universities in the US and Canada. We will discuss expanding futurity.org membership, but we would need to develop some criteria to assure that the news remains truly the greatest discoveries coming out of research universities.”
The project has attracted some criticism, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News:
“Any information is better than no information,” said Charlie Petit, a former science reporter at U.S. News & World Report and the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The quality of research university news releases is quite high. They are rather reliable,” he added. “But they are completely absent any skepticism or investigative side.”
Petit followed up with a lengthier comment and example on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, and said that press releases published by Futurity should be clearly labelled as such:
“Press releases can and often do carry real news, and in professional and ethical style. In aggregate, they serve reporters and the public in an essential way. However: They may be science writing. They are not independent journalism that seeks (if not always successfully) to get wide opinion and angles on the news. This is not a fine point. It is essential that the distinction be clear.”
Related: Columbia Journalism Review: Is Futurity the Future?
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 public information data – that certainly didn’t exist a few years ago.”
A new feature has been added to Google News, Spotlight, which (according to a very brief explanation by Google) is :
“(…) section of Google News [that] is updated periodically with news and in-depth pieces of lasting value. These stories, which are automatically selected by our computer algorithms, include investigative journalism, opinion pieces, special-interest articles, and other stories of enduring appeal.”
By looking at both the search engine’s own explanation of Google Spotlight and the selection of stories it has flagged up so far, Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward suggests, “Spotlight shines on longer features that have bounced around blogs for a few days.”
According to Seward, lifestyle and opinion pieces fare well, while the New York Times is a frequent source. He does see potential for the new section, however, as a way of using people’s online activity to highlight interesting and important material.
[Laura Oliver adds: The usefulness of Spotlight will perhaps be greater for those who use Google News as their first port of call for the day’s headlines – but what portion of Google News’ users behave in this way (figures welcome) needs to be taken into account.]
Google’s Webmaster Central has posted a video guide to how Google News works for publishers and tips for improving your SEO as a news source – very handy stuff:
According to several news reports the Italian Competition Authority searched Google’s Milan offices this morning as part of an investigation into the company’s abuse of its ‘dominant position on the internet’, says paidContent:UK.
The investigation was sparked by a complaint from the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers criticising the search giant’s lack of transparency in handling Google News – in particular the ranking process.
Google responds on its European Public Policy Blog stating that publishers can request to be removed from Google News at any time and that Google drives vast amounts of traffic to publishers’ websites.
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It’s noted on the Search Engine Roundtable blog that Google News is now re-indexing and crawling news sources for the latest version, provided updates are posted within a ‘short period of time’.
In the past, once a story was published and Google News indexed it, Google News would keep the item as it was, even if changes were then made by the publisher.
Users in the Google News Help forum discuss the issue here. Google employee Inbal Drukker said:
“We now do have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site if these updates are published within a short period of time.”
YouTube is offering news outlets featured in Google News the opportunity to become an official partner of the site – with an aim to increase video views on both YouTube and Google News.
According to a post on the Google News Blog, a partnership will offer the chance of prominent placement of a news organisation’s videos on YouTube’s news page; and, if the videos are embeddable, the opportunity to appear as a featured video on Google News.
News outlets can apply to be part of the YouTube Partner Program, which will also include an advertising revenue share program – as explained by the program’s ‘partner benefits’ page:
Meanwhile, as reported by MediaWeek, Bauer and IPC Media have become two of the first magazine publishers to sell ads around their YouTube content on the site. They follow Channel 4, which struck a deal with the video-sharing site last month.
Google News Blog: A Call to News Publishers: How to Share Your Video.