Results matching “how google news”

Although not directly related to newspapers, this is of interest in terms of larger trends : for the first time, Google has surpassed Yahoo as the most popular website in the US, according to comScore's unique monthly visitor rankings.

Until now, Yahoo's panoply of sites received more traffic that Google, although the latter has long been the Internet's leader in search.

The lead is very small, 466,000 visitors out of about 141 million unique visitors both for Yahoo and Google.

But the finding could be more significant in terms of Web trends as a whole. In April 2008, Google's unique audience in the US had grown 18%, compared to 7% for Yahoo.

Source: Yahoo News (AP) through I Want Media

Fear not, news publishers, Google News is not an editorial venture, nor does it aim to be. And "we definitely respect copyright law."

This is essentially what Google News Business Product Manager Josh Cohen said at the 2008 Canadian Newspaper Association/Canadian Community Newspapers Association conference in Toronto.

"We're not creating content, we're not editing it. We certainly work with publishers on a regular basis ... but I think we're a different part of the ecosystem," he said.

Asked why some news publishers see Google News as a competitor, Cohen replied that "globally, with a handful of exceptions, these publishers are all on Google News. So I think that the vast, vast majority - we're sort of working with them in some way."

According to him, Google News fully respects copyright law, by licensing content when it uses more than a headline or snippet.

And as usual, Cohen reaffirmed that Google's broader goal wasn't content creation.

"Again it'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."

But publishers' main concern may be that they have generally served as both the content creators and the platform to carry that content.

Read the story on our sister site, the SFN Blog.

Source: Toronto Star

The Norwegian press is experimenting with innovative Google news mash-ups and online databases, an effort that is spearheaded by, among others, Epsen Anderson, who is charged with modernizing NRK 's (Norway's public broadcaster) flagship program Brennpunkt,  the Norwegian equivalent of Panorama.

Andersen, who regularly designs new technology methods for "doing journalism", feels that "computer programming is also journalism." He is a strong advocate for making programming know-how a necessary and commonplace skill in a newsroom. 

His latest project for NRK is Politikerdatabasen (see image), a database that currently contains information on all members of parliament in Norway and will expand to include information on the country's 11,000 local politicians in May, reports Journalism.co.uk's Kristine Lowe.
 
"I think it is absolutely key to bring programmers into the newsrooms so they can get involved in journalistic projects at an early stage," Andersen said. "Programmers can create solutions to process large quantities of information, e.g. from public sources, and present it in an engaging and orderly manner."

Before working with NRK, Andersen created several high-profile online databases and mash-ups for local newspaper Budstikka, discovering along the way that maps which touched on issues close to readers found the most success. Examples included a map of parking fines showing the parking lots with the highest fines, and one detailing which parts of the region were troubled by snails killing off plants, a concern for gardeners.

Andersen is not the only Norwegian on the cutting edge of multimedia journalism; two journalists at VG were recently honored for a complex multimedia project focused on domestic homicide.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

Google has revamped their search feature in Google News, so that searching and browsing through quotations in news articles are easier. Users can now keep track of what his/her favorite politician, actor, or sports star is saying, as well as search within their quotes for a certain topic.

Type a person's name in the search box on Google News, and recent quotes from that person will show above the search results. For more of a speaker's quotes, click on his/her name. There, users will have the opportunity to search within the quotes. For example, entering "Iraq" in the search box of John McCain's quotes will produce his quotes on Iraq.

This feature can be useful in finding original quotes from a huge amount of commentary pages and in finding specific quotes through many pages of transcriptions. 

Source: Google

On Wednesday, Tom Curley, president and CEO of Associated Press, spoke at the annual conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) and stated that "the news cooperative hasn't changed its fundamental mission, but must have a more flexible business model to meet the changing dynamic of the media industry."

In order to help struggling newspapers, AP has already offered price cuts for fees paid by members, expanding video and business coverage, and creating a digital archive database that members can search.

The AP also plans to re-price and re-package its news for its 1,500 daily U.S. newspapers, which would entail a core service for all national, state, and international breaking news with separate add-ons of premium service, instead of offering news feeds defined largely by the volume of news delivered.

Many newspapers are unreceptive to this plan due to the lack of specifics, but Curley assures that more details will be available in July.

"I can't sit here today and tell you that we at The Boston Globe are going to save any money from this program because I quite frankly have a hard time understanding the program,"  Martin Baron, editor of The Boston Globe, said.

David Shribman, vice president and executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, remarked that his paper is getting too many enterprise stories from the AP and not enough of the day-to-day coverage it needs. "I think you vastly underestimate the resentment and anger in this room over the AP's policy," he said.

Curley said "the company is trying to respond to member needs and wants to hear from member newspapers about AP services."

Another service AP is adopting, in addition to tracking service Attributor, used to monitor content, is iCopyright, a copyright protection service, for online users of its content.
 
Every AP-hosted story will include links to the iCopyright service, which will allow AP content users to email content, request copies, purchase photos or publish to their own websites. It will also "guide users through the appropriate licensing arrangement or payment process for aggregating content."

The system will faciliate monitoring copyright compliance and identifying pirated and misappropriated stories, according to Bruce Glover, AP deputy director of business development.

Mike O'Donnell, founder and CEO of iCopyright, encourages news sites to add the links to AP stories on their own websites "to promote an industry-wide standard for online copyright protection."

Source: Associated Press through IFRA Executive News Service, Journalism.co.uk (photo)

The Newspaper Association of America reported this week that the number of unique visitors at its member's websites increased by 12.3% in the first three months of the year.

That's certainly excellent news for newspapers. However, blogger Alan Mutter has pointed out a worrisome finding behind the growth: more people than ever are visiting, but they are sticking around for shorter than in 2007.

The chart depicts the movement of the four key metrics of online newspaper growth.

In the first three months of 2008, the average amount of time spent by website visitors dropped by 2.9%. Though not a dramatic drop, it becomes more noticeable after factoring in the 6.6% loss in the average number of page views per unique user,

According to Mutter, "the decline in the average duration of sessions at newspaper web pages suggests that visitors are not utilizing the industry's sites as primary destinations, but, rather, as places to episodically view individual articles highlighted by Google News, Drudge, Digg, blogs or any of the thousands of other places they might be."

The concern for newspapers with what Mutter terms "drive-by surfers" is a potential loss in advertising revenue, which would come as particularly hard hit in an industry that is relying more and more on online revenue. It is also likely that these latest figures will increase newspaper's opposition to Google's new "search within a search," which had started to curry favor following a controversial debut.

Source: Reflections of a Newsosaur 

UK journalism blogger Paul Bradshaw offers some tips for busy reporters and editors on how to use some Web-based tools such as RSS feeds and social media to help them along the basic newsgathering process.

According to him, why go searching for news on the Web and Google when one can let that news come to you instead?

Among his tips:

- subscribe to RSS feeds for any online sources in your area of coverage: you'll get constantly updated feeds, from a multitude of sources, on a one-stop page.
- Technorati, the blog search engine, gives the possibility of subscribing to feeds organized by tag: an easy way for a motoring journalist to keep up to date with the blogosphere's coverage of 'Ford', 'V8s' and more.
- Twitter offers features including Twitterlocal and Tweetscan, which enable users to subscribe to feeds based on location and keywords, allowing journalists to set up feeds in advance for scheduled events.
- Subscribe to bookmarking sites such as Delicious and the like: "Bookmarking sites like Delicious are a goldmine of information and leads," says Bradshaw.
- Use social networks and their feeds: "Journalism is all about contacts. Social networks are a fantastic way of finding and managing them," writes Bradshaw.
- Sign up for some Google alerts: in addition to automatically providing items that may have gone unnoticed, Google always displays 'similar' results.

While journalists should by all means learn how to take advantage of these easy-to-use Web resources, they shouldn't do so at the expense of traditional reflexes: getting directly in touch with sources and verifying the accuracy of content on their own.

Source: journalism.co.uk through IFRA Executive News Service

Last week we shared the emotional photo documentary from Martin Gee of the San Jose Mercury News. Visual journalism is a powerful tool for conveying the impact and scope of the downsizing that has been happening in U.S. newsrooms. 

Many startups such as Local Edition and Backyard Post are attempting to claim the "hyperlocal" news market. OurTown is the newest player, which boasts 70,000 hyperlocal websites across the country. George Blake, former editor and 20 year veteran of the Cincinnati Enquirer is now chief news officer for OurTown.

Blake believes that the best definition of "hard news" is the news "most important to your readers." Thus, editors must discover what people want to read and respond accordingly: if people want local entertainment and activities, provide a community calendar, if people want school, church, kids sports news, provide links to their specific-interest site. There will also be chat rooms for people to discuss local issues, according to Blake. He hopes that this very local content will distinguish OurTown from bigger local sites such as Yelp.

"You want to know about the local festival 10 minutes from your home, not the one 50 miles away," said Blake. " When you go to your OurTown website, you will read stories about places and people you recognize in your community."

Local editors, who are from the community they represent, oversee the content of their sites and keep almost all of their local ad revenue, which Blake hopes to be enough incentive for them to make their site "the best it can be." Editors will also receive help from an advisory board of journalists and will receive updates on what is working and what can be done to make the sites better. Their licenses can be pulled if the site is not regularly updated or contains inappropriate content.

Blake hopes that OurTown websites will attract local advertisers who want to build close-to-home businesses. "Unlike the daily newspaper that needs to sell the $100,000 ad contract, OurTown editors can sell $100-a-month contracts and create significant income," he said.

OurTown is marketing through "word of mouth" and through sites like Google, Yahoo, Craigslist.

Blake stated that while OurTown does not plan on becoming a social networking site, it will connect people with common interests and common goals.

"Everyone will be able to go on their OurTown site to see what all those sirens were about last night, or if their neighbor's kid threw the winning pitch in that little league game," Blake said.

Source: OJR through David Black

Here's a quick sum-up of some of the big media stories outside of the newspaper industry, which you can also read more about on our sister site, the SFN Blog:

- Photo-sharing site Flickr, owned by Yahoo!, announced the launch of a video-sharing function on its site. Videos will be limites to 90 seconds and 150Mb in size though. "While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse," wrote community manager Heather Champ. In broadening its span to video, Flickr will attempt to distinguish itself from market leader YouTube, by sticking to "what quickly bubbled up was the idea of 'long photos', of capturing slices of life to share," wrote Champ. The video service will only be available to "pro" users who pay $24.95 a year.

- In a move interpreted as a retaliation to Microsoft's hostile takeover offer, Yahoo! announced it will be testing an advertising sales deal with Google that will last for up to two weeks. Yahoo! will run Google's AdSense service along its own search results. Microsoft's reaction was straightforward: "Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidated over 90% of the search advertising market in Google's hands; this would make the market far less competitive," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's lawyer.

Source: SFN Blog - Brand Republic - Guardian through European Journalism Centre

Here's Part 2 of a piece submitted to us by Chris McGillion, former Editorial Page Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He currently coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University in Australia.

In the following, he outlines five key points presented by some of his journalism students to top execs in the newspaper industry, who it seems would be better off heeding their advice :

Also read Part 1: The value of the journalism graduate.

Last year the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association (Panpa) invited five of my journalism students from Charles Sturt University (CSU) to give a keynote presentation at its annual conference in Melbourne on what their generation wanted from the newspaper of the future.

Newspaper decision-makers have access to the latest statistics and trends in audience research as a matter of course. But they rarely if at all have five representatives of Generation Y - the readership base of the future - holding court without interruption for ninety minutes on what they want in a newspaper and why.

My students made five major points. First, while not discounting a continuing (if diminishing) market for hard-copy newspapers, they argued that the "newspaper' of the future would have to be web-based in order to attract sustained patronage from their generation.

This is consistent with the results of annual surveys of first year communication students at CSU (200 in all of whom almost half are journalism students). These results show an increasing trend toward accessing news online (34.7% did so at least weekly in 2007) and decreasing hardcopy newspaper consumption (down to 41% at least weekly in 2007).

Further evidence of our students' attachment to web-based technology is daily usage of Hotmail accounts (60.7% in 2007), the Google search engine (72.7%), and social networking websites such as MySpace (33.3%).
 
Second, the student presenters argued that future web-based news sites would have to play a "gateway" role rather than the traditional "gatekeeper" role. Put simply, young people these days don't like to be told what news is or what they should consider important: personalised, tailored content will be the hallmark of Generation Y's media consumption.

Another side of this cultural shift is that Generation Y doesn't like to be told what to buy: they will certainly follow trends and adopt brands but both must be - or must appear to be - peer-recommended (and remember we are dealing with people who may have up to 400 "friends" on their social networking websites).

This shift has important implications for advertisers and thus the way media organizations fund their operations.

Third, the most popular news sites will allow for a degree of interactivity. Young people don't only want to know what's happening in the outside world: they also want the outside world to know what they think about what's happening and even, increasingly, to be the ones defining and providing whatever it is that is happening.

Fourth, reputable media organisations remain highly valued. This seems to be a function of information overload and the consequent need to filter what's "out there" together with attitudes ingrained from parents (and reinforced by teachers and public figures) about reliability and quality. 

Fifth, and most important, Generation Y will change the economics of the newspaper industry. In an internet age, young people do not see the need to pay for information.  But nor do they have the same concerns about privacy as their parents and grandparents. Their's, after all, is the "Big Brother' generation whose private lives have become the stuff of public consumption.

The students at Panpa then unveiled their idea for a proto-type web-based "newspaper". It was designed as a gateway to the internet: it allowed readers to pre-sort the news they received, to access email and other social networking sites, and to provide their own "news" stories, comment and photos. It also offered free mobile phones and/or phone accounts in exchange for personal information which the site host then sold on to advertisers.

I had worked closely with the students for three months on this presentation. Sitting in the audience of 300 or so (mostly middle-aged male) editors and publishers, I heard enough grumbling about what the students were saying to fear that the presentation was a PR disaster for the journalism course I run. "Free newspapers and mobile phones!" I heard one editor complain under his breath. "What else do these people want?"

Then, one by one, three international experts on the subject of trends in the newspaper industry - representing IFRA, INMA, and News Digital Media - were invited to respond to the students' presentation. Their message was clear, simple - and reassuring for me at least: in no uncertain terms they each told the audience that they ignored what my students told them to their peril.


Chris McGillion coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University, Australia (cmcgillion@csu.edu.au).

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Stay tuned, as we will shortly be resuming our 'Future of Journalism' series with interviews from editors at The New York Times and the Financial Times.