US: Rethinking the structure of online news

At the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) conference in Las Vegas, Google senior advisor Richard Gingras, talked about the future of Google News, its relationship to the newspaper industry and the future of online news content.

According to the study of online traffic flows to websites, around 50% of traffic comes from Google searches, essentially making homepages less significant.  Google is able to direct traffic to news sites by crawling around 40,000 news sites globally every ten minutes.

Google executive Marissa Mayer has presented her "atomic unit" theory to demonstrate the segmentation of online media.  She provided a metaphor using the introduction of the MP3 and how it altered the "atomic unit" of music from albums to songs.  Essentially, what this means for news sites is that its no longer about the site, "it's about the article," Gingras explained.  

In an interview with BNET, Gingras offered the example of Wikipedia as a possible direction for news providers; "Wikipedia is doing living resources and newspapers are continuing to do ephemeral, here-today-gone-tomorrow article pages -- one of the last vestiges of edition-oriented publishing."

Gingras believes one of the greatest assets news providers have today is their professional reporting staffs and methodologies.  He believes that it is vital use this resource by providing users with the ability to identify the original source of all news reports.

According to Gingras, news providers need to rethink the structure of their content, maintain a "living" news model, increase their content volume, and take on a more aggressive approach to reporting.  

Sources: BNET