Results matching “article the google way”

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

To mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3, the Council of Europe is launching an online discussion forum on media freedom in times of crisis, reports the European Journalism Centre.

The forum, intended for both journalists and anyone else concerned about freedom of expression, will center on how journalists do their job in the face of government restrictions during wars, terrorist threats and political instability.

This year's World Press Freedom Day comes days after a report by lobby group Freedom House concluded that global press freedom declined in 2007. According to the survey, Iraq and Somalia remain the most dangerous countries for journalists.

Sources: EJC, AFP

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)

Employees at Le Monde voted Tuesday, April 8, to go on strike to protest the management's decision to cut 130 positions, in what will be the first strike in the newspaper's history.

At a meeting Tuesday morning, an overwhelming majority of the appoximately 300 members of the editor's society voted to stage a 24-hour strike on Monday, April 14. They also announced the decision not publish the Tuesday edition of the paper.

President of Le Monde Eric Fottorino said that he had planned to address employees next Monday to discuss the staff cuts. He declared himself disappointed that employees chose instead to declare a strike "in an informal manner, tallying votes through raising hands" before he had an opportunity to explain his decision, reports AFP.  

This latest issue represents only the third threat of a strike since Le Monde's founding in 1944. The prior two instances were resolved before employees went on strike.

Source: AFP  

Last week, the Google News Blog posted a few comments about how Google News editorializes and ranks articles, in an effort "to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths." Perhaps this can also help newspapers to better understand how their content, and rivals' content, makes it to Google News.

- Having an image next to your article improves your ranking: Myth

- Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News: True
Since the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once, this can be problematic for many news websites that now regularly post updates on published stories.

- Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking: Myth
Google News' algorithms are designed to avoid duplication of content and promote original sources, so it doesn't help newspapers to post the same story after another source.

- Articles that are just images or video won't be included: True
Good to know, as many newspapers and blogs increasingly publish photo galleries or pure-video stories.

- Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News: True
Since Google News relies on automated crawlers, a well-crafted website redesign can affect Google News' retrieval of a website's information.

- If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings (on Google News) will improve: Myth
Google News has some sense of 'editorial independence': using Google's AdSense service doesn't affect Google News' rankings.

For more detailed information, click below.

Source: Google News Blog

Newspaper readers and editors agree on the basics of good journalism, but readers desire looser rules for online conversations, finds a study on online news credibility.  

Reader and editor responses diverged most sharply on the topic of anonymous remarks: approximately 70% of editors surveyed said "requiring commentators to disclose their identities would support good journalism," a sentiment shared by only 45% of readers, reports the Associated Press.    

Readers were more likely to favor an online news model in which journalists engage in conversation and give their opinions, with only 36% of the public seeing this as detrimental to journalism, compared with 58% of editors.  

In contrast, the study found a general agreement amongst readers and editors on basic practices such as the need to ensure accuracy, the importance of fairness in news coverage, and desirability of depth, meaning providing links to other related material so readers can gain a fuller understanding of a story.

The Online Journalism Credibility Study was released April 8th by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Click here for the complete report.

According to John Bartosek, editor of The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., and chairman of the credibility committee for the AP managing editors group, sites that allow journalists to express personal views are perceived as more credible, a finding which runs contrary to journalism's traditional emphasis on maintaining complete objectivity.

Editors' reluctance to inject journalist commentary is understandable; it's a blurry line between expressing opinion and assuring fair news coverage (the study shows that readers want both).

So what to do to meet both demands? A possible solution can be found in the recently incarnated service Hubdub, which allows users to make predictions on the outcome of a given story (e.g. Barack Obama being elected president). Hubdub founder and CEO Nigel Eccles, who recently noted readers' desire for journalists to make predictions, said that Hubdub is now looking to distribute a continuously-updating widget that will display the state of the market ie. the percentage of users who believe that a certain outcome will come to pass (e.g. Obama will be elected).

By incorporating a Hubdub style widget in their news sites, editors could have their journalists rest neutral, while meeting readers' desire for opinion. The only difference: readers would get the opinion of thousands of other readers rather than that of single journalist.

Source: AP through IFRA Executive News Service

The blog L'Observatoire des Médias posted world maps of attention paid to the media in 164 countries in the world and received links from Gawker and Boing Boing.  The numbers included the blogosphere as a whole and 10 media organizations, including the New York Times and the Economist.

Each country is either stretched or shrunk on the map, depending on its share of media attention. The cartogram to the left is an analysis for the Wall Street Journal, showing a flattened Africa and South America and an augmented Western Europe.


Blogger Nicolas Kayser-Bril retrieved the numbers by manually searching the Web sites of 10 news organizations and Google Blog Search for articles containing the names of countries. He also counted and mapped the search results. He expects this process to be automated in a few months, using data scraping, to run more trials.

The numbers ran for each country against a model that Kayser-Bril constructed to approximate that country's importance, including: the country's Human Development Index, area, population, GDP, budget expenditures and number of U.S. soldiers present, accounted for more than half of the variation in countries' media coverage, according to Kayser-Bril. 

There were challenges, for example distinguishing new stories about the African nation of Chad from the rock singer Chad Kroeger. Kayser-Bril instead used capital cities for Chad, Georgia, and Jordan, and then multiplied the results by five (the typical ratio between search-engine hits for a country and for its capital, according to Kayser-Bril.). Another example: Not every article about the U.S. contains the search term  United States."

Kayser-Bril concedes that the algorithm is not very accurate:
- It counts each article equally, no matter the length or prominence.
- Search engines are not reliable. He noticed that "when you do the same search twice, you don't [get] the same numbers."
- The maps can be misleading, because it "makes countries with low population density, such as Mongolia and Canada, appear to be getting short shrift."

Ethan Zuckerman, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said the work is important for showing how undercovered some countries are: "When you're not paying attention to a country, you don't trade with it; you don't send relief to it; you don't have to intervene in it."

Source: WSJ through Cyberjournalist.net

USAToday.com is among over a million websites that have fallen victim by a mounting Web attack (not pictured; photo shows a 2002 hack, see below for more details). Other high profile sites impacted by the attack include Target.com and Walmart.com. 

The hacking activity, which was first reported in mid-March by security researcher Dancho Danchev, has broadened in scope, increasing both in "number and importance of the [affected] sites," Danchev said.

The attackers have not hacked into servers, but are instead targeting sites' search functions. When a user searches a popular term on a website's internal search function, the hacker tacks on an HTML command at the end of the search. That code then redirects the user to a malicious site where his computer is at risk for spyware and Trojan horses.

What stands to perpetuate the Web attack is sites' search cache. According to InfoWorld, sites often submit a saved copy of their search results to Google in order to boost their ranking. When someone searches that term in Google, the tainted cache results then appear, making it more likely that the malicious HTML code will spread.

Danchev said that websites could guard against the problem by "doing a better job of checking the search queries on their internal search engines to make sure there is no malicious code."

USA Today also had troubles with hackers back in 2002; click on the photo to see an incomplete screen shot that was taken of the hacker-modified homepage before the paper pulled their server. And USA Today is not alone; the website of the UK-based Telegraph shut down for a day in May 2007 after being hit by hackers.

Source: InfoWorld through I Want Media, Horked.net through Ask Bjorn Hansen   

Must-read. AJR's Senior Editor Carl Sessions Stepp has noted that while news remains as valuable as ever, journalism is certainly changing as daily newspaper circulation has declined every year since 1987.

Is it time for newspapers to panic? It could be, had Stepp not come up with an expansive list of very good editorial and business ideas for newspapers.

Instead of cutting everything, from staff to newspaper sections, Stepp argues that newspapers should be creating a product that is high quality and indispensable. Journalists need to embrace arriving technologies and make their articles more exciting. But how?

Here's a list of Stepp's ideas, more or less in his words, that could help newspapers recapture "domination of the overall information market":

-  A four section daily paper with journalists and readers sharing and discussing news together.
Section 1: a "dynamic, definitive guide" to local news featuring digests, analysis, listings, links, columns and audience contributions; excerpts and synopses of top content appearing elsewhere; and an annotated guide to the top material concerning international, national, regional and local news, sports, business and arts.

Section 2, the most important local, national, and foreign news, fully updated and differentiated from earlier Web copy.

Section 3, an in-depth package that changes everyday, which would present serious, investigative, quality journalism, not available anywhere else.

Section 4, all the expected features from crosswords to comics, plus new ones including reader creations.

- An online information superstructure built around a double home page, with an easy toggle back and forth: one screen for an orderly display of news and other content, the other a portal-type screen offering a master index of anything useful and appropriate for your audience, with more choices, more services and a nontraditional license to experiment.

- A new, more conversational tone, both online and in print, including staff and outside blogs, behind-the-scenes essays from staff members and a higher proportion of analysis and explanation.

- Archives and galleries with a more user-friendly format like Google or Yahoo! that cluster content by precinct, neighborhood or topics. Searches that index advertising or searches programmed to answer questions such as where a movie is playing or when the school board will meet.

- Expanded interactive guides to movies, shows, concerts, galleries and other arts, with amazon.com-like reader reviews and interaction.

- Real-time online traffic and weather blogs.

- Contests every day for the funniest, weirdest, most helpful or most outrageous local images, audio and video.

- Tournaments, online and in-print, pitting local individuals and teams against one another in solving puzzles, predicting sports or election outcomes..

- Online book clubs and discussion groups on local sports, religion, relationships and more.

- Original uploaded programming, in which readers Web-cam their neighborhood news, read political commentary, offer Leno-like stand-up comedy bits on the news and debate key local issues.

- A complaint forum, directed toward local government or business, in which editors or audience choose which questions have merit and pose them to local authorities.

- A local records center, providing agendas and minutes of every significant meeting in your area; text or links to as many public records as feasible; and your homemade community databases such as local sports stats, crime maps, home values or restaurant menus.

- Greater capitalization on the treasures of your archive; readers can develop and download scrapbooks featuring every article, photo or other mention of themselves and their families in your library; or publication and sale of special in-depth or feature reports drawing on your archives and research capabilities.

- A help-needed feature, a sort of super-classifieds, that lets readers pose questions, seek products, evaluate services and possibly engage in transactions from which you share the profits.

- Moderated forums and advice segments for personal finance, health, travel and other subjects.

- New products and revenue sources: frequent-visitor points, premium services (such as customized news delivery, conferences featuring star journalists, first crack at ads and coupons, local discounts), neighborhood magazines, daily auctions (lunch with the editor!), grants from nonprofits, vastly upgraded searching services and search-related ads, customized magazine and book-length reports on key topics.

- Staging regular creativity meetings throughout the news organization and in the community.

- Hosting an ongoing online suggestion box with prizes.

- Spend real money by giving $100,000 to three or four of your smartest people and challenge them to design something breathtaking.

Read Stepp's article for more of his ideas.

Source: AJR

On Wednesday, Ibrahim Eissa (shown in photo), Egyptian Editor-in-Chief of Al-Dustur, was sentenced to six months in jail on the charge of spreading "false information [on 79 year old President Hosni Mubarak's health].. damaging the public interest and national stability." He faces up to three years in prison with the ability to appeal to sentence.

Eissa's reports were accused of causing foreign investors to withdraw more than $350mil.  from the stock exchange, thus harming Egypt's economy.

In September, at least seven journalists were sentenced up to two years in prison because of misquoting the justice minister and writing speculative reports in Egypt's independent press of Mubarak's hospitalization, travel abroad for treatment, and even death.

23 papers have suspended publication for one day in October in protest.

Eissa said the verdict showed the regime's hostility to the press and "affirms the holiness of President Mubarak and the rejection of any criticism of him or his policies. I don't know if this is a judicial decision or a political one."

Source: AFP (photo) through EJC

Linking is the key to reinventing online news, reports Publishing 2.0. While newsrooms try to cover all the resource bases, online reporting shouldn't attempt to, the website suggests. Instead, online news should provide original reporting with the support of links to additonal original reporting on the same subject.

The article sets up an analogy to demonstrate the projected importance of linking to online reporting: the reported quote is to print journalism as the link will be to online news.



Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review offers helpful tips for effective hyperlinking and suggests that online journalists owe it to readers to provide useful links that relate to the story.

"Ultimately, the addition of useful hyperlinking within an online news story reflects the strong reporting of its author. If a reporter does not know of online pages with extra information relating to the story, he or she cannot link to them. But if you have that information, why not share it with those readers who are eager for it?" he said.

Some critics fear linking will turn away readers. The logic proves faulty when one considers the huge success of Google, whose primary purpose is to provide links to other websites. Users aren't turned away, and in fact have been coming back in droves.

Linking, Publishing 2.0 argues, has the ability to not only enrich stories with additional sources but also tell stories themselves. The article displays linking's storytelling capacity as well as other innovative examples of hyperlinking.

Source: Publishing 2.0 (illustrations too)

According to Ground Reports, 2008 will be the year citizen journalism evolves, after having cemented its establishment in 2007. Leaders such as Newsvine, NowPublic, Orato and Digital Journal offer many similar features: proprietary content submission tools, community ratings, and even some occasional revenue share. But it’s “how these players break out of the pack in the coming year (that) will determine everything.”

The article summarizes its key predictions on what to expect from citizen journalism in 2008: