Google News publishes new agencies’ stories
Stories from the Press Association, Associated Press, Canadian Press and Agence France-Presse will be scanned by Google News, and the online aggregator will omit duplicated versions of the agencies’ stories in its search results.
Google News will now directly display the story from the original news agency – if the agency doesn’t have a news site, Google will host the story. Although it won't carry ads alongside the hosted stories, Google hasn't ruled out this possibility in the future.
This announcement is likely to worry news organizations, although Google News business product manager Josh Cohen argued that "the flip side is that there will be more room on Google News for more of their original content, which will be pushed higher up the results."
“From a user perspective, it's (the previous Google News model) not offering a different perspective as three of the five sources are duplicate stories," he said.
“Where publishers have used agency copy but added their own quotes and information, their version of the story will appear alongside the first agency version,” reported the Guardian.
On the other hand, this can also lead to the gradual phasing out of news organizations or news websites that rely on major news agencies. And this is the case for most news organizations, including those who do original reporting.
What do you think?
Source : The Guardian - Editor & Publisher
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This will become a serious issue for newspapers sites, and since more and more of the news reading is moving on the internet, it's an issue for all the media.
The traditional circulation of a piece of news is agency - print edition - internet edition, which means the piece of news will appear on a newspaper site one day after the agency has released it. Of course, many newspapers, televisions and independent news sites do real-time update these days, but this is not a rule, yet. And even in competition with real-time update sites, Google News will likely release the news several minutes prior to the competitors.
The effects will hardly be seen in the near future, because selection is not obvious enough at this stage. I haven't found any referrals to Google's way to leave out the duplicated stories. Probably this is done by comparing fragments of text. Do a test on Google News and you'll see the volume of results is going down to roughly 30% because of the new organization, but, however, in a case like "White House Sex Scandal", that means 500 results instead of 1300 results. It still makes no big difference to the human eye at this stage.
See my post "Google deal uncovers truth that AP is now a competitor to newspapers, and papers are suckers for being members of it" at The Future of News