Google News: Editors more important than ever
Posted by John Burke on November 5, 2008 at 9:05 PM
At a seminar held in Bogota, Colombia by la Fundacion de un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano in conjunction with Google, Latin American representatives of Google News reassured participants that GoogleBot is not doing the job of traditional editors and that in fact, editors are more important than ever.
The representatives used the example of the Sun Sentinel/United Airlines fiasco in which a negative article about United published in 2002 was picked up by Google News from the Sun Sentinel as breaking news, causing United's stock to plummet. The Google News presenters pointed out that the reason for this problem was that editors at the Sun Sentinel tagged the date of the article incorrectly, and thus Googlebots picked it up as breaking news.
In another example proving the importance of traditional editors, they showed a popular video of O Globo, a large Brazilian media company, that showed a stream of smoke emerging from a cityscape and the live voiceover declaring the smoke caused by an airplane crash. In reality, the smoke came from a fire at a mattress factory at which nobody was even hurt.
The lesson behind the examples was that editors need to fact-check more than ever because once information is published, it is immediately spread all over the world by Googlebots and other software. Editors need to make sure that "informing as quickly as possible is not the same as misinforming."
The representatives used the example of the Sun Sentinel/United Airlines fiasco in which a negative article about United published in 2002 was picked up by Google News from the Sun Sentinel as breaking news, causing United's stock to plummet. The Google News presenters pointed out that the reason for this problem was that editors at the Sun Sentinel tagged the date of the article incorrectly, and thus Googlebots picked it up as breaking news.
In another example proving the importance of traditional editors, they showed a popular video of O Globo, a large Brazilian media company, that showed a stream of smoke emerging from a cityscape and the live voiceover declaring the smoke caused by an airplane crash. In reality, the smoke came from a fire at a mattress factory at which nobody was even hurt.
The lesson behind the examples was that editors need to fact-check more than ever because once information is published, it is immediately spread all over the world by Googlebots and other software. Editors need to make sure that "informing as quickly as possible is not the same as misinforming."
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