Google News comments: a roundup
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 13 August 2007 at 13:23
Tags: Google, Google News
Google unleashed an enormous amount of online comment last Tuesday when it announced that it would be experimetning with inviting comments on Google News from “a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question”.
People involved in a story listed on the US version of Google News by emailing news-comments@google.com — an approach that immediately led Read/Write Web to sniff about it to being “feels ‘Web 1.0′“.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land interviewed Google News business product manager Josh Cohen and confirmed that reporters involved in reporting the story would qualify as participants whose comments could be posted. In an e-mail to Sullivan, Google also stuck to its traditional line that it is a technology company uninterested in creating original content.
“We don’t want to create content, and we don’t want to be in the content creation business. We want to be the conduit connecting people with information,” Google told the search engine journalist.
But most commentators were unconvinced. The content-creation angle was the most significant development to many. Edelman PR man Steve Rubel, who blogs at MicroPersuasion, the significance of the new feature is that it marked Google’s first foray into an editorial role and ownership of original content.
“The Google News team now makes decisions about what responses go up and what gets left behind,” Rubel wrote. Consequentially, they are getting into the verification business, and are taking on all the legal and other risks of an editorial department.
There was some head-scratching at Telegraph.co.uk. “[I]t’s a labour-intensive way to build themselves up as a message board,” wrote assistant editor Ian Douglas.
At the Poynter Institute’s E-media Tidbits blog, Tish Grier wondered whether Google had underestimated the size of the editorial task it had taken on. “These days, even the big-time newspapers of record don’t hire enough experienced moderators to manage their own flow of comments,” she wrote.
Most importantly, Google’s new editorial function has implications for all those in the publishing business who have been weary of their “frenemy” Google. The news aggregator bas been tolerated by many publishers only because it drives such huge volumes of traffic to their news sites. But by providing new developments to their stories without pushing readers to news sites themselves changes the game.
Lloyd Shepherd, until recently Yahoo! Europe’s director of news, was blunt: “war is declared“, was the title of a post predicting that the new feature would be “the straw that will break the camel’s back - the camel being the news organisations, and the back being their willingness to trade Google News’ “fair use” of their stories for traffic to their sites.”
Joe Murphy, a developer on the Denver Post web site, argued the move threatened news sites in a number of ways. It would lead more people to go to Google News first for news; the opporuntinty to comment would bring many “newsmakers” into this new Google News audience; it reduces the credibility of news organisaitons by giving a (presumably-required) right to reply, and it provides Google with a growing contacts book of sources for news stories. The simple solution for newspapers, he argued, is to devote more resources to commenting features on their own sites.
TechCruch’s Michael Arrington was also characteristically forthright, accusing the search giant of hypocracy for not allowing others to crawl or aggregate Google News, a position that is untenable now that it is hosting orignal content of its own.
But writing on the Huffington Post, respected US newpapper industry analyst Lauren Rich Fine threw cold water over the whole brouhaha — which continues today with stories in both the New York Times and the Guardian. The whole story, she argued, is “attributable more to the media’s fascination with itself as well as traditional media’s inability to get with the new program of a dialogue versus a monologue.”
Really?
Tags: Google, Google News
