@AOP: Meet the aggregators
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 3 October 2007 at 11:28
Tags: Google News, MSN, UK AOP
There were some sparks in the first panel discussion of the day about aggregators and portals.
AOP president and GMG digital Simon Waldman challenged each participant to excplain “Why should we publishers like you?”
Google News business product manager Joshua Cohen reiterated the usual lines from Google’s relationship with publishers. It’s a tech company, not a publisher; Google doesn’t want town content, but help people to find it… Google News focuses on news enthusiasts and generates significant fresh traffic and new readers.
Waldman challenged him, saying that the recent deal to host content from PA, AP and other news agencies on Google servers was a “strategically big shift” that changes some of this. Google is now hosting wire service copy. So should we still like you?
Cohen responds that the deal was driven by the desire to show the biggest number of viewpoints possible. Often stories on Google News were the the same exact duplicated content from news agencies. The agencies have a different business model from other web publishers.
MSN.co.uk executive producer Peter Bale sent some veiled barbs at sites that aggregate news only by algorithm. The former editor of Times Online stresses that he is a journalist and that MSN’s news site is an editorial product produced by a team of 30 journalists. It is important to find ways to pay for the enormously expensive process of gathering and editing news online, he stresses.
“Journalism is not free; we have to work to pay for the enormous financial and personal cost of delivering news,” he says, with a nod to the murder last week in Burma of Japanese reporter Kenji Nagai.
MSN wants to be a destitation in its own right, not just the default news site in ubiquitous Microsoft products like the Internet Explorer browser and MSN Messenger instant messaging tool.
“MSN is a journalistic product — this is more than an algorithm,” he says. It is also intellectual property, a concempt his parent company, Microsoft, understands better than most. “I hate to see news as IP, but it is — in a way that some of our competitors don’t fully appreciate,” he says.
Waldman challenges him about whether these veiled comments were directed at Google and whether Bale thinks Google infringes on news producers’ copyright. Bale eventually answers “no,” but not before saying he expects “a downward bump in traffic” national newspaper web sites to lose traffic from the Google News deal with PA.
Later in the question and answer session, Bale says he is betting his personal future at MSN on “a journalistic overlay” on MSN’s news aggregation service. It will provide human-edited links to news from other sources of high-quality journalism.
“We have young readers on [MSN] messenger who may never pick up a newspaper,” he says. We want to expose them to the great thought and the very expensive that are out there. He gives the example of linking to The Spectator web site, a notion that amuses Waldman — kids using MSN Messenger will want to read articles in the Spectator?
A question from the floor asks for some details on how the Google News search algorithm works. Cohen gives only a few hints. Google News, he says, attempts to “aggregate editorial interest” and takes placement of stories on a news site into account. It also looks at the type of site a story is on. For example, Bloomberg might be higher for business news, but not sport. But being first or more recent, or best at SEO is not a guaranteed way to get a top link on Google News, he says.
