For a while our posts were getting picked up on Google News. Which was pretty cool – it brought in readers we wouldn’t otherwise get, plus we got to see our posts next to the New York Times or some other august media corporation when we happened to cover the same story.
And then, suddenly, silence. Our friends at statcounter reported not a single hit from Google News. Odd, thought I to myself. So I ran a couple of test searches on Google News, and sure enough, we were nowhere to be seen.
So I sent the powers that Google an email asking what had happened. Here is the response I received:
Hi David,
Thank you for your note. Upon a recent review, we’ve found that we can no longer include your site in Google News at this time. We do not include sites that are written and maintained by a single individual. Similarly, we do not include sites that do not have a formal editorial review process. We appreciate your taking the time to contact us and will log your site for consideration should our requirements change.
Regards,
The Google Team
Well, well, well. No "formal editorial review process," huh? That pretty much shuts out any site that isn’t part of the dreaded Mainstream Media, doesn’t it? It surely shuts out every blog on the internet, since one of a blog’s defining features seems to be the lack of "a formal editorial review process," whatever that is. (FWIW, I’ll note for the record that Blue Mass. Group is not "written and maintained by a single individual.")
Isn’t this policy completely ridiculous? After all, one of the great things about the internet is that it reduces the cost of disseminating information widely to almost zero, which means that a whole lot more people can find out about a whole lot more things and tell a whole lot more people about them than ever before. In other words, there’s a lot more NEWS on the internet than in the mainstream media. Even we humble Blue Mass. Groupers have occasionally reported on events that we thought were important but that were not covered by any mainstream media outlets, and there are a lot of bloggers out there who do a whole lot more actual reporting than we do. Apparently, though, none of that reporting is good enough for Google News.
I think this is really a shame. Google is a wildly successful company because, in a lot of ways, they seem to really get the internet – they understand what people want from it, and they know how to design their products so as to deliver what people want in new and clever ways. But IMHO, they have completely missed the boat on the question of what constitutes "news" in the age of the internet. Maybe just being a clever bunch of designer/programmers isn’t enough to really see the big changes that are taking place.
don-warner-saklad says
Boston City Council censors its minutes by only making available a very spare formatted outline instead of the more complete stenographic transcript paid for with public funds.Could any of you folks be persuaded to ask for the more complete stenographic machine output from the city council stenographer Ellen Fritch Associates. I tried but to no avail.
jon says
Google’s history when it comes to political speech is not a happy one.I wrote up a detailed account of my own woes as with de facto censorship as a Google Adwords advertiser. The original piece follows below, as well as a follow up and a story in The Nation.– “Google’s Gag Order: An Internet Giant Threatens Free Speech”– “Do No Evil: A Google Freedom of Information Act.”– “Google’s Haphazard Ad Policy.”
charley-on-the-mta says
Well, this is really a shame. One of the things that savvy internet companies should do is to widen the scope of voices in the public sphere. I always appreciated that Yahoo News would link to somewhat unusual commentary about news events — the socialist reaction, the Ayn Rand/Libertarian reaction, etc.And it’s true, the blogs report on all kinds of things that the MSM misses. A formal “editorial policy” is no guarantee of newsworthiness or even basic journalistic responsibility — and in some cases is antithetical to either. The great thing about the internet is that credibility (either as a “reporter” or as commentary) is self-enforcing: As bloggers, we can’t buy credibility; we have to earn it, and people will just read other sites if we’re not providing something of value. You don’t have to read us just because we’re “what’s on”, like with TV or newspapers.Free the blogs!
sco says
Yeah, but is it news? I agree that the line between commentary and news is blurring these days, but if I don’t want Rush Limbaugh in the google news aggregator, then I’ll have to accept that Daily Kos shouldn’t be there, either.That’s not to say that blogs don’t have a lot of good stuff in them, but if I want blogger reaction, I’ll go to technorati. If I want news, though, Google is still the place to go.
ken says
I agree with sco. The thing is, if blogs are allowed in Google News, it’s going to include a lot of stories that aren’t news. Similarly, how do they draw the line on what is a “news” blog and a personal/other topic blog? People may comment on their personal lives as well as news, and I don’t want to be hearing about some random person’s daily life on Google News. Now, if Google came out with a new service, say, blogs.google.com, that let you search blogs in the same way as you search news, that would be great. But then, you’d still have the mixed in personal stuff, but that’s ok.
david says
Not necessarily. The initial selection of whether a website gets included in Google News or not is done by humans who look over the site. Only then do the automatons take over. So it’s easy for them to screen out non-news blogs. And I could easily see them saying that this blog doesn’t do enough independent news-gathering to qualify. The point is, though, that a lot of blogs that don’t meet Google’s somewhat arbitrary qualifications actually DO provide “news” that isn’t available elsewhere. It’s a shame – and not a little bit ironic – that Google, the uber-internet company, has adopted a policy that screens out all but, basically, newsprint or TV news outlets that also maintain a website.
cos says
I don’t agree with sco. It is news. For example, who covered the attempt at voter suppression in the March 15th special election in Allston? The BU Daily Free Press, which you can’t read without registering, and Blue Mass Group, and one mention in one of the local papers. I did google news searches for it at the time, as did other people. People looking for news were well-served by the fact that Blue Mass Group was included.A lot of blogs are full of opinion… but so are the usual news sources. Every paper has editorials and op/ed, and Google indexes all of those along with the rest of their content, as far as I can tell. And what about the ideological or partisan press? Things like NRA News, American Family Radio, Fox, and so on. How about press releases from organizations like the ACLU? We’d be best served if Google includes a broad variety of sources, instead of perpetuating the myth that the “objective” traditional media is somehow different from those with points of view. That myth distorts the news.