News wire services the Associated Press, Agence
France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press have all
agreed to allow Google to host their news stories as part of the
Google News site. Financial terms were not disclosed.
In the same revamp, Google News is also prioritising the news
report which broke a story rather than those of news outlets which
followed up or reproduced it. This new part of Google News is
called 'duplicate deletion'.
Stories from the news agencies mentioned have featured on Google
News, but not directly. They appeared as credited stories published
by newspapers, and Google News drove traffic to the newspaper
websites, because the agencies did not publish directly.
"Because the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press
Association and the Canadian Press don't have a consumer website
where they publish their content, they have not been able to
benefit from the traffic that Google News drives to other
publishers," said Google News business product manager Josh Cohen
in a Google blog posting. "As a result, we’re hosting it on Google
News."
Several news agencies have threatened legal action against
Google in the past over its use of their material, but both Agence
France-Presse (AFP) and AP had signed deals with the company ending
the lawsuits. It has not been known until now how Google News would
use their content.
Google News's other announcement was that it would end the
duplication of identical stories and credit a story to its original
source organisation. The move is likely to impact on the traffic to
websites that publish news agency stories.
"Instead of 20 'different' articles (which actually used the
exact same content), we'll show the definitive original copy and
give credit to the original journalist," said Cohen, explaining the
'duplicate detection' feature.
"Our goal has always been to offer users as many different
perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible,
which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world
in Google News," he wrote. "However, if many of those stories are
actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those
different perspectives. Google News will direct readers to the
original version of a story."
Google News has run into controversy, especially in Europe, over
its use of headlines and snippets of news content on the site. AFP
and Belgian association Copiepresse both took cases against Google,
and Google News stopped hosting content produced by Copiepresse
members.
Last month Google announced a new and unusual
user comments feature for Google News. It will only display
comments emailed by participants in the story, including people or
organisations mentioned and the writer.
The announcement was made in Google's official Google News Blog.
It explained: "Our long-term vision is that any participant will be
able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the
articles about the story. Comments will be published in full,
without any edits, but marked as 'comments' so readers know it's
the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's
report."
