SubscribeGoogle’s Wake Up Call to Newspapers
Posted in Internet, News on September 6th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Google recently announced a partnership with the major news agencies to feature their original stories, while at the same time hiding “duplicates”, or in other words, the actual newspaper’s versions of that very same story.
The relationship between newspapers and news agencies is based on sharing contents and pooling resources. Newspapers write and give away to agencies their local contents. In exchange they receive from the agencies national and international stories, not having to spend their own resources covering them.
The result of this relationship is that beyond local news, most newspapers publish the same “one size fits all” version of most national and international stories. The newspaper’s value has then been greatly reduced to the edits and small additions that each newspaper’s journalists and editors add to the story.
Google News is not a significant source of traffic to newspapers and thus this move might not mean much to them in the short term. It has however raised awareness of diminishing value of newspapers beyond the local context, especially in a networked world. News media coverage today is all about optimization of resources. At least this new Google partnership might be an invitation to rethink the AP model.
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