Experimental news platform opens to wider audience while Google tests ethical boundaries with Wikimedia donation.
Last year, Google News launched Living Stories into Labs. The concept is to put breaking news stories in context of their greater story. For example, knowing that the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts made the Superbowl has greater significance when you consider the awesome seasons both teams had leading up to the big game.
Living Stories launched as a handful of stories that were hand-edited by the staffs of The New York Times and Washington Post. This really shouldn’t have been a stretch for these traditional journalism staffs, as many publications keep organized notes on stories for easy-access context on any story as it returns to the news cycle.
You can star an email in GMail. And you can star an item in Google Reader. Now, starring has come to Google News.
To use the feature, simply click on the star next to a news item.
When you want to look at all of your starred items, look for the link in the left sidebar:
A page will load with all of your starred items:
The nature of news is that it is constantly developing. For example, we first heard about the Haiti earthquake. Then we learned how its rating on the Richter scale. Eventually, we understood the utter devastation it has caused – and continues to cause – in the Caribbean nation.
Many times reporters update individual stories as they learn new information. As such, it presents a challenge for indexing. Google is addressing the challenge by recrawling news articles to index the changes to an existing story. Many of the updates to an article occur within the first day of publishing. Because of this, Google has set the recrawling to occur frequently during that time frame.
Outsell has released data showing the continuing demise of print newspapers in favor of digital technology. They surveyed 2,787 US news consumers to get an idea of their preferences on receiving news.
57% go to digital sources, which is up from 33% just a few years ago. Online news aggregators are popular among news users, coming in at 31% compared to newspaper sites at 8%.
Apparently, the fondness for news aggregators stems from a desire to quickly devour news. 44% of visitors to Google News simply scan the headlines.
Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr
Google News is like kudzu, which is known as “the vine that ate the South” because of its out-of-control growth in the Southeastern United States. Although I’m from New England, friends like Stacy Williams of Prominent Placement, which is headquartered in Atlanta, tell me that kudzu is called the “mile-a-minute vine” in her neighborhood.
According to the Nielsen Company, there were 15,895,000 unique visitors to Google News U.S. in November 2009, and 4,817,000 to Google News France, 3,082,000 to Google News U.K., 2,727,000 to Google News Germany, 2,424,000 to Google News Spain, and 2,328,000 to Google News Italy that month.
Many in the West reacted negatively when Google kowtowed to the Chinese government’s demands to censor its Chinese search engine Google.cn. At the time Google said that it would monitor conditions in the country and make adjustments in policy as necessary.
Looks like that time has come.
Agents who may have been working on behalf of the the Chinese government have apparently attempted a coordinated hacking attack against Google and over a dozen other major corporations. In Google’s case it seems like the purpose was to access email accounts of suspected anti-government activists.
If you go to Google.com/news and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll now see Fast Flip. This is a visual-based news platform that was launched into Labs last September. It’s designed to enable users to read the news similar to how they would a print edition – there are pages, that you flip through.
Google was keen to point out that Fast Flip remains in Labs. But it is a feature that is quickly growing. Last month, 55 resources were added to Fast Flip.
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
This this handed to me, Newsknife has just published a ranking of the Top News Sites of 2009.
The big story is that Newsknife’s combined figures for sites owned by Rupert Murdoch put them in second place at a time when Murdoch has declared his unhappiness with Google News. (Methinks the media mogul doth protest too much.)
The Top News Sites of 2009 is compiled by Newsknife from its analysis of more than 311,000 listings by over 7,400 news sites at Google News during the year. Here are the news sources you are most likely to find in Google News:
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Google News now features a new feature: The Living Stories project. Launched while I was at SES Chicago earlier this week, it is an experiment in presenting news in the online environment that was developed by Google in collaboration with The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Google Living Stories lets you read the same reporting and analysis that you expect from The New York Times and The Washington Post, delivered on a highly interactive platform. Google is providing the technology platform, the journalists from the Times and Post are writing and editing the stories.
These are not the best of times for print media and they are the worst of times for Editor & Publisher, the journalism trade journal. The Nielsen Co. announced today that it is shutting down Editor & Publisher, which has chronicled the newspaper business for 108 years.
Nielsen is selling eight other trade publications — including The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard — to e5 Global Media LLC, a new company formed by private equity firm Pluribus Capital Management, and Guggenheim Partners, a financial services company.
Two years ago, I observed that, “In many industries, the trade press has imploded.”
