Google News Allowing Story Participants To Comment

Jamie found this analysis of Google News's foray into community commentary. They are starting it off by only allowing people involved with the story to comment — and participants must first be authenticated by email. The article rounds up other bloggers' views on the game-changing nature, and the possible dangers to Google, of this new feature. Here is a sample of comments to a Google News story.

Neat idea

[Cleon]

This is kind of a cool idea; it's a way for direct commentary from the people involved without a journalist's filter.

Plus, it'll get really entertaining when they apply it to political campaigns and the press secretaries get into flame wars. :D

Re:Atypical

[illegalcortex]

Oh, and just to head off a couple of the replies saying things like "well, they also filter based on who you are and if you're involved." What's keeping anyone from saying they are "Professor of X", where X is whatever they claim. Unless they are sending in more credentials than their email address, it's rife for abuse. And as you see from this page, both responses are opinion. I'd say a good portion of stories on Google News "involve" just about everyone (otherwise, they wouldn't be on there) in some way. So everyone will have an opinion.

Re:Neat idea

[Notquitecajun]

Filter=bias here. This is a good thing...it may help show all sides of a story and cover those points which reporters leave out, and hopefully provide context to news stories.

Re:Email addresses have domains, too...

[illegalcortex]

No, it's not high-security. It's just giving you a false sense of confidence. Every Tom, Dick and Harry at Columbia could claim to be a professor there. And for big companies, we already have press releases and responses to the story right there in the article. For smaller or mid-size companies, plenty are using services like hotmail or gmail instead of their own hosted email. On top of all that, you also get people who work at companies who could fake up an "official" company response. Imagine a disgruntled employee from a @macdonalds.com commenting in a hilariously embarrassing way. Or, more likely, just someone at the company responding before it was cleared through their communications department.

Re:Good idea

[eln]

That's a very optimistic view. The people that have the time and the resources to monitor this stuff are the big corporations though, so I think you're most likely to see comments made by a company spokesman trying to spin articles that are unfavorable to that company. The first comment on the sample article seems to be bear that out.

So, instead of the article followed by a separate press release spinning that article, you get the spin on the same page as the article itself. I'm not sure what's really gained in that case.

Google news will take more time

[icepick72]

All of a sudden everybody involved in a news article is responsible for controlling their own public face through comments on the article. Some of the more newsworthy Tom Dick and Harrys will be vehemently defending themselves online all day. And I thought Facebook was bad.

Re:Good idea

[Wordsmith]

And what makes you think sources involved in an incident are any less prone to bias and misreporting than the media? The media gets its accounts from involved sources, and most media really does make the effort to portray those accounts fairly; but when there's room for debate in an issue or even an observation, each side is prone to thinking of the other as slanted, and blames the media for acknowledging that account.

Re:Journalists without Journalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they feel it so necessary to invite commentary from those actually involved in a story, then why do they not simply hire journalists to interact with such people?

Because journalists are invariably people who really, really wish they were paid to write fiction. Isn't that obvious to anyone who's ever seen a mainstream news story covering a topic they're personally familiar with?

Disintermediation is a good thing, mmkay? Most of the time, "journalists" are just valueless middlemen who deserve to be cut out of the food chain at every possible opportunity.

I Love this!

[djrogers]

This is great - we will not longer have to rely on the mass media journalists to decide what comments make it in a story, and in what context. I'm sick of seeing stories that ignore or downplay one side or the other by skewing the comments of the person that doesn't meet their agenda.

Re:Doctor Troll

[BobMcD]

Okay, but what's the adoption rate? And is that 3000 unique kids per day, or can kids try/begin smoking multiple times throughout the year?

$11,000 each assumes 100% of them. If you discount those that never turn into buying customers, that figure would go way up.

Looking at $1,600 per year, and assuming (what, 12-to-70?) something like 58 smoking years for these kids, that's almost $93,000 per kid. And please note that we're ignoring any costs of any kind...

It would take one in ten for that to work, and those would have to be LIFETIME smokers. Optimistic at best. Closer to delusional...

Re:Email addresses have domains, too...

[MorpheousMarty]

It is not that hard to get reasonable confirmation of this kind of thing, or quoting people would be nigh impossible. Can anyone who actually works in a news room say how they verify things normally? I'll bet a simple phone call is all most major newspapers require and it won't kill Google to have a dozen people on the phone. Personally I can't wait until someone comments something really dumb, and then claims it wasn't them. Google may become my only source of news at this point.

Re:I Love this!

[BlackCobra43]

I think your reasoning is fallacious; the story is no more informative if it includes bullshit from both sides than it as with only bullshit from one side. What ever happened to just reporting the facts?

Re:I Love this!

[Wordsmith]

And from whence do these facts come, if not from the involved parties - who, like all human beings, are potentially prone to bias? Certain things are directly observable by a reporter, and certain aren't. But the very fact that those on various sides of an issue can come to radically different conclusions, and even make radically different observations, suggests the "facts" of a given issue aren't as simple to decipher as one would hope. Very few things in this world can boil down to inarguable, objective truths; and a great many things are newsworthy simply because there's debate in the first place.

Google News creating a minefield for itself

[HooliganIntellectual]

I run a news site that is indexed by Google News. As much as I'm anti-copyright and for open access to information, this move by Google really bothers me. This commenting feature really crosses the line. If Google is going to allow people to comment on stories from our service outside of our service, I want a cut of the money that Google makes off of using our content for free. This is only fair if Google is allowing people to comment on stories in a way that is outside the control of our website.

Do no evil? Google is really turning out to be the next Microsoft. Greedy and determined to control everything at any cost.

This will probably create a flurry of new lawsuits by larger news services.

This is a good thing!

[fox1324]

I know its unpopular to fellate google as much as I'm about to, but a lot of /.ers seem to be missing the mark. This is an interesting move by google, and I predict it will add a lot of value to their news page. Think about the tremendous public service news.google provides; A quick-loading, easy-to-find, free-as-in-beer virtual newspaper...it attempts to neutralize political spin/bias by linking to multiple sources for each story, and by using the web it is capable of pulling from tons of lesser known, local newspapers that you would not otherwise know about/hear from (more sources also helps remove bias). This new addition is a step forward because it attempts to get information straight from the source (those involved in the story), removing the middlemen (remember the 'whipser down the lane' effect?). At the end of the day, all of google's actions seems to be aimed squarely at improving the quality of information available to the public, and making available to them as quickly and easily as possible... and did I mention, for free? This is a huuuggee asset for keeping the general public informed about the state of the nation/world/etc. I know a lot of people think google is the next m$, but google has done nothing to break my trust so far.
happy 4:20!