Google News to Host Wire Service Stories 63
knhasan writes to tell us that Google has just announced a new program in which they will host wire news stories directly on their site. This is widely believed to be the first concrete fallout from recent troubles with Agence France Presse (who sued Google for alleged copyright infringement) among other wire services. "The new feature unveiled Friday is called 'duplicate detection,' which lets Google News identify the original source of a story that may appear in tens or hundreds of news outlet Web sites. If the source story is from one of the four news service agencies that Google has licensing agreements with, Google will display the story on a page that it hosts."
Woohoo (Score:3, Funny)
I'm hoping for better reporting. (Score:3, Interesting)
Which means that in order to attract people to YOUR news site, you'll have to ADD something. Either background research, interviews, commentary, etc.
Sure, the commentary might not be "better". It will probably still be biased. But the facts should appear more consistently now.
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*duck*
Where's my nose? I had it a second ago... (Score:1)
Re:Where's my perspective? I had it a second ago.. (Score:2)
Finally... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Funny)
To: ettiz (639203)
Sir,
We note with some regret (but mostly with glee) that you have duplicated, copied and otherwise stolen one of our (potentil) members Intellectual Property. It is estimated that this heinous crime has cost our (potential) member in excess of $10,000 per view. You have stolen this persons livelihood and he will now be required to live on the street and will, most likely, die of starvation and sorrow before the next equinox. Given these indisputable facts, and your clear malicious intent, we hereby notify you that unless you pay $1,000,0000 immediately to the SPAA (we will then hand 0.001% of the settlement directly to our member) we will be obliged to take you (or someone like you, or possibly someone dead) to court.
We expect and demand your immediate co-operation. (or that of an employer, your children, your ISP or your cat)
Signed
Tod Hsals
(Vice deputy junior legal officer)
Slashdot Posters Association of America
(For clarity, this is not a legal notice, you need take no action, and its totally off topic, if slightly pertinent to your last post.)
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It's a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to be completely random which site a given story will point to and there are times when I click through to a news item and I'm immediately skeptical of the source site. If a news vendor isn't doing any sort of value-add, I don't see why I should get sent to bob's scraped wire site versus a trusted major news source.
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I like to see the varying articles and standpoints available for the same story (usually in the editorials around the actual feed).
If google starts feeding me a single specific variation with one POV its worse in my book.
Re:It's a good thing (Score:5, Informative)
Hundreds of websites run the same identical AP/AFP/Reuters/UPI/Etc. wire services news story. Until now, G news would show ALL of those stories.
Now, when it detects a story that is from a wire service and just reposted, it will show it on the Gnews site, as Gnews has a subscription for all of them (except AFP apparently.)
However, if the Corner Podunk Press writes an original story on the shuttle launch, it too will be linked.
The loser here are news sites that do run wire service stories as they will no longer be getting free traffic from Gnews. This might encourage them to be more original.
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Oh dear. If only that were true, the world would be a much better place.
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Now let me explain to you.
Editorials on their own pages do not get overlooked by this program.
Re-writing a headline OUGHT to be overlooked.
And by far, the vast and fast majority of the stories that gnews had been linking were 100% identical. 50000 newspapers carry AP, 50000 newspapers have website, there would be 50000 linked stories on the topic on GNews, making it impossible to find the actual original content.
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It's actually very easy for Google engineers to identify the sources, because they _have_ all the possible source texts at their disposal: anybody who subscribes to AFP/Reuters/AP/etc obtains the r
Nope. (Score:3, Funny)
Not true. Being stupid is easier. No explanation required.
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However, if the Weekly Podunk Herald writes an original story on the shuttle launch, it will not be linked.
We hate them.
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Yeah. I hear the The North Platte Bulletin [northplattebulletin.com] has an opening for a Beijing bureau chief.
Wire services exist because it is impossible for every news outlet to cover every story. Hell, given the buisness situation in the newspaper industry, even the major papers are drawing down their national and international coverage and relying more on wire
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Now, when it detects a story that is from a wire service and just reposted, it will show it on the Gnews site, as Gnews has a subscription for all of them (except AFP apparently.)
You sure about that? Google displays wire stories from AFP, on the Google News FR website at the very least [google.com]. Also, this has been happening for at least a month. I figured this was a non-event for ./ goers, but apparently we're just extraordinarily slow on the uptake.
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Perhaps Google is doing this as a way to hit back at AFP for all the lawsuits?
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Let me guess who'd be called "duplicate" (Score:1)
All your newsbase are belong to us (Score:1)
Checkmate. Google owns the news. Game over for your local paper. I predicted this many years ago.
It's about time.
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Re:All your newsbase are belong to us (Score:5, Interesting)
The game begins for your local paper.
The Niagara Falls Reporter [niagarafallsreporter.com] is a free tabloid that efficiently - and hilariously - extinguished the career of the most corrupt and incompetent mayor this border town has known in living memory.
It succeeds by relying on a minimal staff, reporting and opinion with strong local roots - in John Hanchette, for example, it has a founding editor of USA Today,a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a man with a Pulitzer to his credit and a national reputation as a journalist and teacher.
Whoever modded this down is an idiot (Score:3, Interesting)
The newspaper I was working for when I predicted this is still available at its vestigal domain name here [tribnet.com] where I helped set it up.
At the end of a meeting to review a very expensive (>100K$) demographic survey in 1992, I spoke my mind. I told him a number of things, including that the toxic ink on dead tree business model wouldn't last forever, that communities were more important that forums, that the Internet wouldn't be male dominated forever and that user generated content was more important than e
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Define community for me?
In context (Score:2)
Agence France Presse should know that (Score:1, Insightful)
they can shove their copyright up their "butté" now - for its probably useful for only doing that compared to what it might have been.
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Film at eleven.
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In related news... (Score:3, Funny)
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dup detection -- fantastic for the smaller papers (Score:3, Insightful)
This is very useful. As far as I can tell, it only means that you won't get a billion copies of the same AP, Reuters, etc. press release that many papers, because they have cut their staff, print in lieu of actually doing their own research. This is fantastic news, and will hopefully be another reward for smaller newspapers who do actually do something instead of print ads for car dealerships. If the Sasquatch Press has a Middle Eastern correspondent, their journalist's work will not be lost in the spam flood of AP articles. Of course, the Sasquatch Press won't have such a correspondent, but they may indeed have one for Sasquatch City -- who probably knows a hell of a lot more than the AP reporter airlifted in when the Sasquatch Robots gain consciousness.
Until now we didn't have a Middle East reporter (Score:2)
If the Sasquatch Press has a Middle Eastern correspondent, their journalist's work will not be lost in the spam flood of AP articles.
You're absolutely right. I'm Stormy Flowers, Editor in Chief of the (Toenail Sands, OR) Sasquatch Press. Nobody knows the Sasquatch Robot story like we do, but there's no reason we can't branch out in to Middle East coverage. I'm sending the ever-reliable Bruce Foggins out to Iraq on the next available C-17.
Thanks for thinking of the Sasquatch Press!
everybody should have seen this coming (Score:1)
Why should google redirect you to joe random's copy of the same AP story when they can display it themselves?
In a similar fashion, froogle/google products (and google in general) has a similar situation with dozens of e-commerce (often shitty osCommerce based) stores selling the same stuff from the same supplier, drop shippers, etc. Since google is an information company, they probably don't need to worry ... yet.
If this helps kills off websites that add no value, then good riddance.
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It costs Google nothing to link to another site, while it costs them to syndicate wire stories. OTOH, if Google displays the story they can keep the ad revenue.
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It costs Google nothing to link to another site, while it costs them to syndicate wire stories. OTOH, if Google displays the story they can keep the ad revenue.
Since there are lots of sites around that do nothing but republish wire service reports in order to bring in ad revenue, it stands to reason that the ad revenue is more than enough to pay for the wire service.
Therefore, what Google is setting up is a paying proposition. They're end-running all the eyeball-grabbers.
Great news for legit sources (Score:1)
Good. (Score:1)
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Sounds Like The Wire Services Got Hosed (Score:2)
However, unless the wire services are getting a fairly substantial *percentage* of the ad revenue they are the ones who are ending up as the losers. Sure had google merely licensed the content it would have been a victory for the wire services but the whole original detection bit is a stroke of genius. It may look like a nice gesture but the net effect will be to greatly reduce the value newspapers get from hosting wire ser