Links are one of the biggest reasons that the print industry can’t compete with web content. This is not a new revelation, but after reading an interesting piece about the value of links by Scott Rosenberg, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it spelled out so…
News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has had a lot of issues with search engines – most notably, Google. He has repeatedly threatened to block News Corp. content from search engines, but content from the Wall Street Journal, for example, still po…
The big news of the moment is that the site WikiLeaks has published over 90,000 secret military documents related to the war in Afghanistan. Posted on Sunday, the documents had previously been shared with three publications (under embargo): The New Yor…
Many news consumers are increasingly relying on human-edited news aggregation and content curation to sift through their news and establish trust. While not all mainstream media sources are thrilled about the concept, it’s just how it is, and there is …
Update: Google has now released video of Schmidt’s speech. Watch it and hear what Schmidt has to say right from him.
Original Article: Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a pep talk to the news industry Sunday Night in Washington, addressing the American Society of News Editors. Schmidt’s talk comes after Rupert Murdoch recently re-ignited the "we’re going to block Google" flame.
Is the web good for the news industry? Tell us what you think.
"The web can ultimately be very good for news," Schmidt is quoted as saying. "Think about it: You have more readers than ever, you have more sources than ever, for sure you have more ways to report and new forms of money. New forms of making money will develop."
According to Politico, Schmidt talked about "wanting to be challenged through technology that directs readers to a story with an opposing view." News aggregators do this (assuming that they’re aggregating a rounded pool of sources. Google News does this. Go to a story page in Google News, and you’ll be met with articles (sometimes hundreds or thousands) from varying sources, many of which have varying views.
That can be valuable to a reader, and can paint a more rounded picture of the story. Perhaps Google will deliver something (technology-wise) through Google News that puts greater emphasis on the opposition of views from the sources it draws from. Could this really be done algorithmically? What if Google News had a credibility rating system like Allvoices?
Google is "working on new ways to tailor advertisements and content for consumers, based on what stories they read," according to Politico’s account of the speech.
Either way Schmidt reportedly says that new forms of making money will develop and that Google is working on them, without giving any more detail than that. He did however advise news publications to place greater emphasis on news personalization and mobile, and maintained that there’s a bright future for both display ads and subscription models.
What approach would you like to see Google take for delivering news content? Ads? Share your thoughts here.
Allvoices is an online news destination that features a mix of aggregated professional news content and citizen-contributed reports, both from numerous channels. It’s been steadily growing in popularity. After a couple years of existence, the company tells WebProNews it’s getting over 4 million uniques and contributors from over 130 countries. I spoke with Allvoices CMO Aki Hashmi about what makes this site tick, as well as a new announcement it made today.
How it Works
When you hear that Allvoices uses an algorithm, thoughts of Demand Media may dance in your head, but where Demand Media CEO says flat out that it is not journalism, Allvoices is all about journalism.
Comparison between the two entities is not really fair anyway, because they are simply different animals. Whereas Demand’s algorithms help it determine the topics that it needs articles on, the Allvoices algorithm is more about piecing stories together, regardless of where they come from. Allvoices isn’t necessarily telling you what to write about. You’re reporting to Allvoices the news you have. If someone else contributes a different perspective on that news, the two (or however many exist) will be brought together to the same destination. That’s how it works in a nutshell. It’s actually more complex than that.
While Demand and Allvoices may be different animals, that’s not to say that there aren’t some similarities. For example, both have great potential for search. You can read about Demand’s process here. When a single report is pushed out under Allvoices’ model, five additional pages are created – for related news stories, images, blog posts, videos, and comments. It’s not about creating content based on what people are searching for, like Demand’s model, but there are multiple ways that readers may experience the content by way of search.
The Allvoices system takes citizen reports and news feeds from mainstream outlets, instantly determines when they come in, where they come from in the world, down to the city level, and categorizes them dynamically, whether that be politics, sports, entertainment, etc. If a city page doesn’t exist in the system, one will automatically be created. Hashmi says the system dynamically determines the validity of a news source as well.
That’s where the reputation system comes in. It looks at local sources that are coming from a country, Twitter feeds coming from that location, citizen reporters from that location, etc. The way the community interacts determines the credibility and level of trustworthiness of a story/reporter. Each citizen report has a rating that lets readers check the credibility level. There are basically three levels of contributors. Everybody starts out at the "stringer" level. Once they’ve met the criteria of credibility, they can become a "reporter." This means they have greater clout, and can eventually achieve "anchor" status, which will give them more influence on the community and a higher degree of trust. Things that are looked at to determine one’s status include number of articles per month, checking for copyright violation, reputation, level of activity, engagement factor, level of promotion (Allvoices provides tools to share content), popularity, etc.
Contributors can make money at any of the three levels, should they elect to join the incentive program. At the lowest level, they can get $2 per thousand views, and at the highest level, $4 per thousand views.
As far as spam checking goes, Hashmi says the algorithm looks for profanity and performs contextual analysis. There is a plenty of the human element invovled as well. Community managers will police content on top of the algorithm, and there is further checking at the top level. Users can also flag stories and comment on them.
The New Global News Desk
Now Allvoices has released a Global News Desk, or an assignment desk if you will, which gives citizens and reporters opportunities to work together. For example, a citizen could feed a journalist information for a particular story, and the journalists could take it from there and turn it into a full-fledged story. This News desk has launched in 30 cities around the world, and they expect to have that number of to 60 within the next month to month and a half. The idea, is that more parts of the world can be covered extensively than what is currently being covered by mainstream media outlets. "We see signals from the audience," says Hashmi. "They’re looking for alternative news sources and different perspectives – news they’re not typically seeing." Currently, cities that have appointed Global Desk citizen and professional journalists include:
- Baghdad, Iraq
- Beijing, China
- Beirut, Lebanon
- Cairo, Egypt
- Colombo, Sri Lanka
- Doha, Qatar
- Dubai, UAE
- Islamabad, Pakistan
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- Kolkata, India
- London, UK
- Manila, Philippines
- Nairobi, Kenya
- Shanghai, China
- Yerevan, Armenia
As well as cities in:
- Canada
- Iran
- Israel
- Nigeria
- Palestinian Territories
- Turk and Caicos Island
- USA
"What’s interesting about us is unlike traditional media sites, we don’t promote reporters," says Hashmi. While traditional media will promote their reporters and the actual coverage, Allvoices places greater emphasis on the stories themselves, bringing in multiple perspectives to a single destination. Assuming it works like it’s supposed to (frankly I don’t have enough experience with Allvoices to give it an evaluation in that regard), it’s a pretty novel idea for helping readers wade through bias and get a more well-rounded picture of any particular topic.
While Allvoices considers itself a destination site for news, Hashmi tells me mainstream media outlets often find content through the site and request to syndicate it themselves.
Dow Jones & Company said today it has launched The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition for consumers.
The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition is available to consumers for $49 per month. Current WSJ.com subscribers can access the offering for a discounted rate. In October 2009, Dow Jones launched the professional edition, aimed at offering businesses more in-depth information while boosting its revenue via its subscription service.
Features of The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition include allowing users to personalize the service to match their needs. Wall Street Journal editors will monitor and select top news and trends across key industries including pharmaceuticals, healthcare, energy, media & marketing, finance and technology. Users can customize news alerts and company profiles for industries and topics that are most relevant to them.
The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition offers access to news from Dow Jones’ 2,000 journalists, as well as the ability to search more than 17,000 global business news sources, some of which are not available free online.
"The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition leverages two of our leading products to create an innovative tool to serve professionals across multiple industries – a service Dow Jones is uniquely positioned to provide," said Todd Larsen, president, Dow Jones & Company.
"The competitive advantage offered by being able to quickly and thoroughly access and analyze information from literally thousands of resources is an exciting prospect for our business and for our users."
The Department of Justice said today it supports a proposal by the Associated Press (AP) to develop and operate a voluntary news registry to manage the licensing and online distribution of news content created by the AP, its members and partners.
The department said the registry is not likely to reduce competition among news content owners and could offer procompetitive benefits to both participating content owners and content users.
The registry would consist of a centralized database containing news content from multiple content owners. It would allow content owners to register and list individual items of news content, specify the uses others may make of that content, and detail the terms on which such content may be licensed.
"The AP’s registry may provide a new, efficient way for news content users to identify applicable terms of use and purchase licenses for Internet news content," said Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney.
"The registry may benefit both news originators and content users by reducing the transaction costs associated with securing licenses for Internet use."
The registry would be a non-exclusive method of accessing, licensing and using content on the Internet. It would be open, on nondiscriminatory terms, to all owners and users of Internet news content. Content owners would be free to select which, if any, content to include in the registry. They would be allowed to offer registered news content outside of the registry. They would also be free to join other competing Internet registry services.
Update: Google has now open sourced Living Stories, giving all developers the code to build their own living stories pages. This means anyone can participate now.
"Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article," Google says. "Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there’s a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way."
Code and documentation can be found here.
Original Article: Google has been working with the New York Times and the Washington Post on a Google Labs experiment, which the company has unveiled today. It’s called Living Stories, and aims to provide a different online news experience by creating a singular page where readers can follow one story line in the news as new developments occur.
"A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance," says Google. "Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context."
Components of a "Living Story" include:
- A summary at the top of each story. Summaries are rewritten to reflect updates. Changes will be highlighted.
- A running catalog of info related to the story. The latest info is always at the top.
- Filters on the left-hand side of the page to identify the important moments in an ongoing story, the people involved, source material, images, audio, and quotations.
- A timeline, which provides a snapshot of the story’s most important developments.
The pages are personalized to readers’ reading patterns, so when they leave a story and come back, the newest updates are presented at the top. Previously read updates are collapsed. Readers can subscribe to a page via email alerts or RSS feeds to stay updated.
Google says it hopes to eventually make Living Stories available as a tool for publishers, so they can implement a similar functionality into their own content. One reason this format may not be attractive to some publishers is that by creating a singular page for a storyline, as opposed to separate article pages, you’re essentially creating less places to put ads, which is how most content publishers make money on the web. That said, the more content that appears on a single page, the more room there is for ads on that particular page.
"Are Living Stories the ‘future of news?’" asks Google. "Maybe. Are all these concepts correct? Probably not. Can this collaboration kick off the debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online? We certainly hope so."
Being a Google Labs experiment, there is plenty of room for improvement with Living Stories. Google is heavily encouraging feedback from publishers and news readers alike. It will be interesting to see how this project develops in time, and whether more publishers embrace the concept down the road.
Living Stories are currently only available in English, and are not designed to necessarily support mobile devices yet.
Related Articles:
> Murdoch’s War with the Aggregators
> Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content
> Minds of the Media Gather to Discuss Future of News
> Is This the Answer for Online News Revenue?
> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?
After a seven-week-long hiatus, Google is now hosting content from the Associated Press again. The two have had a deal in place in the past, but AP content quietly went missing from Google, and that very fact became a topic of wide discussion last week. Now the deal appears to be renewed to some uncertain extent.
The statement Google has given on the matter says, "We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won’t be commenting further at this time."
An AP spokesman is quoted as saying, "We have nothing to add to Google’s statement."
If you’ve followed the online news industry much, we probably don’t have to tell you that Google and the AP have had a somewhat complicated, if not rocky relationship.
Last week, Yahoo reached its own deal with the AP. Financial terms of that agreement were not disclosed.
This week, the AP promoted editor and correspondent Ted Anthony to Assistant Managing Editor. He is said to have been involved in the development of the news organization’s social media practices.
Related Articles:
> Mark Cuban Takes Murdoch-esque Stance on Google
> News Corp. Blocks Content from News Aggregation Site
> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?
> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"
> Murdoch’s War with the Aggregators
> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?
I have a question for you. Where do you get the majority of your online news? Is it from a feed reader? Is it from Twitter? Is it from Google News? Yahoo News? Do you spend your time simply checking specific news publications? There is talk that Facebook could become the number one place online for people to get their news.
Here’s one for discussion. Facebook users can set up a news list, which will aggregate stories from different news sources who publish their stories to their Facebook pages. All a user has to do is be a fan of that page. Would this be any different than other news aggregators linking to stories? If a news source is willingly putting up a Facebook page with its stories, wouldn’t that be the exact opposite of the argument against aggregators using content? Facebook serves its own ads too. Both the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press have Facebook pages (hopefully they don’t mind me linking to them).
Sure, these publications have control over just what content actually appears on these pages. It’s a bit different than Google or another news aggregator simply crawling the content, but how different is it really? The publications also have the power to block the aggregators. Is there a double standard?
Regardless of that debate, users are increasingly flocking to Facebook to get their news (news is also one of the most popular reasons for using Twitter by the way). The reason Facebook could be the biggest news source is that it has a massive user base – way bigger than Twitter’s, and for all intents and purposes, it operates the same way when it comes to news (albeit, with room for more text in each update).
According to research from competitive intelligence agency Experian Hiwise, 3.52% of upstream visits to News and Media websites came from Facebook last week (that’s compared to 1.39% from Google News.
"Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn. News and Media is the #11 downstream industry after Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the social networking site’s traffic," says Experian Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins. "To offer a comparison, 6% of downstream traffic from Facebook went to Shopping and Classifieds last week and 6% to Business and Finance and 15% went to Entertainment websites (YouTube in particular)."
"Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category," she adds. "And with the Wall Street Journal already publishing content to Facebook, perhaps the social network can avoid the run-ins that Google has suffered recently with Rupert Murdoch."
Lately Facebook has been encouraging users to set up news lists. They want to be your news source. "You can even create a ‘News’ list to filter news-oriented Pages into one view on your News Feed," noted Facebook’s Malorie Lucich on the company blog. "Simply add relevant Pages to the list, just as you would with a friends list. The next time you sign on to Facebook, you can click the ‘News’ filter to see stories from all of the news outlets of which you’ve become a fan."
"In addition to reading news on Facebook, you can share news with your friends on external sites with Facebook Connect," says Lurich. "Outlets like The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, USA Today and countless blogs have become more social by adding Facebook Connect to their websites and iPhone applications. You can sign in with your Facebook login to see what articles your friends are reading and comment on articles with your authentic identity."
Facebook has a huge advantage for being the go-to place for news. Everybody is already there, and they’re spending more and more time there checking their feeds, messing with apps, sharing their own updates, etc. If their news-news (Facebook refers to highlights from friend updates as the "news feed") is right in their feed, they’re going to see articles frequently and get their news there almost inadvertently at times. Plus, if they set up an actual news list like Facebook wants them to, it’s only a click away, and suddenly the average user gets to enjoy the same kind of functionality that users of RSS feed readers have been enjoying for years (they never quite made it to the mainstream did they?).
Do you use Facebook to get news? Can you see it becoming the most widely used platform for online news?
Related Articles:
> Mark Cuban Takes Murdoch-esque Stance on Google
> News Corp. Blocks Content from News Aggregation Site
> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?
> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"
> Murdoch’s War with the Aggregators
> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?
Update: Cuban has now posted a lengthy explanation of his stance on Google. Essentially, he appears to view Google as helpful if not necesary for lesser known brands, but as a bad business decision for big names in the news industry.
Oriinal Article: The always outspoken Mark Cuban has contributed his thoughts on the whole news aggregation/Google News/publisher debate, one that is most often credited to Rupert Murdoch. It appears that Cuban has a similar opinion on the matter.
Cuban spoke at a keynote address this week at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC 2010 Conference, and is quoted by numerous sources as calling Google in particular a "vampire."
"When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood," he is quoted as saying, reportedly telling newspapers and other publishers to "show some balls" and block Google News and, "There’s absolutely no reason for you guys to be indexed on Google News … if they don’t pay you."
Michael Arrington points out that at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008, Cuban said he’d like to be an investor in TechMeme, which provides a similar service to Google News and other aggregators. In addition, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land notes (in great detail) that Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which actually "touts to advertisers how it taps into Google to generate page views."
While on the topic of the news industry debates, the topic of charging for news is always a conversation starter. The Wall Street Journal has taken down its pay wall for the day, giving users access to articles that would otherwise require a subscription to access. The effort comes as the result of a sponsorship from Acura (Via SIA).
Related Articles:
> News Corp. Blocks Content from News Aggregation Site
> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?
> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"
> Murdoch’s War with the Aggregators
> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?
There has been a lot of discussion about the fate of the online news industry lately, particularly since the New York Times announced that it will be going the paid content route next year. Another New York-based publication, Newsday, already charges for its online content. After three months of doing so, it has reportedly only managed to attract 35 subscribers.
Newsday.com is free for those who subscribe to Newsday (print) or ISP Optimum Online. Otherwise, you have to pay $5 a week ($260 a year).
According to the New York Observer, the publication revealed its 35-member subscription base in a newsroom-wide meeting last week, when a reporter asked how many people subscribed. 35 people at $5 a week for 12 weeks is $2,100. If they are all signed up for the year, that’s $9,100 so far. Cablevision purchased Newsday for $650 million in 2008.
Reuters editor Robert MacMillan offered the following tweet on the matter:
According to data from Compete, Newsday.com’s traffic has been taking a steady nosedive. From the three month period between September and December (the pay wall started in October), Compete has the site’s US unique monthly visitors plummet from just over two million to just over one million. It will be interesting to see if January’s numbers extend the trend at a similar pace.
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Newsday.com promises that when you register for a subscription, you will gain access to:
- Breaking local news
- High school sports scores and stats
- ExploreLI – your online guide to fun on LI
- Latest HD quality videos and photos
- Customizable news and information that matters the most to you
- Exclusive newsday.com newsletters and text alerts
- Newsday deals and discounts
The question is, is this stuff worth paying for? Apparently for a few people it is, but based on the information presented by the Observer, it’s not looking good as a business model. One can only assume that the less traffic that comes in, the less advertisers will be attracted, and if the pay wall isn’t generating the money either, how can it work?
I don’t know about the deals and discounts, but is the local news offered so unique that it can’t be found elsewhere? High school sports scores?
To be fair, it hasn’t been an incredibly long time since Newsday’s pay wall was introduced, but how long will they give it to gain momentum before they give up on it? How long would you wait? Discuss here.
Related Articles:
> Do Facebook and Twitter Threaten or Complement the News Industry?
> Is the New York Times Jumping the Gun on Paid Content?
> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?
Google has a post up on the Google News blog today talking a little bit about how it recrawls news content in order to provide the most up to date content and eliminate dead links.
"How do you balance looking for new content against the need to update older content? How can you make sure the content is fresh, doesn’t link to dead pages or display headlines that have been changed by the publisher?" asks Google.
Google’s answer is that it has implemented a recrawl feature that lets it focus on getting the newest content, while displaying the most current version of older content. After Google News discovers an article, it will continue to crawl it repeatedly to look for changes. In the first day, it will actually recrawl it more frequently, because as the company says, the most changes are usually made to news stories soon after they’re published.
"In some cases, we’ll even revisit articles we had trouble crawling the first time around," says Google. "After that, we visit them less often. Either way, we try hard to present users with the freshest news. (We bet whoever wrote "Dewey Defeats Truman" wishes they had recrawl!)."
Google says the feature is intended to reduce the number of outdated headlines and dead links, and for publishers, it will provide assurance that Google will index the latest stories and updates as soon as possible.
Related Articles:
> Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content
> Minds of the Media Gather to Discuss Future of News
> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.
Five reporters from radio stations in in Canada, France, Belgium, and Switzerland are going to spend five days locked in a French farmhouse with only Twitter and Facebook to get their news. It’s not a lame reality show, but an experiment looking at the quality of news from social media.
This experiment may be flawed from the start. One can almost imagine that people will purposely put out false information via Twitter and Facebook just to mess with these people (they can be followed on Twitter [updates in French]). Reporting on this story, AFP’s Marie-Dominique Follain asks if social media is really a serious threat to established media.
Is this a worthwhile experiment? Tell us what you think.
It appears that the credibility of social media as a way to get news is what is coming into question (not that this is the first time that has happened). "People tweet about fake events. Social media is rife with hoaxes," people will say. Yes, that’s true.
People do put out false information, but what seems to be overlooked is that Facebook and Twitter are just the platforms for people posting their updates. They often are accompanied by links to blogs and traditional news sources. While the group have agreed to only connect to the outside world through Facebook and Twitter, and no web surfing, they are reportedly still allowed to follow links to outside sites from these social networks. With the 140-character limit of Twitter in particular, linking out is often very necessary in getting the whole story across, or at least gaining access to that story from the reader’s perspective.
Maybe I will be proven wrong, but I don’t see any possible result coming from this experiment that indicates social media is not useful for finding news. I don’t believe social media threatens traditional media. It complements it, in a variety of ways.
Sometimes stories break there before they are reported by a traditional source…that’s a source for that traditional channel. It could just as easily come from someone saying something in a crowded bar. If it’s newsworthy, it might be worth covering, but it might be a lie, and facts are worth checking. It’s just that with channels like Facebook and Twitter, those bars are as big as the entire world, and the patrons aren’t all there to relax, drink, and have a good time (though some of them certainly are). Some of them are there to spread news. And people know that they can get news there because of that very fact (a study last year found that news was a top priority of Twitter users).
Not all news breaks on social media (although the ever-increasing accessibility to social media through mobile seems to be greatly narrowing the margin), but social media is always there for open discussion about the news, which tends to make for a more rounded outlook on any particular event. It doesn’t eliminate the bias, but it provides a means for all biases to come together to form a more complete view of the story. Open discussion allows for points to be made that wouldn’t necessarily be made by a traditional news outlet because maybe that outlet does have some kind of bias, even if it strives not to. Some say everyone has some bias.
The fact that people do turn to social media for news emphasizes the fact that they do want a look at the whole picture, and do want to have open discussion on matters. True, some of that is pointless noise, but strewn throughout that are often important facts and otherwise unconsidered viewpoints.
So what can this experiment really prove? That you can limit yourself to social media for news sources if you want? Isn’t the point of social media (at least in the news sense) to strip away the limitations? Share your thoughts.
Related Articles:
> Is the New York Times Jumping the Gun on Paid Content?
> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?
> Is This the Answer for Online News Revenue?