DISQUS

Rob Hyndman · 2 years ago

Hmmm. Potentially interesting distribution for NowPublic. And the newspapers are looking like intermediaries ripe for disintermediation ...

Edward Vielmetti · 2 years ago

This will only be good for newspapers like the Marquette (MI) Mining Journal who regularly write original local reporting for their area and don't rely on wire service filler copy to pad out their online pages.

Mathew · 2 years ago

I agree, Rob -- and Edward, I think you are right as well.

Damon Kiesow · 2 years ago

I would like to hear some more details on this - but at first blush it seems like newspapers now have a strong disincentive to have AP pick up original and/or breaking news items published online first. The AP rewrite of our original story will now get preference in Google news or even cause our original to be un-indexed as a 'duplicate.' It seems that could not be true - but would like to hear from AP and Google on that.

John Roberts · 2 years ago

What I have failed to understand for several years now is how the AP can act in a manner so contrary to the needs of its owners/members. Who's on the AP board again? That's right... newspapers!

Matthew, can you explain this?

John Roberts
http://www.pencoyd.com/clock/

Rex Hammock · 2 years ago

I understand the magnitude of the difference, however, wasn't the "die cast" when those news services cut the same deal with news.yahoo.com? My instant reaction is to agree with whoever questioned the value of visitor who chanced upon a newspaper's website because they Google'd a news term. When my local newspaper needs to really start worrying is when I go to Google for local news search, and the local newspaper's content doesn't show up.

Mathew · 2 years ago

Not sure of the answer to that one, John. And Rex, I think that's a good point.

Danny Sullivan · 2 years ago

Big change, yes. But last I saw, Yahoo News had three times the traffic of Google News. Yahoo News has operated this way for years, and no one ever worries (or has worried) about Yahoo's impact on local papers.

Danny Sullivan · 2 years ago

Oh, Mathew -- appreciated the inclusion, but could you change me from working at Search Engine Watch to working at Search Engine Land? I started my own site at Search Engine Land back in December when I left Search Engine Watch. Old habits :)

David · 2 years ago

I've written a post that goes in another direction, if your theme had proper trackbacks, you'd see that post here.

Mathew · 2 years ago

Thanks, Danny -- sorry about the name thing.

And David, I used to have trackbacks, but found that I was getting flooded with trackback spam, so I disabled them. I may turn them back on at some point.

toby johnson · 2 years ago

Any time someone comes along and makes things more efficient by cutting out the middleman or getting rid of older, less efficient means of distribution, the middleman will always complain.

We've seen it with Wal-Mart driving small, inefficient mom-and-pop stores out of business. We've seen it with the RIAA and music industry fighting digital distribution of music instead of embracing it.

And lately we've seen newspapers, publishers, and reporters complain that Google News is "stealing" their traffic or somehow providing their content for free. How many times have we heard about newspapers suing Google over Google News?

I'm sorta surprised it took Google so long to make this move. They have cut out the middleman and made news delivery more efficient. Kudos to them.

alan herrell · 2 years ago

Danny,
Yes, on a number of clicks traffic basis news yahoo may have more traffic, but it does it differently than google.

Your characterization of the Yahoo news site is a bit of misdirection as news yahoo when you click on a link, brings up another yahoo news page, rather than news google which sends you to the source.

As to why 'nobody has worried) about Yahoo’s impact on local papers' it's probably the just beating up on the 800 lb gorilla meme.

Gabe · 2 years ago

One criticism I haven't seen yet:

Google doesn't permit crawling of its hosted news content, even though Google News relies on crawling news content from other sites. (Recall the same was true for the comments on news stories Google announced a few weeks back.)

E.g., this robots.txt file http://ap.google.com/robots.txt states that nobody may crawl this hosted news article http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gURr_MR-Wtuq...

One consequence: you can use Google Search to find Yahoo News-hosted content, since Yahoo News doesn't block (http://news.yahoo.com/robots.txt is 404), but you won't be able to use Yahoo Search to find Google News-hosted content.

It's nice to be the market leader in search.

Damon Kiesow · 2 years ago

Toby -

This has nothing to do with 'middlemen.' I say Kudos to Google for building whatever business model they want to.

My problem is - newspapers own the AP and in this case AP seems to be operating against their member's best interest.

If AP has some explanation or clarification on how this deal benefits the average paper - I look forward to hear from them.

Damon

António · 2 years ago

"Yahoo News has operated this way for years, and no one ever worries (or has worried) about Yahoo’s impact on local papers."

Yes but yahoo didn't built that service on top of third party news whose headlines, thumbs and bylines they pulled to the service, did they?

Rocky · 2 years ago

Mathew-

Great write up. While much of the discussion has focused on traffic loss, I think there's something equally (if not more) significant.

Google's story page has the most user-centric design. Instead of throwing obstacles in the way of users like most news sites do -- registration requirements, pop ups, etc. -- the page is clean and loads fast.

I did a screen cast comparing the presentation of the same AP story on three different news sites with Google News's presentation.

For the user, the Google presentation is the clear winner.

Sameer · 2 years ago

This does make me re-think CNN's stated reasons for not renewing its contract with Reuters. They say its related to cost cutting (which I'm sure has some truth to it) but it may also have something to do with too much reliance on an outside agency for what might be considered a core competency - reporting.

With Google paving the way for aggregators/distributors to source content directly from newswires, CNN would have less to worry about since more and more of it's content will now be original reporting.

Danny Sullivan · 2 years ago

Alan, good point. Browsing through Yahoo News today, I note that they do seem to be reprinting from most of the sources they list rather than sending people off. It wasn't always that way. In fact, it's a good reason not to use Yahoo News, because of the lack of variety.

But me, I'm a lover not a fighter. Sorry, I like Dangerfield. I mean, I'm a searcher, not a browser. I rarely browse headlines. I search, and searches on Yahoo News do indeed kick you off the site to other sources in many occasions.

Dhyana Sansoucie · 2 years ago

AP seems more and more to be operating as a way to earn money off local papers, but their coverage is not improving. They are using new technologies to make searching their content easier (for an added price), but the quality of their own writing is deteriorating, as is the extent of coverage they provide. They are less and less reliable to cover our regional news stories. The writing and editing standards seem to be slipping as well.

Smaller papers with good local reporting will do fine, and we make an effort to focus our online efforts solely on local news.

Pretty soon, though, AP may price itself out of what smaller and midsize papers are willing to pay. Everything is focusing more and more on local coverage ... and AP isn't doing much of a job there at all.

The bigger metropolitan papers may find AP less and less a bargain as well.

Do newspapers need the AP? Probably. Local papers being able to submit their biggest stories works well. AP's rewrites aren't so great, though. Which one would be featured on Google News? AP's rewritten shorter version or the local version that got sent along to AP, and which organization would get the traffic?

Damon Kiesow · 2 years ago

Our first experience with the new AP/Google partnership:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&am...

The yearbook story was an offbeat piece that was picked up by the national wire. So, instead of Google giving our version (NashuaTelegraph.com) top prominence - the AP/Google page gets the traffic.

Also at issue - even the regional publications that picked up the wire story (Boston.com, WCAX.com) had preference over our original report. Readership-wise we were the only publication with the photo at the time so ours was really the best report.

But - despite our angst at this - we have the last laugh as Fark.com ended up pointing at our version, driving 40 - 50k pageviews to that one story this morning.