Google strikes direct deals with news agencies
By John Pospisil
Google has struck licensing deals with four key international news agencies so that it can publish their stories on Google News.
Google News will feature stories from Press Association, Associated Press, Canadian Press and Agence France-Presse, and will exclude duplicate stories from these agencies published on other news sites.
If the news agency has its own web site, Google News readers will be directed to that site. If the news agency doesn’t have a web site, Google News will host the news item.
If you’ve ever used Google News you’ll know how annoying it can be when the same story is presented dozens of times because it’s been run by different newspapers. It appears that these licensing deals address this very issue.
Obviously this means that news sites that use a lot of news agency copy will loose traffic from Google News. As industry commentator Mathew Wingram put it:
“As far as I can tell, this deal has one major loser: namely, the thousands of newspapers that use content from those services, and are now going to see that traffic disappear.
“This is potentially explosive, I think … if I can see the story from the wire service itself, before it was edited or shortened or changed, I would probably prefer that.”
Google News business product manager Josh Cohen told the Guardian that despite the deals being struck, news agency stories will not be featured more prominently in search results. Cohen thinks that this new arrangement is actually an opportunity for news sites.
“The flip side is that there will be more room on Google News for more of their original content, which will be pushed higher up the results,” Cohen told the Guardian.
Cohen said that Google’s primary goal was to provide as many different perspectives on each story as possible.
“But from a user perspective, it’s not offering a different perspective as three of the five sources are duplicate stories,” he said.
The move has also renewed speculation that Google may start placing ads alongside its news results.
Given that the duplication of content was an obvious problem on Google News, the management of any news site relying on Google News for traffic from news agency stories must have been aware that it was living on borrowed time.
This new arrangement makes perfect sense as far as Google News users are concerned.
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