Contrary to its moniker ‘enemy of publishers’, on Thursday search engine giant Google launched a tool which gives media companies some more control over its content. The new feature titled ‘Editor’s Picks’ allows publishers to highlight content on the homepage of Google News’ U.S. Edition.
Publishers get to decide what stories, videos or audio clips are going to be displayed in the feed and send that information to Google with a special RSS feed. The RSS feed will have to be updated every 48 hours with new content, short headlines, author names, and a minimum of three articles. Only news content is allowed in the feed, advertising is not allowed within the Editor’s Picks section.
Complimenting news organizations on their manner of reporting news online, Google software engineer, Yogita Mehta said in a blog post that they combined the best of traditional and digital journalism. Mehta said that with a view to connect the reader to the best works of news publishers, Google News was introducing a new section labeled ‘ Editor’s Picks.’ The new section which will feature on the right-hand column of the U.S. Edition, would display original content from various sources including The New York Times, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal that publishers have selected as highlights from their publications.
Readers can click the arrows to tab through different publications. The feeds the reader sees are chosen based on a variety of factors, including their news preferences. If readers are interested in using source preferences on Google News, they can do so by using the slider at the bottom of the Editor’s Picks’ tool to let Google know what sources they would like to see.
The Editors’ Picks was first introduced as an experiment last year and based on that Google worked on the tool in alliance with publishers and after getting a positive response from both publishers and readers decided to go ahead with it.
Recounting the benefits of the feature, Mehta said, “Readers get the news which interests them and from the sources they trust while publishers receive higher traffic to their websites.” This is a likely reason why Google might soon introduce this feature on an international scale.
The Editor’s Picks is the latest in a long line of improvements that Google News has introduced in recent months. In May, Google released expandable stories in the U.S. to provide greater story diversity with less clutter. The expandable stories has features like click-to-expand, personalized top stories, labeled diversity among others.
Most recently, Google invited news publishers to give authors greater visibility in search results by displaying their photos next to articles displayed on search result pages.
Google News has often been vilified by publishers, including Rupert Murdoch. In 2009, Murdoch complained about visitors arriving from Google who wanted to read stories for free. Google responded by telling Murdoch to take his publications out of the Google index.
Companies interested in gaining access to Editors’ Picks can visit the Help Center to get started.