Articles from the AP, AFP, U.K. Press Association, and the Canadian Press will appear directly in Google News pages…
“Popular news aggregator Google News has announced a sweeping change in policy designed to bring news from mainstream news wire agencies to consumers’ screens.”
Google Inc. on Friday said it has signed a deal with major news agencies, in an attempt to cut down on multiple copies of the same story, and plans to make original stories from news agencies easier to find using its Google News aggregation service, a move that could significantly change how Google News drives traffic to news publishers, and will give the original authors credit over those who redistribute it.
“Google News will host the stories on its own server and co-brand the pages that the stories appear on.”
From 6pm UK time today, Google News will scan the news stories produced by the Press Association of Britain, Associated Press, Canadian Press and Agence France-Presse and omit from its search results any duplicated versions of stories from these agencies that other news sites host.
The Google News site is a valuable traffic generator for various news web sites around the world, is generally valued by publishers who make money from online advertising and as such benefit from the traffic Google News sends to their sites.
But Google News has been a tougher sell for wire services, which generally make money by licensing their content to newspapers and magazines, and not by attracting readers to their own Web sites.
Having made peace with Agence France Presse (AFP), one of the world’s largest wire services that sued Google for alleged copyright infringement on the News site, Google said it intends to start carrying articles from news agencies on the Google News site.
Although Google maintains that running hyperlinked headlines, text snippets and thumbnail images from news outlets in Google News is protected by the fair use principle, it eventually settled with AFP and signed a licensing agreement with it, as well as with AP.
Although never publicly acknowledged, it is widely believed that the Associated Press threatened to file a similar lawsuit.
“Because the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, U.K. Press Association and the Canadian Press do not have a consumer Web site where they publish their content, they have not been able to benefit from the traffic that Google News drives to other publishers,” Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, explained in a blog post. “As a result, we are hosting it on Google News.”
The announcement that Google is to publish news content on its own site is likely to be met with some concern from the news industry, which has struggled to work out whether the web giant’s activities across video, advertising and book publishing are a threat or an opportunity.
Cohen rejected the idea that the move would worry publishers. “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.”
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.
But the feature will benefit all types of news outlets, not just wire services. For example, if a New York Times story gets syndicated, Google News will know that it originally came from this newspaper.
“By removing duplicate articles from our results, we will be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world,” Cohen said.
"Our primary goal with what we are launching today is to provide the best experience for our users and help our partners get credit for their content, and to provide as many different perspectives as possible on any given story, so we crawl the world for those multiple perspectives from different publishers nationally and internationally," he said.
“Google does not give figures for traffic to its news site, but now displays the most recent stories from around 10,000 international news sites.”
Asked whether the hosting of full articles on Google News will weaken the fair-use protection claim, Cohen said that it will not. "We respect copyright laws. When we go beyond fair use, we enter into licensing agreements," he said.
The question is how many readers will prefer the duplicate over the original. If most people end up reading the source material on Google News, publishers who buy widely syndicated content may find that Associated Press articles, for example, are bringing in less traffic.
The downside of this development is that newspapers that use a large amount of licensed stories could potentially lose traffic thus affecting the amount of money charged to online advertisers. As a consequence, they may become less willing to pay for AP articles. And that would end up making news agencies more dependent on Google for distribution and revenue.
However consumers do stand to benefit simply because they can directly view their favored news from original sources. The new look Google News is available at news.google.com from Friday onward.