In the last few weeks I've noticed a remarkable thing.
I seem to be getting the news first.
Notice I say seem to be because it's not often that a blogger is really the first person to a story on the tech beat. Unless something is being deliberately leaked to one outlet first (usually for placement) the first notice most outlets get is the press release. Or the news conference.
So why was it that I was seeing stuff I covered on Monday at news sites covering open source as late as Wednesday? And not with analysis and thought like I did it – I mean straight news stories that are taken right off the release?
The reason turns out to be pretty prosaic, I think. Most outlets don't yet believe in the Web. That is, they don't think they “have” a story until THEY have the story. It didn't happen until I noticed it, even if it's a press release I “noticed” by having an intern write up or (just as often) merely post the thing.
The result is that, in a growing number of cases, good analysis can beat the news by days.
Most outlets measure themselves by hits, and you get hit by Google love. Maybe it's because they never sought advertising on it, but the algorithms at Google News have gotten awful lazy.
That is, if they see something is from a “news” site, they go with it, and if they've decided you're just a “blog, they ignore it, put it in with the bloggers, who aren't real “reporters.” This also provides publishers with power and influence they have not earned. A more important effect is it keeps news desks stupid, and it wastes reporter resources.
No news outlet should be re-running a press release in this day and age. If you're not adding value to the story, some analysis, a tweak, a call, a thought, you're wasting your time, and that of your reader.
Everyone has limited resources, especially in this game. If the news comes out after the analysis, it means there's news that isn't being covered, and good analysis that isn't being done.
If the purpose of Google News is to improve journalism (and as I said it's not to make money for Google, because it deliberately doesn't) then it's not doing the job. Naturally I have some modest proposals:
- Don't cover the same story multiple times on the same site, especially when it's a story update. For instance, at 2:51 PM on April 28, the “most shared” story is a CNN report from last night saying 42 were killed in last night's bad weather. The second “most shared” story? An update from this afternoon, from the same outlet, saying 247 were killed .
- Add more blogs for analysis. (Like this one.) If you're going to be treated as the “go-to” site for news, then you have a responsibility to get as much of it as you can, not just the stuff that has brand names on it.
- Cut off new versions of the press release a specified amount of time after the press release goes out. Or take press releases and don't link to other copies of the press release. You think that might step on Business Wire, or PR Newswire, or a company's own Web site? C'mon – you claim you're scrubbing “content farms” and old copies of a press release, printed days later, is as much “content farming” as anything scraped from ZDNet.
If Al Gore can “blow up the book” with an app , then you can use Google News to improve newsgathering and the news reading experience.
It's not like Gore invented the Internet or anything.
