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Google News Initiative

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101–110 of 195 posts

Re: Google News Initiative

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right of center news sources? They've been openly hiding them from the feed through their partnership with Snopes and Politifact. Your uncle sharing InfoWars doesn't count.

>Snopes and Politifact If these are your enemies, your political views might be a little further than "slightly" right of center.

Don't know about Snopes, but Politifact has a well documented bias.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/16/running-data-politifact-...

Re: Google News Initiative

#102

Sadly, Google is also sitting on a HUGE amount of archival newspaper in a completely unsearchable state. They've OCR'd thousands of historical papers but the search is completely broken. https://news.google.com/newspapers It's a pretty incredible resource if you know the date/place of an event but if you wanted to research a little more broad it's a tool with incredibly untapped potential. I wish they would spend mor…

> I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences. Power users are a very, very small number, probably sub-million, generate zero revenue, complain a lot and want features that cost a lot of money. There's no reason why Google would target them. But I'm sure you can find a professional service that does that, allowing for…

Universities typically have subscriptions to service(s) that do just this.

Re: Google News Initiative

#104
post #79

Sadly, Google is also sitting on a HUGE amount of archival newspaper in a completely unsearchable state. They've OCR'd thousands of historical papers but the search is completely broken. https://news.google.com/newspapers It's a pretty incredible resource if you know the date/place of an event but if you wanted to research a little more broad it's a tool with incredibly untapped potential. I wish they would spend mor…

What specifically is broken? Basic keyword search seems to work.

keyword search is the very bare minimum for search

Re: Google News Initiative

#105
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duopoly, to be precise

Plus, of course, those other 15% of the market, to be even more precise. Not to mention that online advertisement to a certain degree is the same market as other forms of advertisement.

Look, there is a reason there are active investigations of Google's and FB's effects on the news media in U.K., Australia, Korea. They are duopoly and their effects reverberate through the entire internet, stifling creation of new websites and new media sources. There's a reason that VC investment in news media on the internet is nonexistent.

Re: Google News Initiative

#106
post #27

As someone who runs a regional newspaper, I very much doubt that the future of healthy journalism is in the hands of a big company such as Google. We are already thinking hard what to do with the Facebook monopoly, we would be crazy to voluntarily stick our neck into another one.

First, I'm the type of person that thinks the concentration of power from monopolies could be the most pressing issue facing the USA-- But can you explain how having another choice is dangerous? It seems like it'd be a gasp of air in the face of facebook's suffocating presence.

It’s not much of a choice if we can’t easily change our minds later. It’s more like a long-term investment, and if we are to make a long-term investment, we’d rather invest in a direct relationship with our readers.

Re: Google News Initiative

#107
post #24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the blog article, it seems like the main thing they're trying to solve is the payment system (use Google payment to easily subscribe). If that's true, it's a much different and less exciting offer than the OP's linked page which seemed like a much larger initiative.

The subscription system sounds like it's one part of this initiative. And if it is indeed the "main thing" then I think we should give Google some credit for being serious with this initiative. A payments system is a boring problem but it is the one most core to news organizations' current existential problems. It's not as sexy as using NLP to categorize news archives perhaps, but it's the most important to news orgs…

I just wish they would bring back the old patron system, where I didn't see ads and some small amount of money went to the sites I visited, without a subscription. Because I want to support good journalism, wherever it is found, but there's no way I'm ever going to sign up for $3/mo for the Miami Herald to read three articles a year.

Re: Google News Initiative

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some feedback feature or something you use to get a helpful range of stories? My experience with Google News isn't so much bias or a bubble as uselessness . Source quality, comprehensiveness, and coverage depth seem totally irrelevant, like I'm just getting a feed of every news site a bunch of people clicked on recently. It's the same stuff as Facebook's trending bar, at about the same level of shallow and u…

You can weigh your news sources. I intentionally give a little more weight to sources I don’t always agree with but aren’t obviously biased. Things like fake news spreaders, conspiracy theorist, government propaganda machines, or fair topical sites that simply don’t interest me (mostly Celebrity News and Gossip) get black holed. You can find those sliders in your settings. Also they ask you periodically on the deskto…

Thanks for this, I actually didn't know about that. Might be a product I'll like once I put a bit of effort into cleaning it up.

I'm worried I'll share kolpa's problem, where sources I use for certain like CNN are also full of absolute dreck I don't want to see. But with a bit of luck I can put together a "news of the day" feed, and I'll just go to those touchier sources directly when I expect a specific piece to be usable.

Re: Google News Initiative

#109
Is there a page that actually explains what this is? The linked to page seems to be devoid of any actual content. Is Google going to be covering the crazy costs involved in sending journalists all over the world, keeping them safe, doing investigative journalism (very little of which is happening now anyway), etc. My cynicism aside, its nice to see a tech company atleast try to help find a way to fund journalism in the future.

Re: Google News Initiative

#110
post #89

Google and traditional media as well are in the business of selling advertisement. I feel that when your money comes from selling your readers attention to the highest ad bidder, one incentive becomes to sensationalize and do other tricks to increase viewership. This incentive can be at odds with the incentive to inform truthfully and completely, as some of the important information would invariably be boring, result…

A huge consequence of the prioritization of clicks is the loss of quality reporting. Those shuttered newspapers who went the way of the dinosaurs carried with them hundreds of years of journalistic experience. A lot of it didn't transfer to modern news sites. Now we're paying the price with young, inexperienced "journalists" pumping out junk articles with poor sourcing, missing or wrong facts, etc. I can't find it now but one of the better modern journalists (Glenn Greenwald or Bob Woodward maybe?) had a great piece on this. He lamented how mainstream media is failing to maintain their journalistic standards because they're too biased and they haven't been taught how to be good journalists.

I think Google should focus heavily on this, but their PR doesn't mention it much. Quality journalists first, then quality tools.

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