13 ms·

A new licensing program to support the news industry

71 points by caution 6y ago

Mirioron 6y ago
Will these news publishers also get "demonetized" when they report on something Google doesn't like? I'm not sure I like Google having this much power over (smaller) news organizations.
- syshum 6y ago
  Google would never politically bias their service /s
tannhaeuser 6y ago
> ... these events are happening at a time when the news industry is also being challenged financially Yeah, and what's challenging to the "news industry" is the monopolistic situation on the web and the utter lack of action on the part of US antitrust authorities and their allies. I find it very worrying that Der Spiegel, once the most frequently visited ad-supported news sites in the "old" German web, sees no other hope than partnering with Google. Sorry if I'm being too harsh, but the problem can't be solved by Google, when the problem is Google. Der Spiegel once more showing they completely outsold their journalistic punch and demonstrating basic media incompetence (which is the very last thing you want a credible publisher to do).
- quantummkv 6y ago
  Actions like these start making a lot of sense if you start viewing Google and their friends as a bunch of hi-tech mafioso. Newspapers are essentially forced to pay protection money and then publicly kiss the ring, declare their allegiance and pray that the deal is not altered further.
  - wbl 6y ago
    Google doesn't compete with papers but link papers to readers.
    - tomgp 6y ago
      News papers business is selling ads, that’s Google’s Business too. Google has an advantage over individual publications in that it can track user behaviour across multiple sites. So news outlets have made deals with google to act as brokers for their ad space giving google more power and the ability to effectively set ad prices. Google regularly throws news organisations pitiful sums of ‘innovation’ money for PR purposes whilst creaming multiple times that amount off their revenue streams. It’s going to take a brave publication to question the value of Google’s algorithm and bring ad sales in-house but I think that’s the only way out of this situation.
      - 52-6F-62 6y ago
        A lot of outlets still do in-house ad sales—especially those that run print and standalone digital issues still. Unfortunately, while there is still some business there—it's nothing compared to what it used to be. Most companies just go the online ads route now. I would love to see the kind of push back you mention... but it would be a David v. Goliath task at this stage, except David forgot his sling at home.
    - tannhaeuser 6y ago
      GOOG, FB, and AMZN extract all value out of the web, the music industry, retail, IT/cloud, soon e-learning, and basically everything, with content creators getting nothing. In music, we've already seen the effect of no monetary feedback for too many years now; save for very few counterexamples, we haven't seen any innovation since the 1990's; instead we have raised a generation of YouTube addicts. That is the problem to solve sooner rather than later; it doesn't matter how and why we got here, and it's not a question of whether Google or someone else did anything wrong. It's about how we can go on in a civil society with large public investments into eg IP networking, law enforcement, etc. to only line the pockets of very very few.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  tl;dr it isn't truly google, aggregators force news organizations into competition and the lack of willingness of people to pay you cannot solve google unless you want to outlaw any site aggregating results from across the web. that is what is really clobbering the news industry. they now have to compete with each other when before at most they competed across one city and at most one country for people's attention and money. I do find it bizarre that on this site that people complain about Google and ads when most brag about blocking them and still complaining about how intrusive some advertising solutions are. Then throw in the crowd that is always complaining about how much something cost or how some services should be free or reduced and then you might be getting close to the other half of the problem. People are fucking cheap. If they don't have to pay they will more than likely go that route and quite a few will accept a sub standard experience. Part of that acceptance is from truly desiring to save money but some if from "sticking it to them" in reference to the company they perceive they are short changing.
- CM30 6y ago
  Nah, it's because the internet lets you find hundreds or thousands of news sources very easily, and the lack of willingness for people to pay for subscriptions/ease of setting up an ad supported news site means there's no reason to pay money for any of them. The traditional media only surived because they had little competition and there's a decent barrier to entry when it came to publishing information/news. Now they're competing with every other media outlet in the world, plus anyone with a blog or YouTube channel. Add this to ways the news is discussed online (people can just paraphrase details from stories and discuss them on social media), and the value of a news story has just completely crashed. Does that mean Google and Facebook haven't done any damage? No probably not. The fact they control so much of the advertising market has had some effects, and some might say things like requiring paywalled stories to be viewable without a subscription in search has had an effect too. But the fundamental issue isn't that. It's that the internet and technology has fundamentally broken the business model these outlets used to rely on, and there's basically nothing they can do to change that.
mtgx 6y ago
I know this is still a very rough idea, but I truly believe the future of content monetization is having some kind of decentralized or even federated payment system and digital wallet that's provider-agnostic and allows people to do "micro-donations", whether it's through upvotes, claps, time spent on the page, or a combination of all of those and more. If this depends on Google, or Paypal, or Apple, and you can only donate to a site if you have PayPal, or if you have Google Pay, or whatever, it will never reach its true potential. It should be kind of like email, where everyone has email. Once everyone has an "email-like" digital wallet, and all of these websites accept "email-like money" through micro-donations, I think content monetization would work much better.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Basic Attention Token.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/
- appleflaxen 6y ago
  This sounds a lot like https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/
adamjb 6y ago
>To start, we have signed partnerships with local and national publications in Germany, Australia and Brazil Australia was/is gearing up to force Google to pay. Was anything similar brewing in Germany or Brazil? https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-and-google-pay-for-australian-news-is-a-wake-up-call-20200419-p54l7s.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-and-...
- zeeZ 6y ago
  Yes, Leistungsschutzrecht (ancillary copyright for press publishers). They tried to force Google (and others) to pay, but instead of paying, Google asked "give us permission to use your content or we'll have to delist you", and many obliged, while other aggregators suffered. I believe in Spain Google News just outright shut down.
raverbashing 6y ago
It seems Google is feeling a hot breath in the back of the neck since news and publishing orgs were lobbying for draconian interpretations/implementations of the Copyright Directive (which probably would be judicially questionable, still)
lorsting 6y ago
When news sources are receiving money from Google there remains only one news source: Google.
doublesCs 6y ago
Just to get a sense for the crowd: am I the only one who doesn't care much about the news industry? Keeping with what's new in society is important insofar as having an informed population is vital for the correct functioning of a democracy. But the "news industry" is 95% gargabe and contributes zero to getting people informed. I firmly believe that if the news industry disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't be much worse off as a society. That google is a bad player should be dealt with on its own. We shouldn't be using the "news industry" as a justification for breaking google up. EDIT: In fact I had never thought about it, but even as far as keeping people informed, google is better than the "news industry". At least with google I can find links which I use as starting points for reasearching something.
- PaulKeeble 6y ago
  If much of todays news disappeared I suspect we would be better off as a society. Most of it passes more for propaganda than reporting of noteworthy things that happened. Good news, journalism, we need but it is in ever decreasing supply with the modern clickbait news cycle.
  - eitland 6y ago
    I'm afraid that even given how bad the news industry is now, if it disappeared I fear something worse would fill the vacuum. State run broadcasting has always been mandatory around here but at least when there's a number of competitors - even when I don't like any of them particularly much - I can still shop around to see more angles that one or more of them don't want me to see.
    - agustif 6y ago
      When state is also licensing the competitors, as in broadcast tv at least in my country, you don't get much else than an oliglopoly tbh... You're still only seeing the angles the govt permits and sanctions.
  - aboringusername 6y ago
    I'm inclined to agree, the primary focus is on numbers and engagement rather than strictly bound truthful reporting. How about websites just serve .txt files with a couple links to donate and publish facts/information. I don't need a 5GB JS-infested "website" to access what amounts to a few KB of the actual information I was looking for. This is something hackernews gets right as far as community engagement goes. Truthfully, you could probably get by just reading wikipedia and utilize the sources. Most news doesn't have have a baring on my life and if it does it'll work its way to me. I suspect those who are happier in life forget all of this and focus on themselves, no news, no machines picking out what content you'll see or read.
ngold 6y ago
No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily ad blocked versions. They all had perfectly good reasons to not have to deal with the headache of losing money. But that would require keeping the ad sales team they had on board and making a similiar product online. But everyone got scared and lazy and saw a one quarter jump by dumping a bunch of staff.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  There is already a web monetization api in the work - https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/
  - nness 6y ago
    Reminds me of the ill-fated "Beanz" of 2001...
- ketzu 6y ago
  Did the prices for ads not dramatically drop over time? To me, it feels like it was just market forces driving those decisions. They could have kept the ad sales team and fewer ads, but that doesn't mean that would have worked out.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Don't think so. Ads should be a good dollar per thousand views. Maybe 3 dollar for videos. Well known newspaper may be able to get more given their reputation and how many ads they plaster per page. I think it's the economy of scale that's difficult to achieve. An employee has to bring in thousands of dollar just to pay for own salary, that's millions of views per month. The costs and revenues don't add up to sustain a large company and it has to spam (low quality) content to survive.
- mc32 6y ago
alkonaut 6y ago
If google actually creates a good system for paying news media through e.g. microtransactions or group subscriptions which is ONLY there to improve the internet and doesn't benefit google (Get more traffic, get more user data, ...) then this is a good thing. It would be like the google/apple teaming up on the BT proximity tracking apis in android and iOS. If google gets any cut in such a system, or even gets a slight benefit, or even knows who has what subscriptions and uses that information - then I'm completely against it. But if they spend their own money developing platforms that they then have no control over and no benefit from - good! Otherwise - bad!
- SyneRyder 6y ago
  > If google actually creates a good system for paying news media through e.g. microtransactions... They had something close to this with Google Contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor You add a few dollars to your online account, nominate which participating sites you want it to work with, and you would get an ad-free / paywall-free experience on those sites. The sites would determine the price per page - some only charged 1c, while some smaller blogs charged 5c. Some large Australian newspapers signed up, and apparently Mashable and The Onion were part of it at launch. Ultimately every website I followed pulled out of the program. It seems that advertising revenue earns more for newspapers than anyone is prepared to pay for news. I never even used up the $5 I put into my Google Contributor account.
  - mobilefriendly 6y ago
    The Contributor program lets people decide what "news" to support. Now Google is going to pick which favored news outlets it is going to financially support.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    Isn't that the idea of Flattr?
    - SyneRyder 6y ago
bregma 6y ago
At first I thought this was about some central licensing body regulating and awarding credentials to journalists, just like is done in professional endeavours like medicine, engineering, and law. I was internally debating the merits vs. the dangers (self-regulated or government controlled? Do we want official state-approved press?). Then I realized that it was purely about a distributor musing about paying content providers in the hopes they can influence it, at least ostensibly for "quality". I see nothing wrong with the idea. Money is our way of measuring value, and information certainly has value and Google has been making mint extracting the excess value from information for a long time, to the point that little actually leaks through to the end consumer. I thinks this move would increase the quality of news, but the consumer needs to understand that the product they are consuming is influenced by the media through which they consume it. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, as they say.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  I cautiously applaud Google's reparation payments (that's how I'm reading these initiatives), but I'm very wary of the fact that Google is calling this next stage a licensing. They didn't really go into details. Are we going to see "Google Licensed" news agencies now? That does not sit well with me.
habosa 6y ago
Anyone remember Google Contributor? https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
Eons ago when Google started aggregating news they greatly damaged the news industry. This is because you could start seeing the bigger story and the bias in the individual reporting. This was damaging to Fox News obviously. It got worse unfortunately, the journalists were caught faking scenes. https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-shot/index.html?sr=twCNN110416abc-news-stage-live-shot0715PMStoryLink&linkId=30720260 https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-s... Then the fake news was discovered: https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done for different places. People started discovering that news is heavily fake. Why buy something when they are outright lying to you? This is the reason the news industry is dying.
- 8organicbits 6y ago
  > Then the fake news was discovered: https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg > Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done for different places. I believe you are misinformed. A couple searches on the headlines tells a different story. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wsj-different-trump-headlines/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wsj-different-trump-headli... > Yes, the images represent two different editions, published at different times, and the headlines represent the news at the time of publication — before and after his speech. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wall-street-journal-headlin-idUSKBN23V22J https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wall-street-jou... > While the two covers are both authentic, they were published at different times on that day to reflect evolving developments.
lvs 6y ago
Google News has degraded so much in the last few years that it's essentially useless. The combination of their updated material design (or whatever they're calling it) and AMP was a one-two punch. Click through to related articles is always wrong -- none of the articles are related, and there are many dozens more related that don't show. It's just a dead service.

71 points by caution 6y ago

Will these news publishers also get "demonetized" when they report on something Google doesn't like? I'm not sure I like Google having this much power over (smaller) news organizations.

syshum 6y ago
Google would never politically bias their service /s

tannhaeuser 6y ago

> ... these events are happening at a time when the news industry is also being challenged financially Yeah, and what's challenging to the "news industry" is the monopolistic situation on the web and the utter lack of action on the part of US antitrust authorities and their allies. I find it very worrying that Der Spiegel, once the most frequently visited ad-supported news sites in the "old" German web, sees no other hope than partnering with Google. Sorry if I'm being too harsh, but the problem can't be solved by Google, when the problem is Google. Der Spiegel once more showing they completely outsold their journalistic punch and demonstrating basic media incompetence (which is the very last thing you want a credible publisher to do).

quantummkv 6y ago
Actions like these start making a lot of sense if you start viewing Google and their friends as a bunch of hi-tech mafioso. Newspapers are essentially forced to pay protection money and then publicly kiss the ring, declare their allegiance and pray that the deal is not altered further.
- wbl 6y ago
  Google doesn't compete with papers but link papers to readers.
  - tomgp 6y ago
    News papers business is selling ads, that’s Google’s Business too. Google has an advantage over individual publications in that it can track user behaviour across multiple sites. So news outlets have made deals with google to act as brokers for their ad space giving google more power and the ability to effectively set ad prices. Google regularly throws news organisations pitiful sums of ‘innovation’ money for PR purposes whilst creaming multiple times that amount off their revenue streams. It’s going to take a brave publication to question the value of Google’s algorithm and bring ad sales in-house but I think that’s the only way out of this situation.
    - 52-6F-62 6y ago
      A lot of outlets still do in-house ad sales—especially those that run print and standalone digital issues still. Unfortunately, while there is still some business there—it's nothing compared to what it used to be. Most companies just go the online ads route now. I would love to see the kind of push back you mention... but it would be a David v. Goliath task at this stage, except David forgot his sling at home.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    GOOG, FB, and AMZN extract all value out of the web, the music industry, retail, IT/cloud, soon e-learning, and basically everything, with content creators getting nothing. In music, we've already seen the effect of no monetary feedback for too many years now; save for very few counterexamples, we haven't seen any innovation since the 1990's; instead we have raised a generation of YouTube addicts. That is the problem to solve sooner rather than later; it doesn't matter how and why we got here, and it's not a question of whether Google or someone else did anything wrong. It's about how we can go on in a civil society with large public investments into eg IP networking, law enforcement, etc. to only line the pockets of very very few.
Shivetya 6y ago
tl;dr it isn't truly google, aggregators force news organizations into competition and the lack of willingness of people to pay you cannot solve google unless you want to outlaw any site aggregating results from across the web. that is what is really clobbering the news industry. they now have to compete with each other when before at most they competed across one city and at most one country for people's attention and money. I do find it bizarre that on this site that people complain about Google and ads when most brag about blocking them and still complaining about how intrusive some advertising solutions are. Then throw in the crowd that is always complaining about how much something cost or how some services should be free or reduced and then you might be getting close to the other half of the problem. People are fucking cheap. If they don't have to pay they will more than likely go that route and quite a few will accept a sub standard experience. Part of that acceptance is from truly desiring to save money but some if from "sticking it to them" in reference to the company they perceive they are short changing.
CM30 6y ago
Nah, it's because the internet lets you find hundreds or thousands of news sources very easily, and the lack of willingness for people to pay for subscriptions/ease of setting up an ad supported news site means there's no reason to pay money for any of them. The traditional media only surived because they had little competition and there's a decent barrier to entry when it came to publishing information/news. Now they're competing with every other media outlet in the world, plus anyone with a blog or YouTube channel. Add this to ways the news is discussed online (people can just paraphrase details from stories and discuss them on social media), and the value of a news story has just completely crashed. Does that mean Google and Facebook haven't done any damage? No probably not. The fact they control so much of the advertising market has had some effects, and some might say things like requiring paywalled stories to be viewable without a subscription in search has had an effect too. But the fundamental issue isn't that. It's that the internet and technology has fundamentally broken the business model these outlets used to rely on, and there's basically nothing they can do to change that.

mtgx 6y ago

I know this is still a very rough idea, but I truly believe the future of content monetization is having some kind of decentralized or even federated payment system and digital wallet that's provider-agnostic and allows people to do "micro-donations", whether it's through upvotes, claps, time spent on the page, or a combination of all of those and more. If this depends on Google, or Paypal, or Apple, and you can only donate to a site if you have PayPal, or if you have Google Pay, or whatever, it will never reach its true potential. It should be kind of like email, where everyone has email. Once everyone has an "email-like" digital wallet, and all of these websites accept "email-like money" through micro-donations, I think content monetization would work much better.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Basic Attention Token.
searchableguy 6y ago
https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/
appleflaxen 6y ago
This sounds a lot like https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/

adamjb 6y ago

>To start, we have signed partnerships with local and national publications in Germany, Australia and Brazil Australia was/is gearing up to force Google to pay. Was anything similar brewing in Germany or Brazil? https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-and-google-pay-for-australian-news-is-a-wake-up-call-20200419-p54l7s.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-and-...

zeeZ 6y ago
Yes, Leistungsschutzrecht (ancillary copyright for press publishers). They tried to force Google (and others) to pay, but instead of paying, Google asked "give us permission to use your content or we'll have to delist you", and many obliged, while other aggregators suffered. I believe in Spain Google News just outright shut down.

raverbashing 6y ago

It seems Google is feeling a hot breath in the back of the neck since news and publishing orgs were lobbying for draconian interpretations/implementations of the Copyright Directive (which probably would be judicially questionable, still)

lorsting 6y ago

When news sources are receiving money from Google there remains only one news source: Google.

doublesCs 6y ago

Just to get a sense for the crowd: am I the only one who doesn't care much about the news industry? Keeping with what's new in society is important insofar as having an informed population is vital for the correct functioning of a democracy. But the "news industry" is 95% gargabe and contributes zero to getting people informed. I firmly believe that if the news industry disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't be much worse off as a society. That google is a bad player should be dealt with on its own. We shouldn't be using the "news industry" as a justification for breaking google up. EDIT: In fact I had never thought about it, but even as far as keeping people informed, google is better than the "news industry". At least with google I can find links which I use as starting points for reasearching something.

PaulKeeble 6y ago
If much of todays news disappeared I suspect we would be better off as a society. Most of it passes more for propaganda than reporting of noteworthy things that happened. Good news, journalism, we need but it is in ever decreasing supply with the modern clickbait news cycle.
- eitland 6y ago
  I'm afraid that even given how bad the news industry is now, if it disappeared I fear something worse would fill the vacuum. State run broadcasting has always been mandatory around here but at least when there's a number of competitors - even when I don't like any of them particularly much - I can still shop around to see more angles that one or more of them don't want me to see.
  - agustif 6y ago
    When state is also licensing the competitors, as in broadcast tv at least in my country, you don't get much else than an oliglopoly tbh... You're still only seeing the angles the govt permits and sanctions.
- aboringusername 6y ago
  I'm inclined to agree, the primary focus is on numbers and engagement rather than strictly bound truthful reporting. How about websites just serve .txt files with a couple links to donate and publish facts/information. I don't need a 5GB JS-infested "website" to access what amounts to a few KB of the actual information I was looking for. This is something hackernews gets right as far as community engagement goes. Truthfully, you could probably get by just reading wikipedia and utilize the sources. Most news doesn't have have a baring on my life and if it does it'll work its way to me. I suspect those who are happier in life forget all of this and focus on themselves, no news, no machines picking out what content you'll see or read.

ngold 6y ago

No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily ad blocked versions. They all had perfectly good reasons to not have to deal with the headache of losing money. But that would require keeping the ad sales team they had on board and making a similiar product online. But everyone got scared and lazy and saw a one quarter jump by dumping a bunch of staff.

searchableguy 6y ago
There is already a web monetization api in the work - https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/
- nness 6y ago
  Reminds me of the ill-fated "Beanz" of 2001...
ketzu 6y ago
Did the prices for ads not dramatically drop over time? To me, it feels like it was just market forces driving those decisions. They could have kept the ad sales team and fewer ads, but that doesn't mean that would have worked out.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- user5994461 6y ago
  Don't think so. Ads should be a good dollar per thousand views. Maybe 3 dollar for videos. Well known newspaper may be able to get more given their reputation and how many ads they plaster per page. I think it's the economy of scale that's difficult to achieve. An employee has to bring in thousands of dollar just to pay for own salary, that's millions of views per month. The costs and revenues don't add up to sustain a large company and it has to spam (low quality) content to survive.
mc32 6y ago

alkonaut 6y ago

If google actually creates a good system for paying news media through e.g. microtransactions or group subscriptions which is ONLY there to improve the internet and doesn't benefit google (Get more traffic, get more user data, ...) then this is a good thing. It would be like the google/apple teaming up on the BT proximity tracking apis in android and iOS. If google gets any cut in such a system, or even gets a slight benefit, or even knows who has what subscriptions and uses that information - then I'm completely against it. But if they spend their own money developing platforms that they then have no control over and no benefit from - good! Otherwise - bad!

SyneRyder 6y ago
> If google actually creates a good system for paying news media through e.g. microtransactions... They had something close to this with Google Contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor You add a few dollars to your online account, nominate which participating sites you want it to work with, and you would get an ad-free / paywall-free experience on those sites. The sites would determine the price per page - some only charged 1c, while some smaller blogs charged 5c. Some large Australian newspapers signed up, and apparently Mashable and The Onion were part of it at launch. Ultimately every website I followed pulled out of the program. It seems that advertising revenue earns more for newspapers than anyone is prepared to pay for news. I never even used up the $5 I put into my Google Contributor account.
- mobilefriendly 6y ago
  The Contributor program lets people decide what "news" to support. Now Google is going to pick which favored news outlets it is going to financially support.
- andrepd 6y ago
  Isn't that the idea of Flattr?
  - SyneRyder 6y ago

bregma 6y ago

At first I thought this was about some central licensing body regulating and awarding credentials to journalists, just like is done in professional endeavours like medicine, engineering, and law. I was internally debating the merits vs. the dangers (self-regulated or government controlled? Do we want official state-approved press?). Then I realized that it was purely about a distributor musing about paying content providers in the hopes they can influence it, at least ostensibly for "quality". I see nothing wrong with the idea. Money is our way of measuring value, and information certainly has value and Google has been making mint extracting the excess value from information for a long time, to the point that little actually leaks through to the end consumer. I thinks this move would increase the quality of news, but the consumer needs to understand that the product they are consuming is influenced by the media through which they consume it. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, as they say.

52-6F-62 6y ago
I cautiously applaud Google's reparation payments (that's how I'm reading these initiatives), but I'm very wary of the fact that Google is calling this next stage a licensing. They didn't really go into details. Are we going to see "Google Licensed" news agencies now? That does not sit well with me.

habosa 6y ago

Anyone remember Google Contributor? https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

Eons ago when Google started aggregating news they greatly damaged the news industry. This is because you could start seeing the bigger story and the bias in the individual reporting. This was damaging to Fox News obviously. It got worse unfortunately, the journalists were caught faking scenes. https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-shot/index.html?sr=twCNN110416abc-news-stage-live-shot0715PMStoryLink&linkId=30720260 https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-s... Then the fake news was discovered: https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done for different places. People started discovering that news is heavily fake. Why buy something when they are outright lying to you? This is the reason the news industry is dying.

8organicbits 6y ago
> Then the fake news was discovered: https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg > Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done for different places. I believe you are misinformed. A couple searches on the headlines tells a different story. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wsj-different-trump-headlines/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wsj-different-trump-headli... > Yes, the images represent two different editions, published at different times, and the headlines represent the news at the time of publication — before and after his speech. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wall-street-journal-headlin-idUSKBN23V22J https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wall-street-jou... > While the two covers are both authentic, they were published at different times on that day to reflect evolving developments.

lvs 6y ago

Google News has degraded so much in the last few years that it's essentially useless. The combination of their updated material design (or whatever they're calling it) and AMP was a one-two punch. Click through to related articles is always wrong -- none of the articles are related, and there are many dozens more related that don't show. It's just a dead service.