8 ms·

Google News Showcase Launches in Australia

42 points by caution 6y ago

joecot 6y ago
So is this Google trying to navigate around Australia's proposed changes, or did Google blink and decide not to pull out?
- jimmcslim 6y ago
  I’m not sure of the details but apparently our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, had a “fruitful discussion” with Google yesterday...
  - dhsysusbsjsi 6y ago
    The Australian PM is from a marketing background so there’s a fair chance the deal changed so Australian tax payers are now paying Google to pay Murdoch media.
    - firecall 6y ago
      The whole thing is corrupt nonsense. Morrison has been in Murdochs pocket his entire career. It's shamless corruption that is damaging Australian Domocracy and our reputation.
      - chrismsimpson 6y ago
        Good thing google aren’t evil
        fggg444 6y ago
        no one has a monopoly on being evil. both players can be wrong
        kentosi 6y ago
        If you're referring to Google's old motto "Don't be evil", then FYI that got dropped years ago: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
        filoleg 6y ago
        Was your comment tongue-in-cheek? Because it seemed pretty obvious to me, but you are getting heavily downvoted, and I am usually the one who is very oblivious to sarcasm/tongue-in-cheek in writing. Which makes me doubt my assumption about your comment. Just wanted to make sure I understood the comment correctly.
    - tamrix 6y ago
      Do you have a source for this claim or is this just speculation?
    - kissickas 6y ago
      I looked up every newspaper in the list, and I don't see any evident connections to Murdoch (which I found surprising). Am I wrong?
    - rospaya 6y ago
      In the end he'll always be Scotty from marketing.
- jb_s 6y ago
  50/50? I think this first step is Google going "fuck you, we'll create our own curated news service and we'll pay a bunch of independent media on our own terms". But it's still probably just a matter of time until it's murdoch wall-to-wall
mrcsharp 6y ago
This sounds like a way for google to control who gets publish news articles across their services where google will select the sources they like. So basically if google doesn't like your organization, you don't get a place on this platform. Of course, it is their platform so this is within their rights, but I don't feel comfortable with google getting to promote some news sources over others based on arbitrary criteria. This is problematic when considering the size of audience google can reach.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  Australia is to blame for this whole saga. You can fault Google in a hundred other places, but this is 100% on Murdoch and the Australian gov for forcing Google into a corner where they could not display neutral results.
- valleyjo 6y ago
  This is a great point. It’s a conversation about the place these companies should hold in our lives, in democracy and their ability to control information. I wish people would admit that directly and focus on that discussion. Instead I see unproductive and backward conversations saying that google should pay publishers when in fact google brings more value to publishers via clicks than publishers bring to google. This line of thinking is missing the primary implications in my opinion.
shruubi 6y ago
It reads to me as though Google blinked. I'm sure somewhere, Rupert Murdoch is popping champagne bottles paid for by his ever increasing media in the Australian media bubble.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  I'm not seeing any Murdoch rags listed in the article though?
- abraae 6y ago
  Google had to blink sooner or later. It would be a loss for them if they were blocked from the Aussie market and other alternatives like Bing, DDG became popular. That could lead to a dominoes scenario where other countries realised they could get by too without the mighty Google. Those of us that need Google for searching for weird code snippets and the like (though Google seems increasingly failing in the battle against SEO spam) could just use a US VPN. Most people would get by fine on DDG.
  - kindofajsdev 6y ago
    This is my take as well. Google will sooner run at a loss in certain countries if it means not giving other competitors so much as an inch. Ads are their kingdom. They will protect it at all costs, even if that is giving up some revenue. What I am waiting to see next is, how will other countries/industries respond? Some countries may institute the same thing as Australia. Other industries may try to take a cut as well.
  - curt15 6y ago
    Wouldn't the hyperlink tax apply to Bing too?
nojs 6y ago
Google’s PR on this whole thing is a mess. There’s no explanation of how this fits in to their previous ads and videos that threatened to pull search from Australia. And even that was badly explained. I wish they would pick a stance and clearly say what they mean.
- jb_s 6y ago
  There's also no link to the bloody thing anywhere! Great launch.
  - wbercx 6y ago
    Even a Google search for it doesn't bring it up. Plenty of fanfare about the launch, but no actual product. Already lost interest.
- 22c 6y ago
  Google threatening to pull search from Australia was the most obvious bluff I've ever seen from any company. A total embarrassment, everyone saw right through it.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    If they actually did something like that, they could kiss their GCP, Google Docs, etc... contracts goodbye. Especially with government customers. They'd lose an entire country not just for search, but just about every other service they offer.
    - catmanjan 6y ago
      >GCP, Google Docs, etc... contracts goodbye. Especially with government customers They've already done that, Google's market share in government is approaching zero. They just aren't a B2B company, unlike Microsoft
      - mr_toad 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pulposus 6y ago
This is an interesting development in that the news services they have signed seem to be those not owned by Murdoch, i.e. left-leaning Fairfax and Schwartz Media mastheads. This could be about making sure the first people to make some money out of this are the competitors of those asking for it.
- siquick 6y ago
  Fairfax is definitely not left leaning anymore, they're owned by Nine Entertainment which was strong ties to the Liberal government. "AUSTRALIA’S MEDIA is more concentrated than in some countries that are under dictatorships, such as Turkey and Russia. The ownership and management of practically all of Australia’s print and television media, with exception to Network 10, have links to the Liberal Party. News Corp, chaired by Rupert Murdoch and majority-owned by the Murdoch family, owns around two-thirds of the print media and is a majority stakeholder in Foxtel and Sky News. Nine Entertainment, which was established by the Liberal-linked Packer family and is chaired by former Liberal member Peter Costello, owns the Nine Network, about a third of Australia’s newspaper publications and subscription television service Stan. Seven West Media, which is majority-owned and chaired by Kerry Stokes, another Liberal supporter, owns Channel 7 and any major newspaper publications that are not owned by News Corp or the Nine Entertainment. Ita Buttrose, another person with links to the Liberal Party, is chairperson of the ABC. Although most of Australia’s media is owned and run by Liberal supporters, there have been times when Australia’s media wasn't biased." https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/the-effect-of-right-wing-bias-in-australias-media,14569 https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/t...
  - caf 6y ago
    "former Liberal member Peter Costello" considerably undereggs the situation. He was deputy federal leader of the Liberals for 13 years, 11 of those as Treasurer in Government. He remained a powerful factional leader for years after that, and as far as I'm aware is still a party member.
  - throwaheyy 6y ago
    To be fair though the Liberal party is hardly “right wing” and is more like the centrist faction of the US Democratic Party.
dang 6y ago
The recent-and-related threads on this (there are a lot of them) can be accessed via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=google%20Australia%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
hiisukun 6y ago
So how do I (as an Aussie) use it, or see it? I couldn't find a link in the annoucement blog post. So I Googled for "Google News showcase" but.. no link there. Maybe I had to click the "news" tab/link above the search results- but nope, this just shows me the old style results, articles one after the other. Maybe it's an app? I searched the playstore, but only saw "Google news" which isn't updated since 15 Jan. I gave it a go anyway, but it didn't show the Showcase style anything like the blog post. Makes me think maybe this isn't really for the users.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tedmiston 6y ago
  > The panels will appear across Google News on Android, iOS and the mobile web, and in Discover on iOS, bringing high-value traffic to a publisher’s site. Sounds like it's only in Google News on mobile for now. (No clue why that's buried in the middle of the article.)
bjowen 6y ago
Meaning no shade, since this has probably been launched on a moment’s notice, but the current list of publications isn’t that impressive - none of the big names are there, half are subscriber paywalled, and the Conversation is a Creative Commons enterprise; I don’t think their funding model relies on this kind of traffic. Listed are: The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily and The Conversation.
csomar 6y ago
Be careful what you wish for. I think the old media is super-happy with their new-found resources but they are missing the forest from the trees. Google might have been forced to do this, but I think there will be some surprising unforeseen consequences. Not only your traffic is now tied to Google, but also your revenue. You are double screwed as a single organization. As soon as many organizations are in, it'd be hard for them to speak about any Google practices (guess where the money comes from). Then, it's only downhill from there. Old media had a last chance to re-invent their business model. Now they are officially dead.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- LegitShady 6y ago
  >Not only your traffic is now tied to Google, but also your revenue. You are double screwed as a single organization. As soon as many organizations are in, it'd be hard for them to speak about any Google practices (guess where the money comes from). Then, it's only downhill from there. we're already here. Google ranking/deranking makes or breaks your business. That's already reality especially for these news sites who live and die off of clicks for today's news. In this case at least it requires google to pay them something.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Except Google doesn't downrank content critical of Google or Alphabet. I even got notification-based news, via the Google app, about the Google union and this one article about Waymo's mistakes[0]. Google downranking critical content would get them regulated in so many countries if there was ample proof of it happening. With this new agreement, actually bad-mouthing Google will put pressure on the employees and execs handing the Australia deal and adds the element of human emotion which was previously absent. 0: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-repeating-silicon-valleys-most-famous-blunder/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-rep...
jsnell 6y ago
It seems to me that people are completely misunderstanding this. It's a product that already existed in some other countries. It has nothing to do with showing news sites in search results, or more generally with that Australian law. Though I am a bit confused, because it looks like they already said two months ago that they had Australian publications signed up. What's actually new here?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  So News Showcase appears to be their end run around reality that they need to pay for news content they scrape with Search: They rolled it out with a plan to pay publishers to be a part of it, including the ability to use the content in Search, while claiming they are not actually paying for Search content. But the biggest news is just that Australia called Google's bluff, and is going to pay up for the content they scrape.
  - jsnell 6y ago
    I don’t understand where you are getting this from. This is not stopping the scraping of news sites that do not participate, so it cannot be payment for scraping or showing the site in search results. It fulfills basically none of the requirements of the law. This is not letting the news sites name their price. I do not think there is any promise that every news org is guaranteed to be able to participate. This is not giving them the advance info on algorithm changes. And Australia is not the first country they rolled this out in. This already exists elsewhere, in countries that did not try to come up with laws so Draconian that Google threatened to leave. I bet that Murdoch etc do not consider this any kind of victory. They will continue pressing for the law.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      I see it as Google's attempt to offer a compromise. I agree that Australia probably isn't backing down, but it's clear Google knows it is going to have to pay one way or the other.
fmakunbound 6y ago
What is this shit? I thought they were pulling out of Australia
aboringusername 6y ago
I think the curation and the algorithm-driven nature of the news is responsible for the great disinformation and discord we see in society today. At the end of the day most news is just information, usually it was done on print, of course different sources can paint a different picture but now we have such intense analytics it's possible to figure how much money you can make printing a rape story; you may even want people to get raped as it's a story that yields the best value! Profiting off human suffering has become commonplace, a terrorist story might yield significant amounts of clicks and ad revenue, with each organisation adding their own spin to maximize the profit (ads, data, clicks, engagement) Really, it'd be nice to redefine how news works entirely, but I doubt that would happen this century sadly. Real journalism is really hard to come by these days, even the most respectable soruces often fall short and I can't name a single source that I'd consider to be world class. It's best to not even read the news, very little interesting information gets published there anyway.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Contrarily, you have to have an algorithm for searching the web. Even if you sort results only chronologically, you have to determine what news to show for the search "<topic> news", which is going to be an algorithm. But news has always been curated and algorithm-driven, it was just a human editor deciding whether or not certain stories ended up in this sunday's newspaper based on factors like 'do our readers want to see this', 'will this headline catch the eye of passersby at the news stand', etc. The only difference in the digital age is the access to all news from all sources at a moment's notice - so instead of having to pay to read the news from a single publication a day, you can curate your own viewership to be the most interesting articles from any newspapers for free. In practice, this means that every article, not just the front page headline, needs to now be optimized to sound shocking or interesting.

42 points by caution 6y ago

So is this Google trying to navigate around Australia's proposed changes, or did Google blink and decide not to pull out?

jimmcslim 6y ago
I’m not sure of the details but apparently our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, had a “fruitful discussion” with Google yesterday...
- dhsysusbsjsi 6y ago
  The Australian PM is from a marketing background so there’s a fair chance the deal changed so Australian tax payers are now paying Google to pay Murdoch media.
  - firecall 6y ago
    The whole thing is corrupt nonsense. Morrison has been in Murdochs pocket his entire career. It's shamless corruption that is damaging Australian Domocracy and our reputation.
    - chrismsimpson 6y ago
      Good thing google aren’t evil
      - fggg444 6y ago
        no one has a monopoly on being evil. both players can be wrong
      - kentosi 6y ago
        If you're referring to Google's old motto "Don't be evil", then FYI that got dropped years ago: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
      - filoleg 6y ago
        Was your comment tongue-in-cheek? Because it seemed pretty obvious to me, but you are getting heavily downvoted, and I am usually the one who is very oblivious to sarcasm/tongue-in-cheek in writing. Which makes me doubt my assumption about your comment. Just wanted to make sure I understood the comment correctly.
  - tamrix 6y ago
    Do you have a source for this claim or is this just speculation?
  - kissickas 6y ago
    I looked up every newspaper in the list, and I don't see any evident connections to Murdoch (which I found surprising). Am I wrong?
  - rospaya 6y ago
    In the end he'll always be Scotty from marketing.
jb_s 6y ago
50/50? I think this first step is Google going "fuck you, we'll create our own curated news service and we'll pay a bunch of independent media on our own terms". But it's still probably just a matter of time until it's murdoch wall-to-wall

mrcsharp 6y ago

This sounds like a way for google to control who gets publish news articles across their services where google will select the sources they like. So basically if google doesn't like your organization, you don't get a place on this platform. Of course, it is their platform so this is within their rights, but I don't feel comfortable with google getting to promote some news sources over others based on arbitrary criteria. This is problematic when considering the size of audience google can reach.

bpodgursky 6y ago
Australia is to blame for this whole saga. You can fault Google in a hundred other places, but this is 100% on Murdoch and the Australian gov for forcing Google into a corner where they could not display neutral results.
valleyjo 6y ago
This is a great point. It’s a conversation about the place these companies should hold in our lives, in democracy and their ability to control information. I wish people would admit that directly and focus on that discussion. Instead I see unproductive and backward conversations saying that google should pay publishers when in fact google brings more value to publishers via clicks than publishers bring to google. This line of thinking is missing the primary implications in my opinion.

shruubi 6y ago

It reads to me as though Google blinked. I'm sure somewhere, Rupert Murdoch is popping champagne bottles paid for by his ever increasing media in the Australian media bubble.

Clewza313 6y ago
I'm not seeing any Murdoch rags listed in the article though?
abraae 6y ago
Google had to blink sooner or later. It would be a loss for them if they were blocked from the Aussie market and other alternatives like Bing, DDG became popular. That could lead to a dominoes scenario where other countries realised they could get by too without the mighty Google. Those of us that need Google for searching for weird code snippets and the like (though Google seems increasingly failing in the battle against SEO spam) could just use a US VPN. Most people would get by fine on DDG.
- kindofajsdev 6y ago
  This is my take as well. Google will sooner run at a loss in certain countries if it means not giving other competitors so much as an inch. Ads are their kingdom. They will protect it at all costs, even if that is giving up some revenue. What I am waiting to see next is, how will other countries/industries respond? Some countries may institute the same thing as Australia. Other industries may try to take a cut as well.
- curt15 6y ago
  Wouldn't the hyperlink tax apply to Bing too?

nojs 6y ago

Google’s PR on this whole thing is a mess. There’s no explanation of how this fits in to their previous ads and videos that threatened to pull search from Australia. And even that was badly explained. I wish they would pick a stance and clearly say what they mean.

jb_s 6y ago
There's also no link to the bloody thing anywhere! Great launch.
- wbercx 6y ago
  Even a Google search for it doesn't bring it up. Plenty of fanfare about the launch, but no actual product. Already lost interest.
22c 6y ago
Google threatening to pull search from Australia was the most obvious bluff I've ever seen from any company. A total embarrassment, everyone saw right through it.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  If they actually did something like that, they could kiss their GCP, Google Docs, etc... contracts goodbye. Especially with government customers. They'd lose an entire country not just for search, but just about every other service they offer.
  - catmanjan 6y ago
    >GCP, Google Docs, etc... contracts goodbye. Especially with government customers They've already done that, Google's market share in government is approaching zero. They just aren't a B2B company, unlike Microsoft
    - mr_toad 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pulposus 6y ago

This is an interesting development in that the news services they have signed seem to be those not owned by Murdoch, i.e. left-leaning Fairfax and Schwartz Media mastheads. This could be about making sure the first people to make some money out of this are the competitors of those asking for it.

siquick 6y ago
Fairfax is definitely not left leaning anymore, they're owned by Nine Entertainment which was strong ties to the Liberal government. "AUSTRALIA’S MEDIA is more concentrated than in some countries that are under dictatorships, such as Turkey and Russia. The ownership and management of practically all of Australia’s print and television media, with exception to Network 10, have links to the Liberal Party. News Corp, chaired by Rupert Murdoch and majority-owned by the Murdoch family, owns around two-thirds of the print media and is a majority stakeholder in Foxtel and Sky News. Nine Entertainment, which was established by the Liberal-linked Packer family and is chaired by former Liberal member Peter Costello, owns the Nine Network, about a third of Australia’s newspaper publications and subscription television service Stan. Seven West Media, which is majority-owned and chaired by Kerry Stokes, another Liberal supporter, owns Channel 7 and any major newspaper publications that are not owned by News Corp or the Nine Entertainment. Ita Buttrose, another person with links to the Liberal Party, is chairperson of the ABC. Although most of Australia’s media is owned and run by Liberal supporters, there have been times when Australia’s media wasn't biased." https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/the-effect-of-right-wing-bias-in-australias-media,14569 https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/t...
- caf 6y ago
  "former Liberal member Peter Costello" considerably undereggs the situation. He was deputy federal leader of the Liberals for 13 years, 11 of those as Treasurer in Government. He remained a powerful factional leader for years after that, and as far as I'm aware is still a party member.
- throwaheyy 6y ago
  To be fair though the Liberal party is hardly “right wing” and is more like the centrist faction of the US Democratic Party.

dang 6y ago

The recent-and-related threads on this (there are a lot of them) can be accessed via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=google%20Australia%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

hiisukun 6y ago

So how do I (as an Aussie) use it, or see it? I couldn't find a link in the annoucement blog post. So I Googled for "Google News showcase" but.. no link there. Maybe I had to click the "news" tab/link above the search results- but nope, this just shows me the old style results, articles one after the other. Maybe it's an app? I searched the playstore, but only saw "Google news" which isn't updated since 15 Jan. I gave it a go anyway, but it didn't show the Showcase style anything like the blog post. Makes me think maybe this isn't really for the users.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tedmiston 6y ago
> The panels will appear across Google News on Android, iOS and the mobile web, and in Discover on iOS, bringing high-value traffic to a publisher’s site. Sounds like it's only in Google News on mobile for now. (No clue why that's buried in the middle of the article.)

bjowen 6y ago

Meaning no shade, since this has probably been launched on a moment’s notice, but the current list of publications isn’t that impressive - none of the big names are there, half are subscriber paywalled, and the Conversation is a Creative Commons enterprise; I don’t think their funding model relies on this kind of traffic. Listed are: The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily and The Conversation.

csomar 6y ago

Be careful what you wish for. I think the old media is super-happy with their new-found resources but they are missing the forest from the trees. Google might have been forced to do this, but I think there will be some surprising unforeseen consequences. Not only your traffic is now tied to Google, but also your revenue. You are double screwed as a single organization. As soon as many organizations are in, it'd be hard for them to speak about any Google practices (guess where the money comes from). Then, it's only downhill from there. Old media had a last chance to re-invent their business model. Now they are officially dead.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LegitShady 6y ago
>Not only your traffic is now tied to Google, but also your revenue. You are double screwed as a single organization. As soon as many organizations are in, it'd be hard for them to speak about any Google practices (guess where the money comes from). Then, it's only downhill from there. we're already here. Google ranking/deranking makes or breaks your business. That's already reality especially for these news sites who live and die off of clicks for today's news. In this case at least it requires google to pay them something.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Except Google doesn't downrank content critical of Google or Alphabet. I even got notification-based news, via the Google app, about the Google union and this one article about Waymo's mistakes[0]. Google downranking critical content would get them regulated in so many countries if there was ample proof of it happening. With this new agreement, actually bad-mouthing Google will put pressure on the employees and execs handing the Australia deal and adds the element of human emotion which was previously absent. 0: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-repeating-silicon-valleys-most-famous-blunder/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-rep...

jsnell 6y ago

It seems to me that people are completely misunderstanding this. It's a product that already existed in some other countries. It has nothing to do with showing news sites in search results, or more generally with that Australian law. Though I am a bit confused, because it looks like they already said two months ago that they had Australian publications signed up. What's actually new here?

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
So News Showcase appears to be their end run around reality that they need to pay for news content they scrape with Search: They rolled it out with a plan to pay publishers to be a part of it, including the ability to use the content in Search, while claiming they are not actually paying for Search content. But the biggest news is just that Australia called Google's bluff, and is going to pay up for the content they scrape.
- jsnell 6y ago
  I don’t understand where you are getting this from. This is not stopping the scraping of news sites that do not participate, so it cannot be payment for scraping or showing the site in search results. It fulfills basically none of the requirements of the law. This is not letting the news sites name their price. I do not think there is any promise that every news org is guaranteed to be able to participate. This is not giving them the advance info on algorithm changes. And Australia is not the first country they rolled this out in. This already exists elsewhere, in countries that did not try to come up with laws so Draconian that Google threatened to leave. I bet that Murdoch etc do not consider this any kind of victory. They will continue pressing for the law.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I see it as Google's attempt to offer a compromise. I agree that Australia probably isn't backing down, but it's clear Google knows it is going to have to pay one way or the other.

fmakunbound 6y ago

What is this shit? I thought they were pulling out of Australia

aboringusername 6y ago

I think the curation and the algorithm-driven nature of the news is responsible for the great disinformation and discord we see in society today. At the end of the day most news is just information, usually it was done on print, of course different sources can paint a different picture but now we have such intense analytics it's possible to figure how much money you can make printing a rape story; you may even want people to get raped as it's a story that yields the best value! Profiting off human suffering has become commonplace, a terrorist story might yield significant amounts of clicks and ad revenue, with each organisation adding their own spin to maximize the profit (ads, data, clicks, engagement) Really, it'd be nice to redefine how news works entirely, but I doubt that would happen this century sadly. Real journalism is really hard to come by these days, even the most respectable soruces often fall short and I can't name a single source that I'd consider to be world class. It's best to not even read the news, very little interesting information gets published there anyway.

judge2020 6y ago
Contrarily, you have to have an algorithm for searching the web. Even if you sort results only chronologically, you have to determine what news to show for the search "<topic> news", which is going to be an algorithm. But news has always been curated and algorithm-driven, it was just a human editor deciding whether or not certain stories ended up in this sunday's newspaper based on factors like 'do our readers want to see this', 'will this headline catch the eye of passersby at the news stand', etc. The only difference in the digital age is the access to all news from all sources at a moment's notice - so instead of having to pay to read the news from a single publication a day, you can curate your own viewership to be the most interesting articles from any newspapers for free. In practice, this means that every article, not just the front page headline, needs to now be optimized to sound shocking or interesting.