BoSacks Speaks Out: Can Google Rival the Newspapermen?

BoSacks Speaks Out: Can Google Rival the Newspapermen?



I feel compelled to tell you that I use Google News almost everyday. It is an extraordinary tool for news gathering. Not only the gathering of news, but more importantly, the capacity to get completely differing points of view on the same subject or news event. To me that is an aspect that is rarely mentioned and of extreme importance. For example in today's top headlines there is a story titled "G8 Urged To Ensure Debt Write-Off Reaches Poor." It is a political story coming from Reuters. That story, if it was the only one I read, would contain only one perspective. But with the Google News formula there are 1,211 other links from news sites all around the world reporting on the same story with completely different perspectives. That, my friends, is a true reservoir of diversity. You can't read them all, but reading one or two stories on important events is very important to your understanding of complex issues.

This is power publishing to the extreme. This is powerful broad based information delivery system on a global basis, that anyone, anywhere can tap into, and it doesn't even require a broadband connection. The world of publishing, or "Information Distribution", is changing every day. It is still in it's infancy, but look what we can do already. Think about what we might be able to do in five years? How about 10? Do your plans contain a global perspective? If not, why not?

Today I am sitting in a very rural section in upstate NY. Yet from here, or wherever my laptop is, I reach over 10,000 people worldwide everyday. My good friend Samir Husni says, "Think global, act local." Although I love to disagree with him, he is right on the mark with that statement. The Internet is empowering any publisher no matter how small and local it might be to have a global presence and perspective.

We are all seeing amazing changes in the publishing process. There are radical changes happening now and will continue for the foreseeable future. I often wonder if our current management teams can and will keep up with the advent of newer and even more magical technologies of information distribution.

BoSacks
-30-


The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. - Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980)


Here is a list of the first ten articles on the G8 story listed chronologically starting with the most recently posted.


G8 urged to ensure debt write-off reaches poor

Reuters - 1 hour ago

By Manoah Esipisu. JOHANNESBURG (Reuters)



Last-minute cracks in debt relief plan

Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 1 hour ago



Transparency is key to debt deal - UK's Brown

AlertNet, UK - 1 hour ago



G-8 plan for relief praised by debtors

International Herald Tribune, France - 1 hour ago



Richest nations approve debt relief for poorest

San Francisco Chronicle, CA - 3 hours ago



Rich Countries Waive the Debts of Poor Countries

Zaman Online, Turkey - 4 hours ago



G8 agrees $40bn Africa debt relief deal

Financial Times, UK - 4 hours ago



G8 writes off US$ 40 bn debt for African nations

NDTV.com, India - 5 hours ago



Wealthiest nations agree to forgive $40 billion debt

San Jose Mercury News, CA - 5 hours ago



G8 leaders agree to help poor African nations

Independent Online, South Africa - 7 hours ago







............From the General Publication News Files...............



Can Google News robot rival the newspapermen?
By George Brock
A potential nightmare faces the 'dead-tree-and-ink' business



WE ARE accustomed to the idea that media history has been made by editors and publishers. That was in the past. Now the people who may next change the way news is interpreted and delivered work in a two-storey building in the Indian city of Bangalore.
They are not exactly editors or publishers: they are mostly young Indians with PhDs in computer science. The interns who work in Bangalore for the search-engine company Google are trying to teach computers to figure out what is quality journalism. If they succeed, their impact on written journalism will be profound.



When Google’s webmasters first launched Google News in 2001, its inventors endured a lot of lofty ridicule from newspaper editors and writers pointing out that no “robot” was ever going to be a better news editor than a human. And Google’s system wasn’t perfect: it reported with a straight face that Canada had arrested George W. Bush on war crimes charges.

However, the smiles of the men and women in the dead-tree-and-ink newspaper business are fading. Google News has six million users a month. In the search-engine wars, this isn’t huge — Yahoo! News, edited by real people, has bigger reach — but the implications are more intriguing. Google News is produced entirely by computer algorithms that sift 4,500 internet news sites every quarter of an hour and produce news bulletins ranking the stories by how many times they are found. Like most of Google, the front page is bare bones: clusters of links through to the original stories wherever they appear. You can customise a news feed on a particular topic of your choice; there are 22 regional editions in nine languages.

Once upon a time, fast, accurate news was in short supply. In a wired world with a glut of news, Google wants to be the global positioning system for people who need to navigate the information jungle.

For many people, and not just journalists, this is the stuff of nightmares. For an entertaining summary of the case for the prosecution, watch a short “mockumentary” in which Google’s news robots take over the world’s news business. Without discrimination, the vast news engine spews out data largely trivial and untrue.

Google News’s young Indian founder, Krishna Bharat, is not heading for that dystopia. As the snags are being ironed out of Google News’s basic model, he has already set his interns in Bangalore to work on subtler filters to sift news.

Are the sentences and paragraphs copied from somewhere else and can that story be discarded? Does the length of the story count? How many people does the news operation employ? How many foreign correspondents does it have? Above all, Bharat is striving to establish how to teach a computer to recognise originality, a genuine scoop, clarity, concision, eloquence, political impact.

“I see us as an integral part of the news community,” Bharat told the World Editors Forum in Seoul last week. “Our relationship with newspapers is symbiotic. We send traffic directly to the content provider . . . and we amplify the amount of news being read.”

Google’s experts see information being published on a range from history books at one end to fast-breaking news on the web at the other. A reader chooses how to trade off timeliness against mature reflection. That means that newspapers have to be clear about where they sit and what their readers expect of them in the balance between speed and depth. Newspapers confused about this are those most liable to die.

Perhaps the most powerful evidence of the advance that automated news “aggregators” have made is that their workings and effect are now on the political agenda. American journalism weblogs debate whether the Google formulas demonstrate an unintentional bias between Republicans or Democrats. There was a vigorous disagreement at the conference between Bharat and US and Japanese speakers over Google’s reluctance to reveal exactly what sources it uses and how it adds or subtracts from the list.

But those arguments only go to show that Google News is a force for change, like it or not.


George Brock is the president of the World Editors Forum

For more information:

www.editorsweblog.org/t_2005_world_editors_forum_in_seoul/index.html

ojr.org/ojr/technology/1095977436.php

For further media coverage: www.timesonline.co.uk/media