[Sigia-l] GoogleNews

[Listera]

Trade pub Editor & Publisher has an interesting take from the newspaper
industry POV on what GoogleNews may portend:

If I'm right and Google News does catch on, it could change news reading
habits for Internet users. Instead of the traditional way of choosing a
media outlet and navigating its content, Google News users enter specific
stories via a third party (Google) and bypass news organizations' home
pages. While that's hardly new, what is new is the existence of a Web entity
powerful enough to draw substantial numbers of users away from news sites'
home pages.
[...]
News sites that insist on employing a user-registration scheme could get
hurt by Google News, warns Chris Sherman, a search-engine industry analyst,
because their content would be invisible to Google and the potential
millions of Net users it can attract. What savvy publishers of
registration-required sites must do, he says, is work with Google in order
to be included in their news searches.

Google News already has made arrangements with some leading news sites that
use registration schemes -- such as The New York Times. Google News users
who click on links to NYTimes.com articles at Google News go directly to the
article -- there's no intervening registration screen -- even if they're not
already registered at NYTimes.com.
[...]
Analyst Sherman is equally ebullient: "I think it's going to turn the way we
get online news upside down. ... It will change everything. ... It will
transform the landscape of news on the Web. ... I'm blown away by this
thing."

Sherman considers Google News to be "a gift served up to the news industry,"
and he urges publishers to take advantage. Distribution of news can be
served up by orders of magnitude, he suggests. It supports the news
organizations with the best reputations because their content typically
bubbles to the top of Google's story selections. It's also great news for
small news sites, which can be exposed to a huge audience when their content
occasionally bubbles up.

<http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/features_columns/artic
le_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1712373>

I know people have been somewhat dismissive of this, but I think this is
just the beginning: imagine the same approach with, say, financial news, or
medical or any vertical market news, where a lot of people would pay a
goodly amount of money to subscribe. Imagine it on cell-phones, PDAs or
set-top boxes (it's updated every 15 mins). Etc.

Best,

Ziya