Then again, take a look at the Q&A between Josh Cohen, Google News' Business Manager, and Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land....The most confusing exchange is as follows:
What motivated the launch of this feature? In particular, Google's cofounders have both expressed concerns in the past that news articles don't often tell the full story, with Larry Page cited [page 297] in John Battelle's book The Search that journalism was "extremely flawed" and Eric Schmidt talking recently that false rumors are less likely to happen if more "original source material" is online. Is this in reaction to those types of things?
It's not really a comment on news reporting but more how do you get more comments out there. We're not reporting on stories ourselves. This is just another perspective. It's pretty consistent with what we've tried to do with Google News in general, tried to offer many perspectives on the news. We do that today.
So, this is about adding more comments? It's about making journalism better--perfecting it, somehow? As things stand now with blogs, we've got loads of news commentary, and there are, even with news outlets, ample opportunity for those who are in articles to add to the articles--somewhere in my memory I seem to remember whole bunches of editorials in the New York Times that refuted what had been reported in various articles. Maybe it's that news outlets don't necessarily want to print out glowing revisions produced by propaganda machines--and there's no guarantee that this won't happen with GN....
So, what stories--tech, political, local?--are in need of additional original source material? Right now we're having some problems with an Administration that seems to be strangling the press, but I don't think that Google News is all that concerned about the political scene. Rather, perhaps, there may be more concern about negative reports about corporations (Google is, after all, a corporation) and a need to have statements about corporations made *the right way*--as in nothing negative about particularly powerful corporations that may be in the middle of making big deals that transgress serious legal and privacy boundaries. We Americans sometimes fret over political censorship, but we rarely worry about corporate censorship--which may actually be a much bigger, more insidious and pervasive problem. The tech industry is pretty powerful--more than perhaps most Americans realize. And its desire to correct or append unfavorable articles--perhaps via comments in Google News-- is a possibility that should be considered....
Update The Wall St. Journal is, ironically, commenting from behind its own walled garden on GN's walled garden....
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