by Search Copywriter
K. Todd
K. Todd
Google and its influence on news distribution has certainly been in the limelight recently and new developments have brought to light the revelation that the Mountain View giant is on the move to innovate the way we experience news media online. In an interview with the Guardian, Google News senior business product manager, Josh Cohen, discussed the search engine's plans for the future of news media. He explained how Google aims to revolutionise the industry by pulling together the full breadth of news stories for users, rather than simply collecting similar stories based on the same piece of news.
Well, in one of its projects, anyway. Google is actually attempting to tackle the news from all angles, the above being part of its aim to diversify the way we collect news. Rather than simply looking up many pieces covering the same story, new features added to Google News - visible on the left side menu of the results page - allow users to pull information from all sorts of mediums, including news sites, old and new content - up to the second, in fact - blogs and even Twitter. It brings together straightforward news with opinion pieces with the goal of letting users take in the full extent of a story, including what the greater community thinks of them.
The Guardian reports that Cohen remarked: "There is a lot of high-quality information out there.
"Not only journalism, but blogs and other services. And our task is to bring this information to the reader. So ask yourself: Is Twitter journalism? I don't know. But there is no question that it is part of the dialogue."
The move seems somewhat similar to the search services offered by Microsoft and Yahoo! collaboration, Bing, which unites straightforward news with images and Twitter posts on its results pages.
Cohen also revealed projects like Spotlight and Fast Flip, which attempt to give web users the same experience they might gain from picking up an actual newspaper. Spotlight brings special interest articles, investigative pieces and opinion-based journalism to the surface and, according to Cohen, "overlaps with Fast Flip, which is like browsing through a magazine".
Fast Flip shows readers news stories that they can read just fragments of, as if they were browsing a magazine, with the articles being shown based on "hyper-personalisation" of the reader's history.
