Google: newspapers need to learn from Wikipedia

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 8 May 2009 at 09:43

Google has hit back at suggestions it's harming newspaper journalism, by claiming the industry needs to alter its approach to publishing on the web.

At a US congress hearing entitled The Future of Journalism, Google's vice president of products Marissa Mayer began by reiterating the party line that newspapers make a healthy living out of Google traffic.

"Google connects internet users to journalists' work while at the same time helping journalists generate income to support their work, and providing tools to make news more compelling to readers and viewers," she told the hearing.

Intriguingly, she then went on to suggest that perhaps newspapers need to adapt their coverage to better suit the internet.

"Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL," Meyer said. "The result is parallel web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results.

"Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity.

"We see this practice today in Wikipedia's entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a
consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time."

What Mayer failed to acknowledge, however, was that failure to produce a new article for each update would result in the story failing to appear on Google News.

The debate comes as newspaper groups including Rupert Murdoch and The Guardian Media Group are beginning to voice concerns that the search giant uses their content without any direct payment.

Read our interview with Guardian Group's director of digital strategy and development, Simon Waldman in this month's PC Pro, on sale 14 May.