For me, Google News + AP = frustration
Don Day September 19th, 2007
I love Google News. Let me start with that. Love it. I love that it sends traffic to my site, and I love that it makes it easy to find news stories. But it frustrates me. The new AP deal makes it even more frustrating.
We have a trio of peacocks living at my apartment complex. So I wrote a feature and took some pictures. It did great traffic online yesterday. We try to do these online-only enterprised stories several times each week. The peacock story was picked up by the wire. That doesn’t bug me. The story appeared on the other news sites in the market. That doesn’t bug me. But when I did my morning search for Boise - the much shorter, Google AP version of our peacock story comes up first. THAT bugs me. I get that the Google algorithm puts more weight on “The Associated Press” than it does on KTVB. But the fact that it puts SO much weight on AP over a story that has about three times the depth… and includes photos bugs me. TV sites like ours benefit greatly from the AP - but NONE of that benefit comes from Google. They can’t “associate” because they don’t create content. So like I said: AP great, Google great. The combination? Frustrating.
10 Comments Add your own
1. Cory | September 19th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Don, you have explained exactly why the AP model is in trouble.
We pay a big annual fee. We give them our stories. They give our stories to our competitors’ sites, like Google News. Our competitors pay AP for our stories.
What’s wrong with that picture?
2. Brink | September 19th, 2007 at 11:28 am
What, someone on this site’s “staff” has a complaint about Google?
Travesty! All that Google does is right and good. Therefore, you must be wrong.
3. tdc | September 19th, 2007 at 11:51 am
relax, i just did my afternoon google search of - the boise channel - and ktvb came up first.
that peacock story will fade away in a day or so, but you’ll ALWAYS want to be known as “the” channel in town, righto?
and if that jinglejugs.com semi rolls thru boise you’ll be smart to cover it like a rug… that vid was everywhere yesterday.
4. Michael | September 19th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
This was exactly the problem I was imaging when I first heard about the Google + AP deal. What happens when the original content is picked up by the AP? In a perfect world, the original content should be the top headline with the AP content underneath.
In reality, I can imagine the Google News links to the original content will be usurped as soon as the AP picks up the story. It seems to me like the AP is double-dipping on content. First a local station pays for AP access and provides stories to the AP as part of the deal. Then Google News snakes that traffic away from the station’s website when the AP version hits the wires.
Lose-lose situation for the originators of content if you ask me.
5. Rob | September 19th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Speaking of AP, I like the feeds one of the stations in our market has for their AP content that posts everything to their Interweb. Several times I’ve sent AP content marked “Not for online use in Spokane” and it gets posted on our competitor’s site with our byline and the embargo tag. Nothing like getting scooped by the competition on your own website. Priceless.
I try to work around the Google News situation by posting almost all of our video content to YouTube. So far that’s one place where our content hasn’t been usurped by AP. We also are trying to blog breaking news - and sending automated updates to Technorati in the process - as well as Twitter breaking news as well.
Google built us a mousetrap … now we just gotta try to find ways around that trap to get to the cheese.
6. Joe | September 19th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
This is the same problem I had with the site aggregators: Fark, Drudge, eBaum, etc. For example, you have a UFO fly through downtown Kansas City. WKSC-TV posts a story with video. Go to the aggregators and they are linking to the AP story on a site like KCBS’s or some AP story on azcentral.com. WKSC-TV gets no credit or audience for their story. There’s no justice in that model, and I quit trying because it wasn’t worth the aggravation, the aggregation aggravation. I can see how the Google-AP thing could be worse. Let’s see who stops using AP first.
7. discreet_chaos | September 19th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
If you type Boise in Yahoo! News, a longer version from KING-5 is on the first page and it has your byline. And if you type Boise Peacock into Yahoo! News, your original story is the very first and only appropriate link.
8. Mike G | September 20th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Rob is that other station using WorldNow?
From my experience they just do a straight dump, and they don’t do any editing, rather than basic format cleanup, and things like embargoes, member credits, and even pronouncers remained.
The #1 station in our market, also a WorldNow station, used to rely almost exclusively on that automatic feed for local news. Well, about once a month, AP would use some breaking news information from us, and sure enough, if you went to that AP version of the story on their site, you’d see at the bottom (Thanks WXXX, Anytown).
That was the only time AP cannibalization of our content provided any benefit to us.
9. Rob | September 20th, 2007 at 9:05 am
MIke G - Yup, it’s a WorldNow site.
10. Davis Freeberg | September 20th, 2007 at 10:27 am
I think the key to solving this conflict would be for the AP to let you preserve the links in your stories. You might not get the first placement for your peacock story, but if it contained a link back to another story on your site, you would be able to aggregate that link on all of those heavily trafficked sites which would provide tremendous benefit for the original creators of the content. It wouldn’t solve your specific complaint, but it would create a pretty compelling reason for why a small site might want to aggregate for free through the AP network.
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