Update on 12/15: Google News sent us a new email this morning and accepted My Ballard into the index (without having to re-apply). If any of you had something to do with this, we thank you!
Original post: For the past several months, Google News has denied repeated requests to index MyBallard.com, the Seattle neighborhood news site run by my wife and me. At first they ignored our emails, but recently we’ve been emailing back and forth in an odd exchange that ended with another rejection.
For background, MyBallard.com publishes straight news. Both my wife and I are longtime journalists, and I have several national and regional journalism awards. Approximately 80-90 percent of our coverage is original (the rest is aggregation). We publish multiple stories and photos a day, and our coverage routinely beats every Seattle news organization to Ballard news. We have 23,000 monthly unique users in a neighborhood of 40,000 people — one of the most successful neighborhood news sites in the country.
What’s incredibly frustrating is breaking a story and watching a local TV station or newspaper duplicate it in a matter of hours. The local media version appears on Google News. Ours does not. This happens every few days.
So why does Google refuse to list us? I wish I knew. In our last exchange, they asked that we display “organizational information, including evidence of multiple writers and editors, and accessible contact information.” We adjusted our “about” page to ensure we clearly listed our organization, Next Door Media LLC, as well as our names and our email address. They then asked where they could find this information, so we told them, um, to click “about” in the main navigation. Then they denied our request yet again with this note:
Thank you for your reply and for providing us with information about your site. Although we’re still unable to include your site in Google News at this time, please be assured that we’ll log your site for future consideration.
We did not include our physical address, which may be the catch. We don’t want an angry reader to Google our house and show up at our front door as I’m standing there holding our new baby in my arms. Or perhaps, they don’t consider my wife and me to be “multiple writers and editors.”
But this is the new model of community journalism: neighborhood reporters working out of their homes, providing a layer of journalism over a vibrant community (something, I might add, does not always require “multiple writers and editors.”) This is the future of low-cost, high-relevancy, community-powered local coverage. But oddly, Google News enforces the old definition of a news organization, discouraging journalism entrepreneurs in a time when newspapers are in a free fall. It’s discriminatory, narrow-minded and exclusive.
And certainly evil.
(Full disclosure: I use about every Google service on the planet for MyBallard.com, from AdWords to AdSense to Analytics to AdManager to Checkout. And I work for msnbc.com, a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft.)
