Google News and the wires

There was a flurry of debate earlier this week about Google News and its deal to host wire stories from the likes of AFP and AP. This week's debate was sparked by a panel at the AOP Conference in London, moderated by my old boss Simon Waldman and featuring Peter Bale, formerly of Times Online and now at MSN, and Josh Cohen, product manager for Google News.

In the debate, Bale warned newspaper website owners to expect a downturn in traffic from Google News as a result of the decision by Google News to host wire stories. As a reminder, Google News is not just hosting these stories; it is also seeking to remove duplicate stories from newspaper publishers. So, for instance, if Times Online has a story which is in the main supplied by, say, AFP, Google News will display the original AFP version, and not the Times version.

What is interesting to me about this story is the degree of extreme humbug on both sides of the debate. To be clear, the only people who had a significant problem with the Google News model, in the UK at least, were the news wires, As they saw it, they were selling stories to the newspapers, and those newspapers were then hosting the stories as their own and being indexed by Google News. The newspaper got the traffic, Google News got the original audience, and the wire news provider - the source of the original news - got absolutely zip. This is why AFP, for instance, took the decision to take Google on in the courts.

So for Google to claim that they have taken this move to improve the experience of Google News is partly true but also massively disingenuous. The result might be an improved user experience (with less duplication of news stories) but the catalyst was situated in the law courts. Google had to do a deal with the wire news services to avoid legal action, and have sold it back to the Web community as a piece of a product development.

But there's an interesting side-story to this. Journalism.co.uk have a story today that says "Early US user figures suggest little effect from Google/agency publishing deal". The figures are from Nielsen/Net Ratings, and they do seem to suggest that American newspaper publishers, at least, have not seen a big impact from the Google News change. The big loser (and this is the interesting bit) seems to be Yahoo! News, which has had a big tail-off. Yahoo! News is the daddy of online news in the U.S., and is heavily dependent on AP for its news content. With that AP content now available on Google News, Yahoo! could well be the one to lose out in a big way.

And on a side note: Peter Bale also boasted at the AOP Conference that his MSN News team as a "journalistic product", thanks to its team of 30-plus journalists. 30-plus??? Yahoo! News in the US has an editorial team of about a dozen. So how can MSN UK run a commercially viable news service in the UK with more than 30 people? My admiration if they've managed to do that, but from what I know of news audiences in the UK and the relative sizes of the audience, that seems a somewhat quixotic endeavour, particularly with the news that AOL may be offshoring most of its editorial capacity in the UK.