Google News Blog

A reminder about promotional and commerce journalism

2013-03-27T10:59:00.000-07:00

Posted by Richard Gingras, Sr. Director, News & Social Products

Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site. It’s difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines.

Please remember that like Google search, Google News takes action against sites that violate our quality guidelines. Engagement in deceptive or promotional tactics such as those described above may result in the removal of articles, or even the entire publication, from Google News.

If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only. Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

A better Google News experience on tablets

2012-12-11T10:36:00.001-08:00

Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Product Manager, Google News

[Edited 02/13/2013] Update: The new Google News experience for tablets is now available in most English editions worldwide. Hope you enjoy it!

There’s something special about reading news on your tablet. Indeed, swiping through Google News on your tablet is a comfortable and effective way to find more articles from great publications that satisfy your needs and tickle your serendipitous interests. Starting today, Google News feels even more natural and fluid on tablet devices. For example:

You can find new articles, news sources, and even topics of interest with intuitive gestures. Swipe horizontally between sections – from Business to Entertainment, for example – or tap “Explore in depth” to see multiple articles and other info related to a particular story.
We’ve also added more breathing room between articles, making it easier to spot the stories you really care about.

We think these improvements will help Google News send even more visits to news sites (six billion per month and counting).

To give it a try, just visit news.google.com with your Nexus 7, Nexus 10, or iPad.

Improving news search with expandable results

2012-10-22T15:29:00.000-07:00

Posted by Rudy Galfi, Product Manager

Last year we updated Google News to make it easier for you to scan for stories that are interesting to you and let you dig deeper when you find them. Today we’re announcing an update that brings some of those same ideas to news search.

Over the next few days we’ll be rolling out the following features:

Click-to-expand news results clusters: Each news results cluster is collapsed down to one result with the exception of the first cluster. Click on the “Show more” link to see articles from more sources. This improvement makes it much easier to scan through the search results to find just the collection of news coverage you’re looking for.
Multimedia: Within some of the expanded results clusters you’ll see a bar of videos and photos that relate to each cluster’s content. Click on any of these for more coverage of the story.
Layout updates: The cluster image now appears on the left and the source information has been moved to below the article links for better readability.

You can try this out by doing a search on Google News or by clicking on the “News” filter on the web search results page. We hope you like these changes and that they improve your experience searching the news.

Google News turns 10

2012-09-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Scientist and Founder, Google News

Google News launched on September 22, 2002—exactly a decade ago.

Inspired by the widespread interest in news after the September 11 attacks, we invested in technology to help people search and browse news relevant to them. Google News broke new ground in news aggregation by gathering links in real time, grouping articles by story and ranking stories based on the editorial opinions of publishers worldwide. Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content. By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.

In the last ten years, Google News has grown to 72 editions in 30 languages, and now draws from more than 50,000 news sources. The technology also powers Google’s news search. Together, they connect 1 billion unique users a week to news content.

Google News today

As we have scaled the service internationally, we have added new features (Local News, Personalization, Editors’ Picks, Spotlight, Authorship, Social Discussions), evolved our design, embraced mobile and run ancillary experiments (Fast Flip, Living Stories, Timeline). In parallel, we have monitored our quality and challenged our engineers to improve the technology under the hood—increase freshness, group news better, rank stories more accurately, personalize with more insight and streamline the infrastructure.

Take a look back at the past decade in Google News through the top stories from each year and a few notable features that have launched in the interim:

It’s undeniable that the online news landscape has changed immensely. Smartphones and social networks have transformed how news is accessed and sourced, and shifted the relationship between readers and authors. Open journalism is the norm, and aggregation by humans and machines is an integral part of the ecosystem. New technologies such as Hangouts on Air have the potential to connect users, journalists and opinion makers and transform how stories are discussed.

Opportunities abound, and we are excited for where we can take this product in the next decade. While change is inevitable, one thing remains the same: our mission is to bring you the news you want, when you need it, from a diverse set of sources.

(Cross-posted on the Official Google blog)

A newly hatched way to tag your news articles

2012-09-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

Posted by Rudy Galfi, Product Manager, Google News

The day after the historic 1929 stock market crash, Variety bannered their front page with these words: “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.” It’s a great headline: pithy, catchy, and expressive of the substance of the story as well as the scale of its consequences. It’s also worth noting that Variety’s editors had a full day to write the headline—millions of readers weren’t trying to search for the story within seconds of hearing about it.

The Web has transformed both how news organizations report information and the way users find it. Imagine if “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG” were used as a headline today by an online news site. Since the headline is a sequence of text that’s only readily understandable by a human, most machine algorithms would probably attach some sort of biological association to it. In turn, this would make it difficult for millions of curious users who are using Google.com or Google News to find the best article about the stock market crash they just heard about.

To help solve this problem, today we’re excited to announce a news_keywords metatag. The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.

Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text. Taking the Variety example above, news keywords such as “stocks”, “stock market”, or “crash” would be helpful in allowing Google News to better understand the article content for ranking without forcing the editors to water down the creativity of a great headline. Because the metatag appears only as part of the HTML code of a page, visitors to a site won’t ever see the magic under the hood.

Keep in mind that this metatag will be one signal among many that our algorithms use to determine ranking. The news_keywords metatag is intended as a tool -- but high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users.

You can learn more about getting news_keywords set up by reading our Help Center article.

Updates to Google News US Edition: Larger Images, Realtime Coverage and Discussions

2012-05-03T09:44:00.004-07:00

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager, Google News

When a story breaks, Google News is designed to give you the most relevant articles from a variety of sources --- from national news outlets, to local points of view, to expert opinion pieces. To continue to expand your views on the news, we are adding three new features for those using our US edition: larger images on our main page; a new realtime coverage page to surface the latest articles and commentary; and relevant Google+ posts for a new social perspective.

Get coverage in real time
Our new realtime coverage page is now available for every news story as soon as they become available to Google News.

See relevant comments on top stories
Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we're starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages. This way you can see what your circles, journalists covering the story and notables like politicians or others who are the subjects of stories have to say about breaking news, and even contribute to the discussion directly from Google News.

Note that these Google+ discussions will only appear for those of you reading the US edition who have signed in and upgraded to Google+.

If you'd like to try these new Google+ features in News, it's easy to upgrade here. That said, if you prefer your Google News to contain just news stories and no Google+ posts, you can either log out of Google or turn off the display of Google+ posts via the Google News settings page.

We're rolling out all of these features over the next week, so don't worry if you don't see them immediately. Today's updates are the latest examples of how we're working to provide users with a beautiful, consistent experience across Google. So we hope you enjoy them.

Update 9/24/2012: Larger images and real time coverage will begin rolling out to all editions. In addition, Google+ posts relevant to individual stories will be available in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.

A new way to access quality content online

2012-03-29T10:21:00.002-07:00

Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager

Whether we’re getting the latest election news, making sense of the day’s stock market activity or looking for an update on our favorite celebrities, we rely on publishers to inform and entertain us. Online publishers often fund the creation of this content through ads; sometimes they ask you to pay for content directly, by buying a subscription or purchasing a particular article.

Now, you may see a new option: the ability to access some of this content by responding to microsurveys, without having to pull out your wallet or sign in. When a site has implemented this option, you’ll see a prompt that offers you a choice between answering a market research question or completing another action specified by the publisher (such as signing up for an account or purchasing access). All responses are completely anonymous -- they aren’t tied to your identity or later used to target ads. The prompts look like this:

Publishers get paid for hosting surveys. A number of publishers, such as the The Texas Tribune, the Star Tribune and Adweek have already started running these microsurveys on their sites.

So what’s the point of these questions? From international brands to local food trucks, every business owner wants to make important decisions with their customers’ feedback in mind. That’s why we’ve created Google Consumer Surveys, a new business-facing product that makes custom market research easy. It enables companies to ask questions (the ones you'll later see on your screen) and get back quantitative results quickly, accurately and cost-effectively. Companies have already been using it to research everything from online shopping behavior (Lucky Brand Jeans) to gluten-free baking mixes (King Arthur Flour), and to assess brand awareness (Timbuk2) and inform product development (479 Popcorn). Google shares the money these companies spend with our publisher partners.

The idea behind Google Consumer Surveys is to create a model that benefits everyone. You get to keep enjoying your favorite online content, publishers have an additional option for making money from that content, and businesses have a new way of finding out what their customers want.

If you’re a publisher interested in running microsurveys on your site, let us know.

Sending us feedback is now much easier!

2012-01-12T17:36:00.000-08:00

Posted by Mariko Suzuki, Google News Strategist

Do you have any feedback or suggestions you would like to share with the Google News Team? We always love to hear from you, so we made submitting feedback much easier.

Simply click the “Send Feedback” link at the bottom of Google News pages. The Google Feedback gadget will appear, and you can leave us general comments, problem reports or feature suggestions. The feedback gadget will also help you send us a screenshot if you want to draw our attention to a specific aspect of the site. Use the tool to highlight an area relevant to your feedback and black out any personal information before submitting the screenshot to us.

Although we won’t be able to reply to your comments individually, your feedback will help us create a better Google News experience. This tool will be launching worldwide, beginning with the U.S. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Announcing the 2012 Google News elections section

2012-01-04T15:07:00.000-08:00

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager

Who just endorsed whom? What do the latest polls say? How much money did they raise this quarter? Keeping up with the 2012 elections in the U.S. and staying abreast of breaking developments can be quite a task in today’s fast-paced news cycle.

So today, we’re excited to continue our tradition of supporting you during elections season. Google News is launching an Elections section on its homepage which will organize and present elections coverage as it grows through the general election -- Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

The Elections section will be visible by default for all US users and will be located beneath the Health section. It will bring readers the latest and most relevant news stories, using all of the ranking intelligence that users have come to expect of Google. You should also check out Google’s official elections page, YouTube’s collection of candidate videos, and the elections Trends Dashboard to find out more about how people are interacting with the elections online.

More Powerful +1s on Google News

2011-11-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

Posted by Erich Schmidt, Software Engineer

Over the past few months, myriad sites across the web (including Google News) have adopted the +1 button to help start conversations. But there hasn’t been an easy way for signed-in users to see what news articles your friends are enjoying -- until now.

Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles.

Here’s what Spotlight looks like with social annotations:

We hope this change helps you find more great articles to enjoy, and gives more power to your +1s.

Highlighting journalists on Google News

2011-11-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer

Great journalism takes more than facts and figures -- it takes skilled reporters to knit together compelling stories. Knowing who wrote an article can help readers understand the article's context and quality, see more articles by that person, and even interact directly with them. Whole communities can form around prominent contributors, which is why we started showing information about content creators next to their material in Google Search.

Accordingly, Google News is rolling out more information about journalists over the next several weeks, starting with English-language editions. When reporters link their Google profile with their articles, Google News now shows the writer’s name and how many Google+ users have that person in their circles. For the lead article for each story, Google News also shows that reporter’s profile picture and enables readers to add them to their Google+ circles right from the Google News homepage.

If you are a journalist and would like to participate, please follow the instructions in our Help Center. If you are a reader, we hope you enjoy learning more about the faces behind the news.

More points of view on Google News

2011-10-28T15:28:00.000-07:00

By Jayakumar Hoskere, Software Engineer

When a big story breaks, there are often over a thousand articles written about the news event. At Google News, we work hard to surface the most relevant and interesting content to you -- so you can spend less time sorting through thousands of articles, and more time consuming news from a range of diverse perspectives.

For instance, since introducing expandable stories, we have added additional labels to call out special types of articles in many editions. These labels are designed to highlight different content types on Google News, and show you stories that complement and expand upon standard news reporting. The four labels we recently launched include:

Live Updating: A live-updating article, such as a liveblog.
Featured: An article a publisher has told us is standout.
Fact-check: An article providing fact-check content about the story.
Your Preferred source: An article from a source that you preferred.

Evaluating a story from different angles often provides a sharper perspective. That is why we also now highlight special types of articles in many Google News search results. Your search results will not only show recent articles, but also those from diverse perspectives that relate to a given query.

We also recently added the Translate button to non-English international stories in expandable story boxes in the U.S edition, giving you the ability to read pieces from all over the world -- even if you don’t speak the language.

We hope you find these changes useful as we continue to develop opportunities for you to find more interesting and valuable content.

News joins Google Dashboard

2011-10-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

Posted by Panchapagesan Krishnamurthy, Software Engineer

Halloween is almost here and we're celebrating early. No trick -- just a treat. As of now, you can access Google News in the Google Dashboard. This gives you the ability to see basic information about your Google News personalizations, check out our privacy policy and click through to edit your preferences.

We're excited to bring you this additional level of control and encourage you to give it a whirl.

Bringing relevant news to you, regardless of language

2011-10-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

Posted by Yaroslav Kurovtsev, Software Engineer, Google Translate

To help bridge language barriers between you and the news of interest to you from around the world -- and to bring you more diverse perspectives on foreign events -- we’ve added a new “translate” button to the expandable story boxes in the U.S. English edition of Google News.

Clicking the translate button reveals the English translation of the original headline using Google Translate. Clicking on the headline takes you to the publisher’s website where you can choose to use Google Translate to see an English version of the entire article. Headlines are labeled with their country of origin.

To do this, we look for foreign articles from local sources on a relevant news topic. For example, in the case of the flood in Thailand, in addition to surfacing English articles from international press like New York Times, we might show a related article from a local source like อาร์วายที9.

At the same time, we hope readers will benefit from finding relevant news in other languages and being able to read it without knowing the language.

Google News launches redesign in UK and India

2011-09-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager

Starting today, we’ll be rolling out changes to some international versions of Google News in an effort to unify the News experience across editions. As in the U.S. version, these changes offer richer visual navigation, help you find trending and popular news more easily, give you the option to further customize your news experience, and allow you to share pieces you care about in a simpler way.

We’ve also been working to give you a closer relationship with the publishers you love, who can now highlight some of their most compelling content right on your Google News homepage.

In order to bring you the best Google News experience possible, we’ll be periodically refreshing select editions, starting with the U.K. and India. We hope you enjoy these enhancements. As always, please feel free to submit your feedback or visit our Help Center if you have more questions.

Recognizing publishers’ standout content in Google News

2011-09-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

Posted by David Smydra, Product Specialist and Justin Kosslyn, Product Manager

Every day, news organizations and journalists around the world dedicate significant time and resources toward some of the most critical types of coverage: exceptional original reporting, deep investigative work, scoops and exclusives, and various special projects that quite clearly stand out. Today, during a Google News workshop at the Online News Association conference in Boston, we introduced a new content tag for the US edition that will help us better feature this “standout” content and give even more credit where credit is due.

If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results. The syntax for this new tag is as follows:

You can use the tag to point to your own content or to point to other sources with standout stories. Because the Standout tag belongs in the HTML header of your articles, it will only be seen by automated systems like Google News, not by direct readers of your articles themselves.

Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognized as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work.

At this point, we ask news organizations to use the Standout tag to cite their own content at most seven times in each calendar week. If a site exceeds that limit, it may find that its tags are less recognized, or ignored altogether. A news organization may cite standout stories from other news sources any number of times each week.

To be clear, Standout tags are just one signal among the many signals that algorithmically determine prominence on Google News. We recognize the importance of giving credit where credit is due, and believe this tag can be a step in the right direction -- but it will only succeed if the publisher community helps it succeed. We have experimented in the past with other metatags, and have applied feedback from those efforts to this initiative. As we monitor how the Standout tag is applied, we'll look forward to sharing further observations or updates.

To learn more about how the Standout tag works and how you can implement it on your site, visit our Help Center article.

Google News now crawling with Googlebot

2011-08-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by David Smydra, Google News Product Specialist

(Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)

Google News recently updated our infrastructure to crawl with Google’s primary user-agent, Googlebot. What does this mean? Very little to most publishers. Any news organizations that wish to opt out of Google News can continue to do so: Google News will still respect the robots.txt entry for Googlebot-News, our former user-agent, if it is more restrictive than the robots.txt entry for Googlebot.

Our Help Center provides detailed guidance on using the robots exclusion protocol for Google News, and publishers can contact the Google News Support Team if they have any questions, but we wanted to first clarify the following:

Although you’ll now only see the Googlebot user-agent in your site’s logs, no need to worry: the appearance of Googlebot instead of Googlebot-News is independent of our inclusion policies. (You can always check whether your site is included in Google News by searching with the “site:” operator. For instance, enter “site:yournewssite.com” in the search field for Google News, and if you see results then we are currently indexing your news site.)
Your analytics tool will still be able to differentiate user traffic coming to your website from Google Search and traffic coming from Google News, so you should see no changes there. The main difference is that you will no longer see occasional automated visits to your site from the Googlebot-news crawler.
If you’re currently respecting webmaster guidelines for Googlebot, you will not need to make any code changes to your site. Sites that have implemented subscriptions using a metered model or who have implemented First Click Free will not experience any changes. For sites which require registration, payment or login prior to reading any full article, Google News will only be able to crawl and index the title and snippet that you show all users who visit your page. Our Webmaster Guidelines provide additional information about “cloaking” (i.e., showing a bot a different version than what users experience). Learn more about Google News and subscription publishers in this Help Center article.
Rest assured, your Sitemap will still be crawled. This change does not affect how we crawl News Sitemaps. If you are a News publisher who hasn’t yet set up a News Sitemap and are interested in getting started, please follow this link.
For any publishers that wish to opt out of Google News and stay in Google Search, you can simply disallow Googlebot-news and allow Googlebot. For more information on how to do this, consult our Help Center.

As with any website, from time to time we need to make updates to our infrastructure. At the same time, we want to continue to provide as much control as possible to news web sites. We hope we have answered any questions you might have about this update. If you have additional questions, please check out our Help Center.

Enhancements to Google News for Android tablets and iPads

2011-08-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Arun Prasath, Tech Lead, Mobile Google News

Alongside working on improving the Google News design for smartphones, we have also been looking into enhancing our offering for tablet devices. Today, we are launching a few minor enhancements to Google News for Android tablets and iPads.

We have optimized columns in the home page and section pages so that they can be more easily viewed in portrait and landscape orientations. Some of the other updates include: a conveniently placed menu on the top for navigating across sections, support of finger swiping through the multimedia strip in expanded story boxes and a more friendly edition picker.

These improvements are now available in the U.S. edition. To view these changes, just type news.google.com on the browser of your favorite tablet.

Google News highlights unique content with Editors’ Picks

2011-08-04T13:11:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

News organizations tell stories online in ways that bring together the best of traditional and digital journalism, whether that involves long-form investigative features, compelling photo slideshows or interactive maps and charts that add new levels of engagement to the day's news. To help connect you to the best works of news publishers, Google News is introducing a new section in the right-hand column of the U.S. edition. The section is called "Editors' Picks,” and it displays original content that publishers have selected as highlights from their publications. This is the latest addition to recent improvements we’ve made to the variety and presence of stories and multimedia on Google News.

An array of news organizations, including local, national and niche publishers, are now using Editors’ Picks to display their best, most engaging content. Because Google News relies on algorithms, Editors' Picks will always be just that—picks provided by publishers themselves, and not by Google. You can browse a set of publisher feeds that span national, specific and local interests—like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, the Guardian and The Root, among many others—via the side-to-side arrows next to each publisher's logo. The feeds you see are chosen based on a variety of factors, including your news preferences. If you’re interested in using source preferences on Google News, Editors' Picks helps you do that with the slider that appears just below the articles.

You may have first noticed Editors’ Picks as an experiment last year. Based on the data from that experiment, we have been working with nearly two dozen publishers in recent months and have seen a positive response from readers and publishers alike: readers get the news they're interested in from the sources they trust, and publishers receive higher traffic to their websites. We encourage any news organizations that are interested to visit our Help Center to get started.

Posted by Yogita Mehta, Software Engineer, Google News Team

A Few Google News Design Changes

2011-07-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jasson Schrock, User Experience Designer

Beginning today in the U.S. English edition of News, you may notice a few changes in the look and feel. This is part of a Google-wide initiative to improve your experience, and today we’re happy to extend this to Google News.

For starters, we’ve cleaned up the Google News homepage a bit. With fewer visual distractions and less clutter on the page, it should be faster to find the news important to you. The editions menu and “Personalize” button at the top should be easier to see. The “Personalize” button links to your recently consolidated personalization settings including your preferences for topics and favorite sources. Throughout the site, all the features and functionality are still there, but this updated design is aligned with the new consistent look across other recently updated Google sites like Gmail, Maps and Search.

Before

After

In the coming months, you’ll continue to see more improvements to the layout and design of the site, and we’ll also expand internationally.

Shareable Google News badges for your favorite topics

2011-07-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Natasha Mohanty, Engineer, Google News

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

On Google News, the average reader of political news has read 20 articles about politics in the last six months. Where do you stand?

Starting today, in the U.S. edition of Google News, you can see how voracious a news reader you are by earning Google News badges as you read articles about your favorite topics. The more you read, the higher level badge you’ll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate.

We have more than 500 badges available, so no matter what kind of news you’re into, there’s a badge out there for you. Here’s a taste:

Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are. You can also add custom sections by hovering on a badge and clicking “add section” to read more about your favorite topics. To get started with badges, visit Google News from a signed-in account with web history enabled and then visit this page on our Help Center for instructions.

This is just the first step—the bronze release, if you will—of Google News badges. Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level.

In the spirit of continually trying to improve Google News, we have heard loud and clear from the many of you who asked us to separate our Sci/Tech section into two distinct sections. We are happy to report that we have now done this for all English editions, with more languages coming soon. We also combined some personalization settings from the “News for you” and News Settings menu into one handy sidebar at the top right corner of the home page, so you can easily tell us what you want to read on your Google News.

We hope you’ll badge up on Google News to keep track of what you’re reading, read more of what you love and share your passions with your friends.

Applauding the 2011 Knight News Challenge winners

2011-06-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and the Google Public Policy Blog)

Over the past few months, we’ve announced $5 million in grants to be distributed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the International Press Institute—two non-profit organizations developing new approaches to journalism in the digital age—and we’re pleased to congratulate the first initiatives that have been selected as part of that funding.

Today at M.I.T., the Knight Foundation showcased 16 projects selected as the winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge. Now in its fifth year, this media-innovation contest included $1 million in support from Google. As you’ll see in the full list of winners, these initiatives come from organizations large and small and are reminders that entrepreneurship can be sparked anywhere. Here are just a few examples of the creative ways the journalism community around the world is merging traditional skills with an online landscape:

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, OpenBlock Rural will use its seed money to work with local governments and community newspapers across the state to collect, aggregate and publish data.

In Virginia, the Miller Center Foundation’s State Decoded will serve as a platform to display state codes, court decisions and information from legislative tracking services to make government more understandable to the average citizen.

The Chicago Tribune will collaborate with the Investigative Editors & Reporters organization and The Spokesman-Review on a set of open-source, web-based tools that make it easier for journalists to use and analyze data.

Liverpool, U.K.-based ScraperWiki will bring its experiences with public data to journalism camps in 12 U.S. states.

Chile’s El Mostrador will develop an editorial and crowdsourced database to bring greater transparency to potential conflicts of interest.

Ushahidi will build off its past crisis efforts to improve information-verification across email, Twitter, web feeds and text messages.

Other winning proposals tell rich multimedia stories, bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media and further improve the utility of data to journalists. Our sister program in partnership with the International Press Institute is also well underway. The entries in that competition are now in and the winners will be announced later this summer. We look forward to seeing the impacts these initiatives have on digital journalism and hope they encourage continued experimentation and innovation at the grassroots level.

Posted by Jim Gerber, Director, Strategic Partnerships, News

Rededicating the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial

2011-05-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Sean Carlson, Global Communications & Public Affairs

Outside 555 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the front pages of newspapers from all 50 U.S. states mark the entrance to the Newseum. Inside the lobby, a gallery of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs confronts visitors with moments of triumph and tragedy captured on camera. The museum’s corridors display exhibit after exhibit highlighting the role of journalism and journalists throughout history.

One of the Newseum’s most moving tributes is its Journalists Memorial, a wall of glass paneling imprinted with the names of more than 2,000 people around the world who have died while reporting the news. Nearby kiosks narrate their stories, an online database enables anybody with Internet access to learn more, and our new YouTube channel further remembers these fallen journalists through video.

Earlier this week, Krishna Bharat, founder and head of Google News, spoke at the memorial’s annual rededication ceremony. As you can watch in the video below, he began by reflecting on what motivated those being honored “to walk a path that was not paved with gold, but with danger.”

Over the course of his address, Krishna discussed the importance of a free press to society and of high-quality content to the web, observed the rising number of online journalists and bloggers coming under attack, and recounted incidents reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists. On a personal level, he also shared his memories as a boy in India and the influence of his grandfather in inspiring his appreciation for news.

“The journalists we remember and honor today chose lives that were full of meaning and purpose,” he concluded. “Let their stories not be forgotten. Let us repeat them. Let us re-tweet them. And let us print them on our pages so the world knows that silencing a journalist simply does not pay.”

To their families, friends, and colleagues, we extend our sympathy and respect.

Expanding Google News for more variety and multimedia

2011-05-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Chase Hensel, Associate Product Manager, Google News

Every day, Google News crawls through thousands of news articles to present you with the most relevant and recent stories. For a long time, we’ve realized that bringing relevant news to the surface is only part of the puzzle—it should also be easy to scan for stories of interest and dig deeper when you find them.

The newly expandable stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter.

Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don’t use and have a more streamlined experience:

Click-to-expand: Each story cluster is collapsed down to one headline with the exception of the top story. When something grabs you, click nearby anywhere but the title to expand the story box.
Labeled diversity: For stories you’ve expanded, you’ll see genre labels for some of the additional articles that explain why they were chosen and how they add value. For example, you might see something labeled as an “Opinion” piece or an indication that an article is “In Depth.”
Multimedia and more: Within each expanded story box, you’ll find a sliding bar of videos and photos, links to related sections and easier-to-use sharing options, so you can quickly digest the sights and sounds of a news story, dig into different types of publications and share what you find interesting with one click.
Personalized top stories: The Top Stories section is expanded to six or more stories from three to give you more topic diversity. The first three stories remain unpersonalized and the same as before. The rest may be personalized based on your interests. To personalize your Google News experience you can click on “Edit” under “News for you.” You can choose the “Standard Edition” if you don’t want personalization.
Less is more: The default view is now the popular “One Column” (formerly “Section”) view. We merged List View into Top Stories, as described above. You can still switch to “Two Column” view, which resembles classic Google News.

We hope you like these changes—please share your feedback and visit our Help Center to learn more.

Introducing “News near you” on Google News for mobile

2011-05-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Posted by Navneet Singh, Product Manager - Google News

Google News for mobile lets you keep up with the latest news, wherever you are. Today we’re excited to announce a new feature in the U.S. English edition called “News near you” that surfaces news relevant to the city you’re in and surrounding areas.

Location-based news first became available in Google News in 2008, and today there’s a local section for just about any city, state or country in the world with coverage from thousands of sources. We do local news a bit differently, analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

Now you can find local news on your smartphone. Here’s an example of a “News near you” mobile section automatically created for someone in Topeka, Kansas:

To use this feature, visit Google News from the browser of your Android smartphone or iPhone. If this is the first time you are visiting Google News on your phone since this feature became available, a pop-up will ask you if you want to share your location. If you say yes, news relevant to your location will appear in a new section called “News near you” which will be added at the bottom of the homepage. You can reorganize the sections later via the personalization page.

You can turn off the feature at any time either by hiding the section in your personalization settings or by adjusting your mobile browser settings. Please visit the Help Center for further details.

So, go to news.google.com from your smartphone and get the latest news from wherever you are.