When I go to Google News and see a headline like
NEW YORK TAKES EBBERS, OTHERS TO COURT
followed by ''and 175 related,'' a laugh arising from the lungs trips over a catch of breath, and expires in a drop of jaw.
Google is exploring algorithmic wizardry that makes something of a hash out of branded content, puffery of organizational self-importance, advertising and subscription revenue schemes, and fripperies of web real estate. Welcome to the commodification of the news industry. Not that news corporations weren't already using a commodity model. Just that they keep trying to maintain two somewhat incompatible pretenses simultaneously: that the news of each news organization is "objective" at the same time it is "unique," proprietary and brandable.
Often, I just want the basic story. If I have to circumnavigate sign-up pages, pop-up ads, overwritten ledes, bad search engines, archive fees etc. to get it, well, now there are 45 or 1,075 alternative feeds for that particular story, some of which might prove more compatible.
The algorithm sorts the stories by relevance or by date. This is straightforward and more or less fits the definition of "news." The other day, while the New York Times was still trumpeting some farrago about President George W. Bush's resolution on Iraq, Google News already had stories about Iraq's rejection of the resolution at the top of its page. The Times waited until after it had written its own in-house story before leading with it on the following day.
The algorithm is indifferent to proprietary niceties, just as are many who wish to learn the news. The extent to which news media are bound up with concerns about beating the competition, or following with a strong second day package, or keeping you glued to their site by eliminating links to valuable background material found on other sites, is irrelevant to the algorithm. Ironically, this indifference is the essence of transactional insight.
Google News has the makings of a fully configurable source. I envision it with a few tweaks being capable of delivering, say, the headlines from whatever countries or communities one wishes. Ethnic news media might finally have a chance to be heard.
