Freedom from the press:

Google News lets newsmakers comment on stories

By Nate Anderson | Published: August 08, 2007 - 10:36AM CT

Beginning this week, Google News will start posting user comments, but only from people actually featured in news stories. Newspapers that were unhappy about Google News using snippets of their articles will probably be even less pleased to see the new feature deployed, since Google could become an even more formidable player when it starts hosting original content.

Here's how the new system will work: people or organizations that are mentioned in news stories can submit comments to the Google News team, which will then display those comments—unedited—alongside the Google News links to those stories.

The new system will at first be deployed only within the US, but Google is open to expanding it to other regions if the trial goes well.

This raises a number of questions that the announcement does not attempt to answer, such as how Google will vet the comments to ensure they come from the claimed source (watch this space for the first "Google News punked!" stories in the following weeks). Google is also a backer of algorithm-driven solutions as opposed to those which require human interaction and don't scale as well. Vetting comments and verifying identities doesn't sound like the sort of thing which lends itself to an algorithm, but we'll assume Google has thought this through and has some sort of plan. Let's turn instead to the most interesting implication.

Once the new system is in place, Google News will feature something it has never had before: original content. There's a certain amount of "originality" in aggregating news sources from around the world and organizing them into easy-to-click topics, of course, but the content has all been owned by others, and some of those others have been less than happy about their inclusion in Google News.

If the new comments feature takes off and Google News becomes a central clearinghouse for those who want to respond to pieces in which they appear, the site's popularity would no doubt skyrocket. News junkies would have to visit Google News—and not any particular newspaper—to find out if, say, Barry Bonds objected to a characterization of him on the USA Today sports page.

This would clearly be good for Google, but it also has implications for journalism. With the rise of the web, journalists have already lost some of their power as gatekeepers; anyone with a blog can easily tell their own side of a story if a journalist "gets it wrong." But such responses have been scattered across the Internet, and readers generally have to go looking for them. Bringing them all together in one place and sticking them right beside the stories from the professional journalists gives those in the headlines more power to tell their own side of the story.

It could also impact news brands. While major papers like The Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal will have no trouble keeping a high profile, smaller brands might. That's because people can go directly to Google News to get their headlines rather than trolling around to the front pages of a dozen daily papers. This is already happening, but the comments feature could accelerate the trend by combining Google's ease of use with exclusive content. When readers can get all the headlines plus unfiltered reactions from those in the news, why go elsewhere?

While this is all possible, we'll really need to see what uptake is like, especially among those who might submit comments. Much like celebrity TV news, Google News need to attract comments from the "big fish" to keep readers interested. If random third-tier analysts and unknown CEOs are the only ones who submit, interest will remain... reduced.