I love Google News. Let me start with that. Love it. I love that it sends traffic to my site, and I love that it makes it easy to find news stories. But it frustrates me. The new AP deal makes it even more frustrating.
We have a trio of peacocks living at my apartment complex. So I wrote a feature and took some pictures. It did great traffic online yesterday. We try to do these online-only enterprised stories several times each week. The peacock story was picked up by the wire. That doesn’t bug me. The story appeared on the other news sites in the market. That doesn’t bug me. But when I did my morning search for Boise – the much shorter, Google AP version of our peacock story comes up first. THAT bugs me. I get that the Google algorithm puts more weight on “The Associated Press” than it does on KTVB. But the fact that it puts SO much weight on AP over a story that has about three times the depth… and includes photos bugs me. TV sites like ours benefit greatly from the AP – but NONE of that benefit comes from Google. They can’t “associate” because they don’t create content. So like I said: AP great, Google great. The combination? Frustrating.