GeorgeHopkin.com

Straight from the horse’s mouth, some of the myths and mysteries regarding which stories are indexed by Google News and why. Or not:

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn’t include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we’ve noticed that there’s a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We’d like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

The quick-read version:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH

Articles that are just images or video won’t be included TRUE

There’s no way to see why my articles weren’t included in Google News MYTH

Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH

Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE

If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH

More: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/psstsecrets-of-google-news-exposed.html

Via Editor & Publisher, an exclusive break-down of the top 30 US newspaper sites for January.

Top 10 below and the full list on the E&P site. Not surprising to see nytimes.com leading the pack with its outstanding year-on-year growth.

Brand or Channel — Unique Audience (000) — Year-over-year % Change

NYTimes.com — 20,461 — 45.1%
USATODAY.com — 12,314 — 19.4%
washingtonpost.com — 9,902 — 14.6%
Wall Street Journal Online — 6,962 — 81.4%
LA Times — 5,715 — 4.7%
Boston.com — 5,194 — 23.7%
SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle — 4,255 — (-3.9%)
New York Post — 4,027 — (-3.5%)
Newsday — 3,764 — 59.2%
Chicago Tribune — 3,185 — (-15.7%)

More: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/online/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003711746

Via Press Gazette comes news that Britons spend £76 million on newspapers and mags every week:

British households spend a total of £76m on newspapers and magazines every week – the equivalent of £1.37 per person in the country per week.

People over 65 and those in Northern Ireland spend the most on them according to the latest Family Spending Survey, which shows that in 2006 the average British household spent £2 a week on newspapers and £1 on magazines, 0.65 per cent of households’ weekly spending.

The £3 average is up slightly from 2001/2 when families spent an average of £2.90 down from 2003/4 and 2004/5 when the figure was £3.10.

More: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=40100&c=1

(Not sure what ‘dead trees’ have to do with this? Wikipedia has a few lines on this here.)

Via Jemima Kiss at the Guardian, Rupert Murdoch has backtracked on plans to open up the Wall Street Journal’s paid-for content. In fact, subscribers can expect to pay more for it:

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday, Murdoch said his plans for the newly-acquired publication still involved expanding the audience for general news.

But the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which concluded its takeover of Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones last month, indicated that WSJ.com users would probably have to pay more for content that remained behind the subscription wall.

“We’re sort of dividing it up. Those things you can get more or less as a commodity on different sites about finance, that will certainly be free at the Wall Street Journal,” he added.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/25/digitalmedia.rupertmurdoch?gusrc=rss&feed=media

Via John Ellis at RealClearMarkets, is Google about to buy The New York Times?

What’s in it for Google? Well, for one thing, it’s cheap. Sell off the New England properties and the real cost is $3 billion. That’s not much money to buy one of the premier brands of the information age. It also comes with some excellent real estate, which further reduces the risk. And happily enough, it will probably get cheaper in the coming months. So the price is definitely right.

Second, Google is embarking on an ambitious mobile platform. It is buying wireless spectrum and will soon introduce Google Mobile. In so doing, it is entering into an arena where the established players have hired (almost) every lobbyist and (almost) every law firm with expertise in telecommunications in Washington, DC and in virtually every state capital. Owning the New York Times would level that playing field in one fell swoop.

This would also fit in with John Battelle’s idea that Google is making a play for the second click.

And while it’s not in the same league as Google, let’s not forget that the NYT Company acquired About.com in March 2005, which (according to their own info) is ‘a top 10 content site‘.

And speaking of content, Google would also be buying the highly respected New York Times Syndicate and News Service, giving it tremendous reach outside of the US.

More: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/01/might_google_buy_the_new_york.html

Via Publishing2.0, Scott Karp writes on the fundamental difference between print and web journalism:

I realized that the problem isn’t just a lack of understanding about blogging, or social networking…The problem is, framed more broadly, an inability to understand what I like to call “web-native publishing” — but let’s just call it web publishing, because complexity is the root cause problem here.

The fundamental [difference] between print publishing and web publishing is that print distribution is a linear process, while web-native publishing is dynamic and non-linear, particularly when publishing on a web-native CMS like a blog.

…it’s not about understanding one format, it’s about understanding the WEB. It’s about understanding that putting content on the web isn’t just putting content on a page, same as a printed page — it’s putting content on the NETWORK. It’s understanding that, unlike print publishing where subscriptions control distribution, on the web PEOPLE and LINKS control distribution.

Lots more: http://publishing2.com/2008/01/21/the-only-way-for-journalists-to-understand-the-web-is-to-use-it/

comScore reports that the UK’s national newspapers are attracting an increasing number of international readers, with visits to DailyMail.co.uk from users overseas up 153 per cent from a year ago and nearly 60 per cent of visits to BBC sites originating from outside the UK.

The Daily Mail had the highest proportion of international visitors, with 69 percent of its 7.6 million visitors originating from outside the U.K.  The BBC attracted 59 percent of its audience internationally, while the Telegraph (57 percent) and the Guardian Media Group (56 percent) also drew more than half their respective audiences from outside the U.K. Only two of the ten sites studied, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) and ITV Sites, had less than a quarter of their traffic originate internationally.

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2011

Via Journalism.co.uk, AFP reporters can no longer use ‘virtual’ sources:

Agence France Presse (AFP) has banned its journalists from using Facebook and Wikipedia as sources, the agency’s London bureau chief told a Lord’s Committee yesterday. In response to a question from the Lord’s Committee on Media Ownership and the News about the trustworthiness of online sources, Pierre Lesourd said that internal rules that governed the entire organisation prevented journalists from relying on many new ‘virtual’ sources for news.

“We have internal rules that are regularly updated [on this matter]. Wikipedia for example, we have a written rule inside the company that forbids any journalist using Wikipedia,” he said.

More: http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/530941.php

Via Folio magazine, US mags are buying into web and digital projects in a big way:

Magazines announcing digital initiatives—video, content sharing partnerships, integrated marketing, social networking and anything other buzzy product related to Web 2.0—increased by more than 33 percent in 2007, according to year-end data by the Magazine Publishers of America scheduled to be released later this morning.

More: http://www.foliomag.com/2008/magazine-digital-initiatives-33-percent-2007

Via the Gurdian’s tech section, it looks like rumours of the internet’s death at the hands of video overload may be a little premature:

BT is boosting Britain’s attempt to remain at the top of the global broadband market with plans to install a network at Ebbsfleet in Kent that offers speeds 20 times faster than the average UK household connection. The company hopes its deployment of the UK’s fastest ever residential network, at the development of 10,000 new homes, will be a crucial testbed as the government, regulator Ofcom and industry come to decide how to upgrade the country’s broadband network.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/10/btgroupbusiness.internet?gusrc=rss&feed=media

Via Venturebeat.com, social networking is still VERY big business:

Gaia Online, the virtual world for teens, siad media conglomerate Time Warner has invested an undisclosed amount in the company. San Jose, Calif.’s Gaia says it has nearly three million monthly users. It also has a growing population of users on Bebo, who sign into the Gaia OMG application and play a miniature version of the virtual world (see [Venturebeat’s] article from earlier today).

More: http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/08/time-warner-invests-in-teen-virtual-world-gaia-online/

And via Niall Kennedy’s blog, you wouldn’t want to pay Google’s electricty bill:

Google currently processes over 20 petabytes of data per day through an average of 100,000 MapReducejobs spread across its massive computing clusters. The average MapReduce job ran across approximately 400 machines in September 2007, crunching approximately 11,000 machine years in a single month. These are just some of the facts about the search giant’s computational processing infrastructure revealed in an ACM paper by Google Fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.

More: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/01/google-mapreduce-stats.html