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 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 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/

Via Mother Jones, citizen journalism gets a bad press:

…the newspaper industry’s embrace of “citizen journalism” has a downside. Reader-submitted content rarely gets vetted by editors. In the same month as Getz’s Wal-Mart post, the Democrat published a story by a retirement home’s development director about the complex’s great new golf course—without disclosing her job—and a woman wrote an article about a boy who’d organized a cancer charity event without noting that she’s his mom. This may sound like small-time stuff, but it exemplifies the self-defeating side effects of newspapers’ new strategy for survival.

More: http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2008/01/stop-the-presses.html

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

Great story by The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade about digital integration at The Telgraph, Times and Financial Times.

Includes an appropriate nod to the regionals:

“Regional newspapers, as so often, have been in the forefront of this cultural change. Their reporters and subeditors have been embracing multi-platform journalism for several years. The nationals have been slower off the mark, but - as you can see from the following examples - they are forging ahead now.”

And one for those who are still reluctant to embrace the web:

“…it is also clear that integration has stimulated journalists to become inventive. Once it was the journalist geeks among us who had to goad reluctant colleagues to change their attitudes, to learn the new way of doing things. Now journalists are realising that integration is not only proving much less painless than expected, it is releasing them from the straitjacket of the single 24-hour deadline.”

Full story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/07/pressandpublishing.digitalmedia