Be careful what you wish for. I think the old media is super-happy with their new-found resources but they are missing the forest from the trees. Google might have been forced to do this, but I think there will be some surprising unforeseen consequences.<p>Not only your traffic is now tied to Google, but also your revenue. You are double screwed as a single organization. As soon as many organizations are in, it'd be hard for them to speak about any Google practices (guess where the money comes from). Then, it's only downhill from there.<p>Old media had a last chance to re-invent their business model. Now they are officially dead.
Google’s PR on this whole thing is a mess. There’s no explanation of how this fits in to their previous ads and videos that threatened to pull search from Australia. And even that was badly explained. I wish they would pick a stance and clearly say what they mean.
So how do I (as an Aussie) use it, or see it?<p>I couldn't find a link in the annoucement blog post. So I Googled for "Google News showcase" but.. no link there. Maybe I had to click the "news" tab/link above the search results- but nope, this just shows me the old style results, articles one after the other.<p>Maybe it's an app? I searched the playstore, but only saw "Google news" which isn't updated since 15 Jan. I gave it a go anyway, but it didn't show the Showcase style anything like the blog post.<p>Makes me think maybe this isn't really for the users.
It seems to me that people are completely misunderstanding this. It's a product that already existed in some other countries. It has nothing to do with showing news sites in search results, or more generally with that Australian law.<p>Though I am a bit confused, because it looks like they already said two months ago that they had Australian publications signed up. What's actually new here?
I think the curation and the algorithm-driven nature of the news is responsible for the great disinformation and discord we see in society today.<p>At the end of the day most news is just information, usually it was done on print, of course different sources can paint a different picture but now we have such intense analytics it's possible to figure how much money you can make printing a rape story; you may even want people to get raped as it's a story that yields the best value! Profiting off human suffering has become commonplace, a terrorist story might yield significant amounts of clicks and ad revenue, with each organisation adding their own spin to maximize the profit (ads, data, clicks, engagement)<p>Really, it'd be nice to redefine how news works entirely, but I doubt that would happen this century sadly.<p>Real journalism is really hard to come by these days, even the most respectable soruces often fall short and I can't name a single source that I'd consider to be world class.<p>It's best to not even read the news, very little interesting information gets published there anyway.
The recent-and-related threads on this (there are a lot of them) can be accessed via <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=google%20Australia%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>
It reads to me as though Google blinked. I'm sure somewhere, Rupert Murdoch is popping champagne bottles paid for by his ever increasing media in the Australian media bubble.
This is an interesting development in that the news services they have signed seem to be those not owned by Murdoch, i.e. left-leaning Fairfax and Schwartz Media mastheads. This could be about making sure the first people to make some money out of this are the competitors of those asking for it.
This sounds like a way for google to control who gets publish news articles across their services where google will select the sources they like.<p>So basically if google doesn't like your organization, you don't get a place on this platform. Of course, it is their platform so this is within their rights, but I don't feel comfortable with google getting to promote some news sources over others based on arbitrary criteria. This is problematic when considering the size of audience google can reach.
Meaning no shade, since this has probably been launched on a moment’s notice, but the current list of publications isn’t that impressive - none of the big names are there, half are subscriber paywalled, and the Conversation is a Creative Commons enterprise; I don’t think their funding model relies on this kind of traffic.<p>Listed are: The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily and The Conversation.