Tag Archives: Google News

Putting a spotlight on local news sources

TL;DR Google News has launched a “Local Source” Tag to surface local coverage of major stories.

Local news publishers play a critical role in covering the stories that impact us every day in our cities, schools and neighborhoods. Local reporters are often members of the communities they serve, bringing additional context and perspective to a story. Local news is also important to our users: according to the March 2015 Pew Research study Local News in a Digital Age, which looked at three metro areas across the U.S., “nearly nine-in-ten residents follow local news closely—and about half do so very closely”.

With more than 75,000 news sources, many of the publishers in Google News specialize on specific topics and locales. The local section in Google News surfaces content from regional papers to hyper-local blogs that otherwise wouldn’t appear in national news.

But not all local stories stay local. When a local story is picked up by national publishers, it can be difficult for local sources to be heard even after they’ve done the legwork and research to break a story. Consistent with our goal to surface diverse perspectives, we’re excited to share that a new "Local Source" tag is now live across all Google News editions. This new feature brings greater exposure for local news outlets reporting on stories that have gone national. "Local Source" articles are identified automatically by looking at where a publisher has written about in the past and comparing that to the story location. You’ll see the tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather iOS and Android apps.
localnews_2.png

A great example of hyperlocal news is 9-year-old reporter Hilde Lysiak. Hilde made headlines when she reported on the story of a murder in her hometown which she published on her own local news site — Orange Street News (AMP-enabled to load really fast on mobile). Her reporting attracted the attention of major newspapers and morning shows like Good Morning America after she was criticized for being too young to cover hard news. It was one reason we invited Hilde to visit the Googleplex on World Press Freedom Day 2016. And just like Hilde, at Google News we are committed to connecting people to the news that matters most to them — be that local, national or international.

localnews_1.JPG
9-year-old Hilde Lysiak visited Google on World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2016.

Putting a Spotlight on Local News Sources

Posted by James Morehead, Product Manager, Google News

TL;DR Google News has launched a “Local Source” Tag to surface local coverage of major stories.
Local news publishers play a critical role in covering the stories that impact us every day in our cities, schools and neighborhoods. Local reporters are often members of the communities they serve, bringing additional context and perspective to a story. Local news is also important to our users: according to the March 2015 Pew Research study Local News in a Digital Age, which looked at three metro areas across the U.S., “nearly nine-in-ten residents follow local news closely—and about half do so very closely”.

With more than 75,000 news sources, many of the publishers in Google News specialize on specific topics and locales. The local section in Google News surfaces content from regional papers to hyper-local blogs that otherwise wouldn’t appear in national news.

But not all local stories stay local. When a local story is picked up by national publishers, it can be difficult for local sources to be heard even after they’ve done the legwork and research to break a story. Consistent with our goal to surface diverse perspectives, we’re excited to share that a new "Local Source" tag is now live across all Google News editions. This new feature brings greater exposure for local news outlets reporting on stories that have gone national. "Local Source" articles are identified automatically by looking at where a publisher has written about in the past and comparing that to the story location. You’ll see the tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather iOS and Android apps.

A great example of hyperlocal news is 9-year-old reporter Hilde Lysiak. Hilde made headlines when she reported on the story of a murder in her hometown which she published on her own local news site -- Orange Street News (AMP-enabled to load really fast on mobile). Her reporting attracted the attention of major newspapers and morning shows like Good Morning America after she was criticised for being too young to cover hard news. It was one reason we invited Hilde to visit the Googleplex on World Press Freedom Day 2016. And just like Hilde, at Google News we are committed to connecting people to the news that matters most to them -- be that local, national or international.
9-year-old Hilde Lysiak visited Google on World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2016.

AMPlifying the News

At its heart, Google News is about keeping people up-to-date with what is going on in the world and providing news from diverse perspectives. But this goal is meaningless unless we get the reading experience right. For too many people, reading the news on their mobile devices can be slow and clunky, forcing them to abandon a site. That’s why we joined others across the industry on the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP for short) — an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.  

In the few months since AMP launched, thousands of publishers have embraced this new format and are regularly publishing AMP-versions of their content. In February Google started making it easy to find those AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience. Today we will be doing the same thing in Google News on all our mobile platforms — web, Android and iOS. 

 
So — what’s new? At the top of the page, there is a new AMP carousel filled with important headlines and stories of the day. Users can browse up to 14 headlines there quickly, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which is optimized for fast-loading AMP articles. In the viewer, people can also swipe to continue reading other stories from the carousel. Within the regular News stream, AMPlified articles are labelled with the AMP lightning bolt icon. That way, users can know these will be fast even before they click.

Amplifying News.jpg

Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly. That adds up to a win for publishers and users. While we can’t expand the amount of time in the day, with AMP we can help users consume more content in the time they do have. It is also great for publishers because people will read more and click on more stories when they know they will load fast, driving more traffic to a publisher’s site.

We’re starting AMPlification with our English U.S. Edition — more languages and editions will be rolling out soon.


Update: AMP for Google News has launched in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada (French and English), Colombia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland (French and German), Turkey, and the UK.

AMPlifying the News

At its heart, Google News is about keeping people up-to-date with what is going on in the world and providing news from diverse perspectives. But this goal is meaningless unless we get the reading experience right. For too many people, reading the news on their mobile devices can be slow and clunky, forcing them to abandon a site. That’s why we joined others across the industry on the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project(AMP for short) — an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.  

In the few months since AMP launched, thousands of publishers have embraced this new format and are regularly publishing AMP-versions of their content. In February Google started making it easy to find those AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience. Today we will be doing the same thing in Google News on all our mobile platforms — web, Android and iOS. 

 
So — what’s new? At the top of the page, there is a new AMP carousel filled with important headlines and stories of the day. Users can browse up to 14 headlines there quickly, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which is optimized for fast-loading AMP articles. In the viewer, people can also swipe to continue reading other stories from the carousel. Within the regular News stream, AMPlified articles are labelled with the AMP lightning bolt icon. That way, users can know these will be fast even before they click.

Amplifying News.jpg

Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly. That adds up to a win for publishers and users. While we can’t expand the amount of time in the day, with AMP we can help users consume more content in the time they do have. It is also great for publishers because people will read more and click on more stories when they know they will load fast, driving more traffic to a publisher’s site.

We’re starting AMPlification with our English U.S. Edition — more languages and editions will be rolling out soon.


Update: AMP for Google News has launched in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada (French and English), Colombia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland (French and German), Turkey, and the UK.

AMPlifying the News

At its heart, Google News is about keeping people up-to-date with what is going on in the world and providing news from diverse perspectives. But this goal is meaningless unless we get the reading experience right. For too many people, reading the news on their mobile devices can be slow and clunky, forcing them to abandon a site. That’s why we joined others across the industry on the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP for short) — an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.  

In the few months since AMP launched, thousands of publishers have embraced this new format and are regularly publishing AMP-versions of their content. In February Google started making it easy to find those AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience. Today we will be doing the same thing in Google News on all our mobile platforms — web, Android and iOS. 

 
So — what’s new? At the top of the page, there is a new AMP carousel filled with important headlines and stories of the day. Users can browse up to 14 headlines there quickly, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which is optimized for fast-loading AMP articles. In the viewer, people can also swipe to continue reading other stories from the carousel. Within the regular News stream, AMPlified articles are labelled with the AMP lightning bolt icon. That way, users can know these will be fast even before they click.

Amplifying News.jpg

Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly. That adds up to a win for publishers and users. While we can’t expand the amount of time in the day, with AMP we can help users consume more content in the time they do have. It is also great for publishers because people will read more and click on more stories when they know they will load fast, driving more traffic to a publisher’s site.

We’re starting AMPlification with our English U.S. Edition — more languages and editions will be rolling out soon.


Update: AMP for Google News has launched in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada (French and English), Colombia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland (French and German), Turkey, and the UK.

AMPlifying the News

Posted by Maricia Scott, Engineering Director, Google News

At its heart, Google News is about keeping people up-to-date with what is going on in the world and providing news from diverse perspectives. But this goal is meaningless unless we get the reading experience right. For too many people, reading the news on their mobile devices can be slow and clunky, forcing them to abandon a site. That’s why we joined others across the industry on the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP for short) - an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible. 

In the few months since AMP launched, thousands of publishers have embraced this new format and are regularly publishing AMP-versions of their content. In February Google started making it easy to find those AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience. Today we will be doing the same thing in Google News on all our mobile platforms -- Web, Android and iOS.

So - what’s new? At the top of the page, there is a new AMP carousel filled with important headlines and stories of the day. Users can browse up to 14 headlines there quickly, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which is optimized for fast-loading AMP articles. In the viewer, people can also swipe to continue reading other stories from the carousel. Within the regular News stream, AMPlified articles are labelled with the AMP lightning bolt icon. That way, users can know these will be fast even before they click.

Screenshot_20160414-110006.png Screenshot_20160414-110012.png

Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly. That adds up to a win for publishers and users. While we can’t expand the amount of time in the day, with AMP we can help users consume more content in the time they do have. It is also great for publishers because people will read more and click on more stories when they know they will load fast, driving more traffic to a publisher’s site.

We’re starting AMPlification with our English US Edition - more languages and editions will be rolling out soon.

Awarding the world’s best data journalism

For the fifth consecutive year, as a part of our commitment to supporting innovative journalism both in Europe and around the world, Google is proud to support the 2016 Data Journalism Awards. The deadline is fast approaching for the only global awards recognizing work that brings together data, visualization and storytelling to produce some of the most innovative journalism out in the world today. 

Past winners of the €1,000 prizes include the New York Times, ProPublica, The Guardian and Argentina’s La Nación. 2016 hopefuls don’t have long: the deadline for the 2016 Awards is April 10, 2016 at midnight GMT.

Aimed at newsrooms and journalists in organizations of all sizes — big and small — the #DJA2016 awards will recognize the best work in 12 categories, including:

  • Data visualisation of the year
  • Investigation of the year
  • News data app of the year
  • Data journalism website of the year
  • Best individual portfolio
  • Best use of data in a breaking news story
  • Open data award
  • General excellence (jurors’ choice and public choice).

The competition is organized by the Global Editors Network: a cross-platform community of editors-in-chief and media innovators committed to high-quality journalism, with the support of Google and the Knight Foundation. For Google, the Data Journalism Awards offer another way for foster innovation through partnership with the news industry, in addition to our efforts through the Digital News Initiative and the work of the Google News Lab teams around the world. 

Data journalists, editors and publishers are encouraged to submit their work for consideration by joining the GEN community via this form by 10 April at midnight GMT. A jury of peers from the publishing community, including new jury members Wolfgang Blau from Condé Nast International and Kenneth Cukier from The Economist, will choose the winners, which will be announced during a gala dinner at the Global Editors Network Summit in Vienna on June 16. 

We wish you all the best of luck!

Awarding the world’s best data journalism

For the fifth consecutive year, as a part of our commitment to supporting innovative journalismboth in Europe and around the world, Google is proud to support the 2016 Data Journalism Awards. The deadline is fast approachingfor the only global awards recognizing work that brings together data, visualization and storytelling to produce some of the most innovative journalism out in the world today. 

Past winners of the €1,000 prizes include the New York Times, ProPublica, The Guardian and Argentina’s La Nación. 2016 hopefuls don’t have long: the deadline for the 2016 Awards is April 10, 2016 at midnight GMT.

Aimed at newsrooms and journalists in organizations of all sizes — big and small — the #DJA2016 awards will recognize the best work in 12 categories, including:

  • Data visualisation of the year
  • Investigation of the year
  • News data app of the year
  • Data journalism website of the year
  • Best individual portfolio
  • Best use of data in a breaking news story
  • Open data award
  • General excellence (jurors’ choice and public choice).

The competition is organized by the Global Editors Network: a cross-platform community of editors-in-chief and media innovators committed to high-quality journalism, with the support of Google and the Knight Foundation. For Google, the Data Journalism Awards offer another way for foster innovation through partnership with the news industry, in addition to our efforts through the Digital News Initiative and the work of the Google News Lab teams around the world. 

    Data journalists, editors and publishers are encouraged to submit their work for consideration by joining the GEN community via this formby 10 April at midnight GMT. A jury of peers from the publishing community, including new jury members Wolfgang Blau from Condé Nast International and Kenneth Cukier from The Economist, will choose the winners, which will be announced during a gala dinner at the Global Editors Network Summit in Vienna on June 16. 

    We wish you all the best of luck!