Comments on: Google News dumps partner after prank item appears

Company cuts ties with press release aggregator after partnership leads Google News to link to fake blurb.

[Neotrope]

Credibility Will Become More and More Critical

As the owner of what is considered one of the more credible online newswire services (Send2Press(R)), we often point out to clients the poor value in posting content to what we refer to as "news spam" sites which allow anybody to post anything and claim they are "newswires." I've seen over 200 such sites popup in the past year, either in India, or here in the US by "online marketers" who are pushing the idea of press releases for search engine stuffing and polluting searches in news.google. It is our hope that the Google team will begin to apply their credibility patent to their news system, and begin to filter out many of these sites which are parasites and copy news from legitimate news entiries in a "look me too" mentality for getting page views. Anybody thinking of placing their "legitimate" news on these so-called "free news sites" should be very careful in whose company their content is being placed, as no legitimate media/editor will view content on such sites. If Google begins to enact some kind of stricter requirements for "news spam" blocking, we would be very supportive of this.

[J.G.]

Send2Press not news, either

It is just another press release site. Though press releases may
contain facts, they are always mainly opinion. People looking to
read actual news should rely on mainstrean media mostly.
Attempting to confuse people about the nature of press releases is
unethical.

As opposed to Dan Rather?

Nuff said.

[J.G.]

Nothing said

Dan Rather is a fine newsman. The fact that he may have made an
occassional error during his career does not detract from his
stature, except to nitwits.

[richwig]

Google News continues to post open press releases

I'm the one who discovered how easy it is to spam Google News, leading to this story. See http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-to-spam-google-news.html .

Google dealt with this obvious flaw by removing I-Newswire, but has failed to make a coherent statement as to how they choose news sources. In effect, Google's position is that they remove embarrassing sources from Google News when they receive enough complaints, or enough media scrutiny.

Yesterday I posted a press release via openpr.com. It was a few paragraphs of plausible content and then a bunch of text in Latin, clearly nonsense. Within hours Google News picked it up. Right now you can search for "municipal broadband" or "Richard Branson" and find my "press release" high on the hit list. You can also search for "Lorem ipsum dolor" to find my faux release.

You can still make up a faux press release, submit it, and appear on Google News -- trivially. The Google News team has not dealt with this issue seriously.

This remains a news story, until Google pays attention and takes action to ensure that Google News only uses legitimate news sources.

[Dwight Stickler]

News, New Media and Citizen Journalism

Grass roots journalism has been coming of age within the blogosphere for some time. Whereas in times past, the reliability and credibility of the main stream media was rarely questioned, today we have checks and balances within the system in the form of citizen journalists.

Richard Wiggins is acting as one of these journalists. By producing false Press releases and exposing the bugs within Google's News Service, he is in effect balancing the act of news production and distribution.

Consider how many people never question what they read on the internet or who perceive the internet as a reliable information source. It should be noted that although Google News has not seriously addressed the overall issue, they did take I-newswire off their index.

The problem of credibility and transparency within the journalistic community has been existent as long as people have been reporting news.

In fact, some theories state that there is no possible way to be 100% objective about any news item or story. That there are inherent biases existent within every reporter and editor that skew a story.

Whether ABC or BBC produces a news story or I produce a news story about myself, the inherent problem of bias still exists. It is important to remember in my opinion that news needs to be considered at the end of the day; opinion.

Read and listen with some thought and don't take the source for granted. Some sources are credible and some are not. Some journalists research and verify. Some don't. That is true whether it is a Citizen journalist or a professional.