The Future of News

There is a false, implicit assumption being made by those who fear that Google News will soon dominate all of news, and who see its contract to feature only original AP stories as a milestone along that path. That assumption is that news consumers actually LIKE these AP stories — that they prefer them because they are objective and accurate. That seems like quite a leap of faith given the recent Pew Research Center survey showing that 64% of Internet users think this news is politically biased and 59% think it is inaccurate.

But perhaps a bigger obstacle to Google News is that people simply don’t live their lives consulting search engines every time they need to make a decision — including which news to choose. Over time, news consumers will select among multitudes of web-based news outlets, and give preference to those which reflect their worldviews. They will be attracted to one news outlet over another by the irreplaceable editorial judgments of flesh-and-blood human editors, not by the algorithms of machines.

For now, by eliminating many AP members’ duplicate stories, Google News will accelerate the winnowing-out process, so that only the best of the “objective and accurate” news outlets survive. But if Google were serious about becoming a serious player in news, they’d have to replace some of their search engines with search humans. There is not a hint that this is what they plan to do.