While many news organizations consider Google an enemy, the company is now offering a way to increase exposure to several mainstream news providers.
In an experimental new section on Google News called Editors Picks, Google is offering a dozen or so news organizations the opportunity to prominently display their top links on the popular news page. The partners in the program include Reuters, “The Washington Post,” Newsday, Slate, BBC News, “Computer World,” “US Magazine,” “The Atlantic” and Fast Company. These companies are not paying to participate.
The links appear on a rotating basis. So when someone visits Google News, they might see five “Editors Picks” links from Slate toward the top of the page. When they visit the page again a few minutes later, they will then see the top links of one of the other media partners.
Google News ranks the importance of news stories partly based on how many sites have run versions of those articles. In asking the human editors at news publications to pick their best stories, the Editors Picks experiment is a shift in strategy for Google. It once promoted the absence of human hands in the creation of Google News with the humorous disclaimer, “No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.”