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Google News is a depressing read for a journalist. It shows you how many news outlets depend on copy-and-paste reporting, regurgitating the same press releases and quotes in an infinite loop. Who needs all these clones of the same story, with the same basic facts and sources?

This occurred to me a few weeks ago when I was sent to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to cover it for an IT magazine in Finland. The story assignment was the typical “go around, see what the trends are, find a couple of non-mainstream gadgets.”

Events like CES used to be fun for gadget-loving journalists. You walked around, talked to people and filed a story once a night or at the end of the show. But in 2013, everything is different.

It is almost impossible to break any news at the event, because there are tens or hundreds of journalists covering the same press events, tweeting or live-blogging them with video. Speed is everything. How could I write anything significant for a monthly IT magazine that comes out two weeks after the show?

For PR departments in technology companies, this is a dream come true. Your press releases are not buried somewhere in the “news” section of your company web site, which has probably three unique visitors a week. Instead, your products get instant publicity in Gizmodo, Engadget, The Verge or CNET. Tech enthusiasts share those stories in social media. Eventually they are translated and copied to smaller tech websites around the world.

During the CES, I followed the most hyped topics on news.google.com. It was somewhat heartbreaking to see how many almost identical copies all the journalists covering CES produced. A search for “LG OLED CES” produced 1,307 sources. “Self-driving car CES” — 1,247 sources. “Lego EV3 CES” — 234 sources. This is just the English-language media.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having 1,307 LG OLED stories to choose from. However, when they all look the same, we have a problem — hundreds of copies of the same press release, slightly tweaked. And the more you have copies, the less value a single copy has. In the old days, when all the publications had their own, small print market, readers did not realize they were reading copies. Neither did advertisers.

But the Internet made all this transparent, and this is the main reason why traditional publishers are losing audiences, especially paying ones. Readers will not pay for stories they have already read elsewhere. It does not matter if your brand is 100 years old or you used to be the IT or business publication for the decision makers. A copy is a copy, even behind a paywall.

What is even worse, advertisers realize this as well. They are not willing to pay a premium for a product that is a duplicate, no matter if it is a digital or a print copy.

From a journalistic perspective, this is both good news and bad. The bad news is that fewer stories are needed overall as more and more people cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. This means fewer jobs in traditional media. So if you notice yourself writing the same stories as everyone else, or even worse, using copy-paste more than before, run. Your job will become extinct.

However, there is some good news, too. The abundance of copies forces journalists to find their own voice, niche and style. This is why opinion pieces and columns are doing pretty well on the “most-read” story lists. A personality, at least for now, cannot be broken down to zeroes and ones and copied to hundreds of other sites. It is no coincidence that in the exclusive story of Google Glass in The Verge, there were more pictures of the editor-in-chief, Joshua Topolsky, than there were pictures of Google Glass.

The new idea of “more personal” journalism is a challenge, not just for newsrooms but for journalism schools, as well. When I was in journalism school at the end of last century, I learned that journalists create similar stories when they are based on pure facts. You put 10 journalists in a room, give them the same information, and get 10 identical stories.

Nevertheless, as we are moving from an industrial age to a digital one, this notion of a journalist as a kind of “fact mechanic” is slowly transforming. The Internet still needs a few good, solid news pieces about CES that are based on facts. But we don’t need the massive overflow of copies or near-duplicate stories. A computer already does that faster and better with some of the business and sports news.

With computer-generated journalism, the old quote “information wants to be free” is becoming a reality. And it is happening exactly the way Stewart Brand predicted: “the cost of getting it (information) out is getting lower and lower all the time.”

Luckily for journalists, the free part is only half of the quote. It actually begins with “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.” As Brand points out, some of the things you read or see can literally change your life.

Finding life-changing stories every day might be an impossible task. So start from the other end of the quote, by dumping the low-cost stories. Stop making copies – unless they are produced by a computer.

Start to look around in your organization for things that cannot be copied to zeroes and ones. Humans with personal style are a good start: who is the Andrew Sullivan or Kara Swisher of your newsroom? Or think about adopting a voice or style that is distinctive just for your publication. If you are a local newspaper, be fiercely local. Passionate about food, a sports team or cars? Let it show.

If nobody in the newsroom is wasting time making copies, journalists have more time to dig deeper, make that extra phone call and find another source. That is when you start producing the expensive information. As Brand would say: information so valuable that it might change lives.

Get in Google News, and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google’s news alert subscribers, whenever your stories hit the right keywords. Post a hot story quickly, and you could end up on Google News’ highly clicked front page.

But is inclusion in that index or other search engines’ news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I’m going to argue… no. (Well, at least it’s not worth making a fuss over.)

Why on Earth wouldn’t a news site want the higher public profile and increased traffic that inclusion in Google News could bring? Look, if your site’s goal is to appeal to a global audience, especially ones looking for news related to specific keywords and phrases, you need to be in Google News and should do everything you can to get included. If you are CNN, or the New York Times, you need to be in Google News and optimizing your pages to perform well within it.

But what if you aren’t looking to reach a global audience? What if your site’s focus is local, as are the readers your advertisers want to reach? What if you are trying to build an online community, cultivating ongoing relationships with a core of contributing readers?

“Drive-by” visitors from search engines inflate your site’s traffic stats, but they don’t help you reach those goals. Worse, traffic numbers plumped by infrequent visitors clicking news alerts create a distorted picture of your website’s health and viability.

Many newspaper executives might take some comfort in the large number of readers visiting their newsrooms’ websites. But let’s look at how engaged those visitors are with these websites.

Or, more accurately, how they are not.

An Editor & Publisher report on September 2009′s Nielsen Online report on the United States’ top 30 online newspaper websites (by most most unique visitors) showed that the mean amount of time spent for that month on one of those websites was just nine minutes and 22 seconds.

That’s a tick under 19 seconds per day on average, if you considered each website visitor the equivalent of a daily subscriber. I doubt that even the speediest reader can get through many articles – much less any advertisements – in under 19 seconds.

So, clearly, online visitors are not as valuable to today’s news websites as daily subscribers to the local newspaper were a generation ago. Diminishing engagement with their audiences, whether reflected in lower print circulation numbers or by less time spent on the website, is what’s driving legacy news businesses’ failure to hold on to their once-lucrative advertising market share. No one’s going to pay top dollar to reach an audience which isn’t there.

Start-up local news publishers must act smarter. Work to build your website by developing local community contacts, not fattening the visitor logs with out-of-market visitors driven in by search engines. Use social media to encourage current readers to invite new ones. Build content and report stories that local readers will want to recommend.

Looking over the metrics for the websites I manage, I see a clear pecking order in the amount of time spent on the site versus the way a visitor accessed the site. Here’s that list, from most time to least:

1. People referred to the site via an e-mail forwarded by a friend or colleague
2. People searching for the site’s name in a search engine
3. People accessing the site via bookmark or direct-typed URL
4. People accessing the site via a link in its e-mail newsletter
5. People accessing the site via its Facebook page or Twitter feed
6. People accessing the site via a direct link from another, non-search website
7. People accessing the site via a link on another social bookmarking site (i.e. Digg or StumbleUpon)
8. People clicking from Google News
9. People searching for a term in a search engine

For what it is worth, there’s a cliff-like drop-off in time spent between the social bookmark links and the Google News and search engine referrals. In my experience with my websites, people whose initial visit to the site is driven by a referral from a friend or colleague, or from searching for the site’s name in a search engine, spend far more time on the site and are far more likely to return than those referred by a search engine.

As an industry, we’ve got to develop a deeper reading relationship with our audience. From the data I’ve seen, the shortest route to that goal lies in building traffic through human connections, not search engines and their news pages.

Okay, so traffic from search engines isn’t helping build a loyal audience for community-focused publications. But it can’t hurt, right?

Maybe it can. Forgive me while I drift into speculation here, but I’ll do this as an appeal to readers who might be more connected with the “dark arts” of Internet marketing than I am. Of the sites I’ve run over the years, the ones included in the Google News index have encountered a far, far greater incident of spam attempts in comments and other UGC features than those not included in the index.

And that’s not explained simply by site popularity, either. My two biggest family-owned websites are not in the Google News index, but OJR is. And OJR elicits exponentially more comment spam submissions than the other two sites, despite the fact that those sites receive around five to 10 times the daily traffic of OJR. (It’s gotten so bad that we now hold all comments not from site authors for approval before posting on OJR.)

If you’re ready to dismiss that observation as a single data point (and you should be), allow to me suggest that others may be experiencing the same. Speaking with other Web publishers, I’ve heard those whose sites are in the Google News index report getting hit with platform-independent comment spam at a far higher rate than those whose sites are not. (This isn’t to say that sites not in Google News don’t suffer spam attacks. The highly popular sites not in the Google News index tend to be blogs and forums running off-the-shelf publishing software, which from time to time attract spam attacks targeted specifically at those publishing systems. But those attacks are aimed at the publishing platform more than at the individual websites.) These submissions are typically human-generated, and include link spam either in the comment itself, or on the reader’s site profile page.

Are spammers targeting sites in the Google News index? I haven’t spent enough time with the black hats of the ‘net to know, despite my suspicion. Consider this my appeal to those who have to provide an answer.

In the meantime, from a system administration stand-point, I want my website to be well-known to people in its target community… and completely off the radar of spammers and search engine black hats. To me, that means:

• selecting a publishing system with an enthusiastic support community that’s aggressive about security,
• making sure that my site’s home page uses sound search engine optimization techniques to appear at the top of results pages for my site’s name and its community name,
• and spending my energy to cultivate connections within my target community, offline and on, staying clear of link swaps, black hat SEO and becoming a spammer myself.

Getting into Google News? (Or Yahoo! News or Bing’s news page?) Meh. Put that at the bottom of your priority list. As an online news publisher, you have better ways of building your readership community. Focus on those, instead.

By the time I got the e-mail from the spokeswomen for a major credit card company asking me to delete her quotes from an article we’d run almost a year before, I was skeptical. She had already contacted the reporter with various versions of her concern: she’d been speaking off the record, the reporter must have confused her with another source, the quotes were wrong. A man “representing” her had called the managing editor urging him to omit the quotes from the archive. “I think he was a lawyer,” the managing editor told me at the time. (He wasn’t.)

I’m faculty adviser for the Campus Times, a 2,000-circulation weekly newspaper of the University of La Verne in Los Angeles County. My staff of undergraduates occasionally gets things wrong and corrects them. But this was a solid story by a conscientious reporter, puzzled by the content, urgency and timing of the source request.

Most likely the credit card spokeswoman – a woman a Google search revealed is widely quoted by Reuters and CNN, among others – had searched herself online and found our story about college students and credit card debt, in which she spoke openly, if off-message, about the age group’s unchecked spending habits.

Easy access to online news archives is one of the Web’s amazing benefits for journalists – or anyone wanting background on people or events. But the fact that last year’s or the last decade’s news stories are just a mouse-click away means that anything one says to a reporter – perhaps in a moment of vulnerability – can be entered into a very visible long-lasting record. The visibility of this record, its effects and what to do about those, if anything, is a contentious topic among editors and ethicists across the nation, as the sense – and the reality – of new media is that stories live long past their press dates.

The credit card spokeswoman scenario was fairly easy to resolve: The reporter had kept her notes, we reviewed them against the archived story and the now 2-year-old story remains unchanged in our archive. The spokeswoman’s discomfort with the story, particularly given her profession, I concluded, did not come close to a threshold for altering the permanent record.

A few months earlier a colleague shared a similar scenario, albeit with a more dramatic request. In late 2005 he was asked to alter the archive of a 1999 story about same-sex couples by one of the sources profiled in the La Verne Magazine. “She said she wasn’t gay anymore,” said George Keeler, journalism professor and magazine adviser. “It was a painful thing, but I wrote her back and said I wasn’t going to erase (her past),” The story, now eight years old, come up first when the source’s name is typed into Google and Yahoo!’s engines.

“It’s not like it used to be when clippings would just molder in the morgue of the newspaper office,” said Craig Whitney, standards editor for the New York Times, who said the Times frequently fields requests to alter archives.

“A source will call saying the paper reported an arrest, then didn’t report the dismissal of the case,” Whitney said. “We can’t go re-report the who (sometimes 20-year-old) story and we can’t just take their word for it: ‘The judge threw out the case.’ ‘Where’s the judge?’ ‘He’s dead.’ ‘Where’s the record of the case?’ ‘In some archive in Fort Dix.’ We recognize it’s frustrating. We can’t do anything.

“Sometimes it’s a case where somebody is embarrassed about a part of their past that they don’t deny, which wasn’t so prominent (before online archives and Google),” Whitney said.

The New York Times has received requests from divorced couples to remove archived stories about their marriages, said Leonard Apcar, former editor-in-chief of NYTimes.com.

“We’ve always had a sense that the archive is historical,” Whitney said. “What’s changed is now anybody can consult it from home. We haven’t figured out what to do, if anything. We’ve had some meetings and we’ll have some more to… figure out something to do that’s ethically responsible, that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the archives, but addresses the need for clarification, elaboration,” Whitney said adding that the Times has never deleted anything from its online archives. “I doubt if we ever would. The question is, is there something else we can do that falls short of rewriting history?”

The answer to that question seems to depend on the story, the publication and a variety of circumstances, which like the medium, are still evolving.

Editors at the Pasadena (Calif.) Weekly felt they found a fair solution when in 2006, they decided to remove the name of an ex-con from an archived story, six months after it came out in print.

Joe Piasecki, the paper’s deputy editor who also reported the story, had covered a protest at San Quentin Prison a week before the execution of Crips co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams, where he interviewed a man who said he’d been in prison with Williams. Piasecki researched the man’s background through the Oakland Tribune’s (offline) coverage of the man’s 1998 trial and found the man had been charged with raping and sodomizing his former girlfriend, and convicted of assault. Piasecki included that information in the story along with the man’s claim that he was innocent. “I’d called the Tribune library (to make sure) he was who he said he was,” Piasecki said.

The story ran Dec. 8, 2005, in the Weekly, its sister paper the Ventura County Reporter, and on the Reporter’s Web site. At the time the story went up, the Pasadena Weekly didn’t have a functioning Web archive, so the source’s call went to the Ventura, Calif., newsroom first. Then Piasecki and Pasadena Weekly Editor Kevin Uhrich were consulted.

“Our first reaction was ‘no don’t change it’,” Piasecki said. “I tend to say that unless (the reporter) screwed up, don’t change it. What’s true is true.”

Piasecki said his publication made an exception here because the man wasn’t familiar with the Internet, and because his quotes toward the end of a story about someone else, were not critical to its “material essence.” The man had served two years at San Quentin and remembered seeing Williams there; his quotes added color to the story, Piasecki said. The quotes are still in the Ventura newspaper’s online archive, only the man’s name was removed.

“The guy said every time he applied for a job they Googled his name and this was the only hit,” Piasecki said. “We took his name out so he could move on with his life.”

“I didn’t see any harm,” Uhrich said, adding this is the only time the Weekly has edited an archived story beyond correcting specific factual errors and taking offline a guest editorial he learned after publication was largely plagiarized. (The paper’s own Web site hosts archives dating back to January 2006.)

At the New York Times, even plagiarized stories remain as part of the permanent record. Those by ex-Times reporter Jayson Blair still appear intact in the Times archives with editor’s notes appended to the articles.

“The Jayson Blair stories are going to (stay) in the archives,” Whitney said. “We can’t pretend he was never here.”

Because Internet databases do not discriminate in what they pick up and store, however, a ProQuest search of a Jayson Blair story with plagiarized sections called up the story without the editor’s notes.

Despite the timeless nature of online postings, laws that protect news outlets have not changed. No matter how emphatic or justified a source’s complaint may be, any threat to take legal action against the reporter or news organization after the one-to-two-year statute of limitations for libel law is an idle threat, said Roger Myers, general counsel for the California First Amendment Coalition.

Ethically, however, dealing with source requests to alter online archives is increasingly complicated, and as with just about every aspect of online journalism, still evolving.

When a story, column or even a reader response to a story is posted online then transferred to the publication’s archive, “it’s a matter of record,” said Robert Steele, a scholar of journalism ethics and values at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. “To change it would change a piece of history.”

If editors start removing some stories or parts of stories from archives, readers will begin to wonder what else is missing, Steele said.

And yet Steele, who advises newsroom leaders on a variety of ethical issues, acknowledges that in the rapidly changing media landscape, there are no absolutes.

“If it can be proven that the material did not come from the person whose name is attached, that would be a reason to take something down,” he said. “If it is substantially inaccurate, that would be a reason to correct it and in a rare case take it down.”

Or, Steele added, if a source could make a convincing argument that the story’s accessibility online poses a “profound and immanent threat to their well-being,” that might be a case to consider altering or deleting it from the record. Though he emphasized that these would be rare exceptions.

In the rare case when an editor does change or delete a story from the archive, there is no guarantee the original version of the story won’t come up in a Google search. As Paul McAfee, director of interactive operations at the Press Enterprise newspaper in Riverside, Calif., explained: “The major search engines crawl the news Web sites on a regular basis. They could pull up an erroneous story and ‘cache’ it in their archives. “Hopefully they will pick up the correction,” he said. Though he added that it’s likely that both the original and the updated version of the story will come up in a search.

There are formal request processes to have items removed from Google and the other search engines, but there is no guarantee their decision-makers will honor the request. Under federal law, “Internet entities that host other people’s content are not liable for that content.” Myers said.

While McAfee said policy at the Press Enterprise is to not alter any accurate news archive, he recently helped a reader who’d posted offensive comments on pe.com‘s message board, then wanted the comments deleted.

“Someone wrote a comment that sounded really racist, then a few months later they saw the light and changed their opinion,” McAfee said. When the poster asked McAfee to remove the comments from the message board, he agreed to. Unlike its editorial content, postings on the publication’s electronic message board are eventually purged automatically, he said. Because they are generated by the public and not by the newspaper’s editorial department, these message boards are not subject the publication’s editorial policies, McAfee said.

“I wrote (the poster) back, ‘It’s off our site.’ They wrote back ‘yes but it’s still cashed in Google.’ The Google spiders picked it up, it was stuck in Google’s cache. The person asked me to intercede with Google. I sent them the Web address and a form for Google. I didn’t do it for them,” McAfee said. “We disclaim any responsibility for anything on our message boards.”

Letters to the editor, on the other hand, are different from message board postings when it comes to online archives, editors say.

“We’ve had many experiences where letter writers, who espouse some wild or provocative opinion, want the letter taken off the Web years later,” said Clint Brewer, executive editor of the City Paper in Nashville, Tenn., and the Society of Professional Journalists national president-elect. But letters are also part of the historical record, he said.

Brewer said that while the landscape has changed dramatically, at this point newsroom leaders have a long-standing set of standard for accuracy and preserving the historical record based on the print journalism model. “It’s not apples to apples (but) that’s a logical place to start,” he said.

McAfee said he hopes the visibility and permanence of the online record – and the fact that even stories subsequently edited for accuracy may live online alongside the uncorrected versions – will make journalists take their job of getting it right more seriously than ever.

Whitney believes such visibility and permanence will affect sources: “I think that the arrival of YouTube and Internet and the fact that images and text last forever means that actions have lasting consequences. It’s more important than it ever has been for people before they do something (to consider the) consequences.”

“If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?” the Los Angeles Times reported Zell saying to Stanford University class this week. Zell has agreed to takeover Tribune Co., which owns The Times.

Zell’s comment is as ill-informed as outgoing ASNE president Dave Zeeck’s were to his organization last week. I’ve been searching the Web through Google, and reading Google News, for years, and can’t recall Google publishing complete newspaper stories under the Google brand.

Yes, Google hyperlinks page titles and publishes short snippets of those pages’ content beneath them on its search engine result and Google News pages. Those links have helped millions of readers find newspaper stories that they would not have read otherwise.

Without newspaper content on Google News and in Google’s search engine result pages [SERPs], newspapers would face an even more dire future, as those millions of readers would find instead other, non-newspaper sources of news and information. And Google wouldn’t lose much at all. Google News doesn’t run ads. And I suspect that Google’s AdWords program would continue to haul in billions of dollars annually even without newspaper.coms in the SERPs.

Surely, not everyone in the newspaper industry shares Zell’s extreme view. For all the ignorance that certain newspaper managers exhibit in public forums, the newspaper industry employs many more sharp individuals with deep knowledge of how the Web works and how to make money from it. They’re found in the online departments of newspaper.coms and they deserve their chance to call the shots on how newspapers will approach the Internet.

The Zeeck and Zell attitude won’t save newspapers, and will serve only to further isolate them from a new and growing generation of Web-savvy readers.

I e-mailed several newspaper.com managers to ask them what they thought of Zell’s comment, and how they think the newspaper industry ought to approach the search engines.

Chris Jennewein
Vice President, Internet Operations, Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

I think newspapers should welcome search engines because they drive traffic to our sites. Our business on the Internet is all about building audience, and audiences find our sites through search engines. Fighting the new reality of Internet search is ultimately self-defeating for our industry.

Ken Sands
Online publisher, www.SpokesmanReview.com

Well, first reaction is that Zell is talking primarily about Google News, not Google itself. He suggests Google wouldn’t have anything without the content from media, and that’s just not true. Google News aggregates links. It doesn’t steal the content so much as organize it in a way that’s meaningful for lots of people. Mainstream media could have done the same thing but didn’t have the vision, the organizational capabilities or the technical skill.

Google argues that it’s a partner of the MSM, sending readers to each site (for free!). I can’t argue with that. Almost 40 percent of the visitors to our site come through Google searches. Those are typically one-time, one-story readers, but they do account for a huge amount of our traffic. There’s a legitimate question about whether these inflated numbers are meaningful… not sure this does our local advertisers much good.

On balance, I’d say Google does more good than harm. The Google Ad Sense for Newspapers alpha project is a good example. They’ve sent advertising to print newspapers for several months without taking a cut of the action. When the program goes to beta, they will begin taking a small percentage. They seem to understand that their best way of making money is to make sure that everyone else makes money, too.

Will Google some day dominate the media world? Quite possibly. But for now at least, it’s sure hard to pass up their goodies.

Steve Yelvington
Internet strategist, Morris Communications

Sam Zell’s comments make a lot of editors feel good, and editors need something to feel good about these days. But news search and aggregation are just a piddling part of Google’s portfolio of services. Google doesn’t even run advertising in its news channel, so claiming that newspaper content is behind Google’s profitability is just saber-rattling.

Google is a significant threat, but not because it’s “stealing” newspaper content. They’re rolling up a lot of local small business money that newspapers can and should be chasing. We’re not going to get that business by sitting around in our newspaper offices and wishing for the return of sideburns and bell-bottom trousers. We need to be out creating new solutions and coming up with better ideas.

I’ll post additional comments as they hit my in-box. Or you can post your thoughts through the comment button below.

Lasica’s piece got me thinking about ways to measure bias in search results. His observations became the basis for my recently completed master’s thesis, the findings of which may be of interest given the ongoing debate about the quality of Google News’s sources. While my analysis does not indicate an overall conservative or liberal slant, it does confirm Lasica’s suspicion that non-traditional news sources are injecting ideologically biased articles into Google News search results. The data show that articles returned in Google News searches are significantly more likely to have an ideological bias than those returned in searches on Yahoo News. (See below for detailed study results.)

The study examines search results for evidence of bias. By analyzing the content of articles returned in searches on the major-party presidential candidates in the days leading up to the 2004 election, it aims to assess the aggregator’s level of political bias. The study looks at balance within these articles as an indicator of bias, using results from the same searches on Yahoo News as a benchmark.

Notably, almost all of the additional bias in articles returned by Google News searches can be attributed to the site’s use of non-traditional news sources. In other words, if we consider only sources affiliated with old-media companies, the average bias scores for articles on Google News and Yahoo News are virtually identical.

Google News, still in beta three and a half years after its launch, tracks the top stories on some 4,500 English-language news sites, updating its index roughly every 15 minutes. The ability to effectively search this huge collection of timely information has helped make Google News one of the Internet’s most popular news portals, drawing about 5.9 million visitors a month.

But its groundbreaking method of identifying top stories based on how frequently they appear on sites in its index – and doing so entirely without human intervention – put the portal in critics’ crosshairs from the beginning.

That its algorithms are able to automatically determine relative importance of stories and present a front page with top stories in different subject areas has been interpreted by some as an ominous sign that computers will someday make human editors obsolete. At the same time, users have ridiculed bugs that cause the site to occasionally attach a photo to an unrelated article or elevate a relatively minor story to a prominent spot on its front page.

(It should be noted that my research concerns only the site’s search results and is unrelated to Google News’s practice of automatically ranking the top stories on its front page and section fronts.)

Because it uses no human editors, Google News has considered itself immune to bias.

“The algorithms do not understand which sources are right-leaning or left-leaning,” Google News inventor Krishna Bharat told Lasica last year. “They’re apolitical, which is good.”

But choosing which sites to index is perhaps as subjective an editorial decision as selecting the stories to play on the front page of a newspaper or website.

Google News does not share the list of sites it crawls, a practice that has resulted in a lot of speculation about its criteria for inclusion and the notion that there might be some ideological imbalance in its list of sources.

In an attempt to shed some light on the question, one blogger has written a script that grabs the news portal’s front page regularly and logs all the sources that it finds. The count stood at 2,256 as of Wednesday night, indicating that about half of the 4,500 sources have been identified.

Along with the mainstream sites in the list are a number of relatively obscure, online-only news sources (some of which are best described as weblogs), including the opinion sites MichNews.com and Useless-Knowledge.com.

Earlier this year, Google News dropped several sites, including the white supremacist journal National Vanguard, from its index after users complained that hate speech was turning up in searches.

It seems the news portal has been making plenty of its own news lately – albeit unwittingly. In March, Agence France-Presse charged in a lawsuit that Google was infringing its copyright by displaying AFP material on Google News pages. Days later, Google announced it would stop using AFP content. Since then, the Associated Press also has expressed “concern” about Google’s use of its material without payment.

And just this month we learned of a patent application filed by Google scientists in 2003, laying claim to methods of “improving the ranking of news articles” based on the “quality” of the articles’ sources – an apparent admission that relevance alone is not a satisfactory measure of an article’s value.

Google’s patent application offers the following variables, among others, as possible measures of a source’s quality: the volume of traffic it receives, the amount of content it produces, the speed at which it responds to breaking news, the size of its editorial staff and the number of bureaus it maintains. Any of these factors would appear to favor traditional media outlets.

If this is an admission that non-traditional sources are of lower quality, how does that square with Google News’s stated goal of increasing the diversity of viewpoints presented on its pages?

Google News currently does not distinguish opinion from fact in its search results (though it now attempts to identify press releases and satire). Hence, editorials and other opinion pieces frequently appear alongside straight news stories in search results. It is not clear that average users can make the distinction between the two, especially given the many online-only sources that peddle a confusing mixture of fact and opinion.

Ranking news stories based on some measure of quality may be a step in the right direction, but to maintain its credibility, Google News needs transparency – both in its selection criteria and its list of sources.

Key findings of the study

I was intrigued by the notion that a site without human editors might still be biased, and I wanted to test it scientifically. To do this, I analyzed the content of articles returned in searches on “George W. Bush” and “John Kerry” in the weeks leading up to the 2004 election. [More complete results and a detailed description of the research process are available in the full study (PDF).]

I wrote a crawler script to retrieve the results from Google News and Yahoo News for the search terms “George W. Bush” and “John Kerry” at four-hour intervals. The program run was during the two weeks preceding the Nov. 2 presidential election, resulting in a total of 80 “snapshots.” Each snapshot contained four sets of search results: “George W. Bush” on Google News, “George W. Bush” on Yahoo News, “John Kerry” on Google News and “John Kerry” on Yahoo News. The program also downloaded the full text of the top articles returned in each result list.

For each of five snapshots, chosen randomly, the first five articles from each of the four result lists were analyzed, ensuring an equal number of Bush and Kerry results and an equal number of Google News and Yahoo News results. This resulted in a sample of 100 articles, which then were examined sentence-by-sentence. Overall, 1,587 sentences were coded in one of five ways:

• Favorable to Bush
• Unfavorable to Bush
• Favorable to Kerry
• Unfavorable to Kerry
• Neutral

Using the values for each sentence, two scores are calculated for each article, measuring the degree of the article’s overall favorability to each candidate. These favorability scores could take values of –1 (completely unfavorable) to 1 (completely favorable), with 0 being neutral. For instance, a Kerry favorability score of –0.3 for an article would indicate that, on balance, 30% the content of an article is unfavorable to John Kerry.

Two charts – one for Google News and the other for Yahoo News – provide a basic summary of the data. They show the two candidates’ favorability scores for each article, plotted against each other. This facilitates comparison of the overall favorability of the two portals’ search results.

Favorability plots by news portal

Each data point represents an article, and its placement on the chart represents its favorability to the two candidates:

• Upper left quadrant: Article is favorable to Kerry and unfavorable to Bush
• Upper right quadrant: Article is favorable to both
• Lower right quadrant: Article is favorable to Bush and unfavorable to Kerry
• Lower left quadrant: Article is unfavorable to both

In other words, articles in the upper right and lower left are more balanced than those in the upper left and lower right. Articles closer to the center are more neutral. The circular boundary is a density ellipse drawn to make it easier to see patterns in the data.

To determine the direction of bias in a particular story, we compare favorability scores for Bush and Kerry. Where they are similar, the article is more balanced. Each article is assigned a balance score, which is the difference between the two favorability scores. A balance score greater than 0 would indicate bias toward Kerry while a negative score shows bias toward Bush. Both Google News and Yahoo News have average article balance scores that are very close to 0, indicating balanced search results. In other words, both the Google News and Yahoo News searches returned articles that were, on the whole, equally favorable to both George W. Bush and John Kerry. This is what we would expect to see of balanced search results at a time when public opinion was pretty evenly divided between the two candidates.

However, the spread of articles’ balance scores reveals an important difference: Articles returned by Google News tend to be significantly more biased in one direction or the other than articles from Yahoo News.

Besides being coded for favorability, articles were also classified by whether they came from an independent, online-only source (such as Salon.com) or a website affiliated with a traditional news source. A traditional news source is defined as a wire service, newspaper, magazine, TV station, radio station, broadcast network or cable network. (Content from one of these sources that is syndicated on a news aggregator such as Yahoo News is also considered traditional.) Of the articles returned by Google News, 40% were from non-traditional news sources, while only 24% of the Yahoo News results came from non-traditional sources.

When articles from non-traditional sources are omitted from the comparison, there is no significant difference in the spread of the article balance scores between Google News and Yahoo News. This indicates that virtually all of the difference in bias between articles returned by Google News and those returned by Yahoo News is attributable to Google’s use of non-traditional news sources.