Google News Will Now Highlight Local News Sources For Major Stories (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google's News section will now highlight the importance of local news sources. "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," admits James Morehead, Google News product manager. Google is helping with a new change today that will see a "Local Source" tag applied to all Google News instances. Google is tagging local news based on where a publisher has written about previously and matching it to a story location. Tagged articles will be available on the web and in Google's iOS and Android apps, and will serve as a way to highlight a local source on a national story.

Comments

Did they find homegrown clickbait?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google also seems to display the clickbaitiest headlines first, followed by the rest. Does that mean they've found more local bits thereof?

Re:Did they find homegrown clickbait?

[pushing-robot]

Or, you know, maybe clickbait naturally rises to the top because people click on it.

Re:Did they find homegrown clickbait?

[Mashiki]

Clickbait is having a hard time surviving right now. Sites that thrive on it are seeing massive drops in uniques and page views. Whether it's a gawker property or something from vice, it's the same. People have had enough, so that's going to lead to one of two things, either they're going to double down and create a new form of clickbait. Or the media is going to start moving back to actual news. You can't forget the assholes out there either that believe that news isn't to tell the truth, but to reduce harm to those "vulnerable groups." AKA fuck facts, we're going for feels.

Re:Did they find homegrown clickbait?

[jellomizer]

The local journalists have done the majority of legwork to get the news out. Then the big news sites repeat it and make the big bucks.

Eh?

[Threni]

It always has. I don't use the service much but I'd love a way to turn it off. For all their clever AI, google consistently gets my location wrong, and I'll never want to read the local papers, online or otherwise, because, like all local papers, they're just shitty rags thrown together by a skeleton staff, and consisting mostly of ads by estate agents.

Re:Eh?

[Gavagai80]

"Local" in this context means local to where the story takes place, not local to you.

Foreign News Source Please

[fatp]

Living in somewhere basically all local news sources are government mouthpieces, what I want is foreign news source.

and hopefully flag paywalled sites right on the fa

[swschrad]

you KNOW you don't want to have your interest piqued, only to click through and be stared down with "turn off your ad blocker or you can't see me" or "subscriber access only."