Google News experiments with serendipity

Google News has launched Editors’ Picks, which provides content curated by human news editors at partner news organizations, including The Washington Post, Newsday, Reuters and Slate.

Google’s official statement on the new feature:

“At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. Right now, we are running a very small experiment in Google News called Editors’ Picks. For this limited test, we’re allowing a small set of publishers to promote their original news articles through the Editors’ Picks section.”

Nieman Journalism Lab points out:

“That by itself is a remarkable shift for a website that, at its launch in 2002, proudly included on every page: “This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.”

“But Google’s statement very much understates the feature’s (potential) significance. You know how Cass Sunstein wanted to build an “architecture of serendipity” that would give readers important but surprising information? And how, increasingly, many news thinkers have come to believe that systematizing serendipity is not so much a contradiction as a democratic necessity? Well, this is a step — small, but certain — in that direction. Think of Editors’ Picks as a Spotlight-like feature that, instead of highlighting “in-depth pieces of lasting value,” shines a light on what editors themselves have deemed valuable.”

This is one of the latest moves by Google to boost journalism. The search giant has been criticized for its role in pushing “free” news content, but has come back with a renewed focus on the news side of search. A feature by James Fallow in The Atlantic suggests that Google is on the right track. “Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business,” he writes. “Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”
 
“Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright.”