Original tech journalism, especially investigative journalism is set to get a major boost and it’s thanks to Google who are set to roll out new algorithms that identify original stories written by ‘real journalists’ as opposed to tech writers who have no journalist training.
Slammed for contributing to the decline in among many categories, including tech journalism Google is now claiming that stories that provided “original and in-depth” information and had required “a high degree of skill, time and effort” would be elevated in results and “may stay in a highly visible position longer”.
The only negative is that the global search engine company has asked 10,000, humans who review content promoted by Google Search, to help fine-tune the algorithms to take account of the originality of reporting as well as a publisher’s overall reputation and whether it has won prestigious journalism awards such as the Pulitzer Prize.
This is a US based measurement award and at this stage it’s not known whether Google will use other Awards to measure the contribution made by trained journalists who have a nose for news and can identify a news story Vs a PR spin story.
Richard Gingras, Google’s head of news, said the company wanted to “support industry efforts [to pursue deep investigative stories] and help people get access to the most authoritative reporting”.
“In today’s fast-paced world of news, the original reporting on a subject doesn’t always stay in the spotlight for long as [..] they generate follow-up coverage from other publications,” he said. “This can make it difficult for users to find the story that kicked everything off.”
But Mr Gingras said the company was not trying to create an “absolute definition of original reporting’’, adding it could mean “different things to different newsrooms and publishers at different times”.
