Google News Changes Will Advance Salem-News.com

But it is bad news for newspapers and TV stations that rely on Associated Press stories for content. Their work will be nixed from Google under the new program.

Salem-News.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - Three years after launching the news Website Salem-News.com, we feel rewarded that the simple concept of Internet news being the best way to deliver information has come to pass.

Last week's announcement from Google that they will no longer carry newspaper and TV station stories that originated with The Associated Press and other news agencies, is good news for us, because with few exceptions, we generate 100% of our own material.

Newspapers and TV stations conversely, rely on their news wire services to provide the lion's share of of their daily content, and now that reliance has snapped around to bite them in the hind quarters.

It looks like the lunch breaks for reporters and writers at corporate owned dailies might get a little shorter, as only original stories from these groups will now be published on Google News.

Google's announcement that it struck licensing deals with four major international news agencies, means they will put the kibosh on including newspaper AP stories in their lineup.

No doubt this will impact the operations of the Oregonian, Statesman Journal, and countless other papers around the nation and world.

Being able to post AP and other wire service stories has been a free ride of sorts for these newspapers. Until now, all of their Web published stories have been scanned by Google and placed in Google News. Now that number of stories is expected to decrease.

In a numbers game like this, it is all about how many people you can attract to your site.

The new Google News program will only publish wire service stories from Press Association, Associated Press, Canadian Press and Agence France-Presse. They will exclude duplicate stories from these agencies that are published on the sites of their members.

This is an example of a Google News story from today. Note that Salem-News.com is the top pull out of 62 other news articles on the new White House Press Secretary. The changes at Google will mean better placement for reporter authored stories, and no more AP repeats from newspapers or broadcasters, which often dominate the Google News pages

Google's program to distribute news is not something Salem-News.com has ever resisted. In fact, we do everything in our power to prepare the stories we publish for a national and international audience that we attract as a Google affiliate news service.

While other news agencies like the Statesman Journal charge a visitor to look at a story after it is a few days old, we offer our material free and permanently on our site, as well as on Google. This results in amazing Web traffic to our Salem, Oregon based news site.

In fact, stories we publish are regularly featured on the front page of Google News. On those days, we absolutely dominate the Web and people tell us increasingly that they run into Salem-News.com when they least expect it.

We believe that is because we are true to the needs of the state of Oregon and the rest of the nation. We are mainstream in every respect, but we present it with a twist.

It would be our best guess, that few people would expect to find education about medical marijuana on the same page as extensive war coverage from Afghanistan, but that is who we are and we suspect we represent far more people than any of us realize.

I'll admit that it helps to have daily newspapers around the house, they come in handy for packing and starting fires.

We appreciate the wisdom and insight of Google News for recognizing who we are, welcome to the new age of information communication.

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Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with almost twenty years experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist and reporter. Today, in addition to his role as a war correspondent in Afghanistan where he spent the winter of 2006/07, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website, affiliated only with Google News. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com