Google just launched the news reader Fast Flip. Articles will load faster because they are stripped of ads and other things that slow down how quickly they load. Will this have an impact on the way the news is written? Article originally posted at the New York Times.
September 15, 2009
Google Releases News-Reading Service
By MIGUEL HELFT
SAN FRANCISCO — Google, long seen as an enemy by many in the news industry, is making a bold attempt to be seen as its friend with a new service it hopes will make it easier for readers to view newspaper and magazine articles.
On Monday, the company unveiled an experimental news hub called Fast Flip that allows users to view news stories from dozens of major publishers and flip through them as fast as they would the pages of a magazine.
Fast Flip, which is based on Google News, attempts to address what Google considers a major problem with news sites: because they often are slow to load, they turn off many readers. Google, the leader in Web search services and advertising, has long argued that if reading news online resembled more closely the experience of perusing physical newspapers or magazines, people would read more.
“Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print,” said Krishna Bharat, a distinguished researcher at Google who developed Google News in 2002. “When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.”
The service is being rolled out with the cooperation about three dozen publishers, including major news outlets like BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek; magazines like Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic, Esquire and Good Housekeeping; and Web-only publications like TechCrunch, Salon.com and Slate.
Some of the publishers involved said they viewed the experiment with caution.
“I don’t look at this as the solution to the future of journalism,” said Richard Gingras, the chief executive of Salon Media Group, who previously worked as an adviser to Google executives on media strategy. “But who knows? We will learn from it.”
Fast Flip, which is available at fastflip.googlelabs.com, first appears as a collection of images of news articles that Google has culled from the sites of its partners. The stories are displayed side by side in various horizontal rails that show stories arranged by popularity; sections like politics, business, travel or entertainment; topics like tennis, Iran or the Beatles; and publication.
Flipping from one article to the next, or from one rail to the next, is quick. The articles, which are images of Web pages that have been stripped of ads and other things that slow them down, load with virtually no delay. Readers can quickly zoom into a specific section, publication or story. They can often read the majority of an article directly on Google, though if they click on it they will be taken to the publisher’s Web site.
“We are helping people immerse themselves in the content,” Mr. Bharat said. “If they don’t like something, they can move on quickly until they find something they want to read.”
Google plans to place ads alongside stories and share the resulting revenue with publishers. Mr. Bharat declined to discuss what percent of the revenue will be kept by Google but said publishers would receive the majority of it.
Some publishers acknowledged that, if successful, Fast Flip would compete with already beleaguered news Web sites. But they were persuaded the experiment could provide useful lessons.
“Of course there is a concern,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations for The New York Times Company. “That doesn’t mean you don’t participate.”
Mr. Nisenholtz said that Fast Flip could give readers a better experience and more exposure to brand names in journalism than current news aggregators like Google News.
Some news publishers have long complained that Google has unfairly profited at their expense by selling ads on Google.com and Google News alongside newspaper content. Google has countered that its services help news publishers by driving traffic to them, and that any publisher is free to block Google from indexing its content.
“The interesting thing about this service, when compared to search, is that there is a revenue model for us on Google,” said Scott Havens, vice president of digital strategy and operations for The Atlantic.
Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, said that the decision by Google to begin paying publishers for news content on its site is a significant change. “It is a chink in Google’s armor,” Mr. Doctor said. “It could be a path to peace and rationalization of the relationship.”
While the experiment includes some major publishers, several of the top newspaper chains, including The News Corporation, Gannett, McClatchy, Tribune and MediaNews, are not part of it. Many those chains have a broad advertising partnership with Yahoo, Google’s rival, and top executives of News Corp. have been among the most vocal critics of Google.
Mr. Bharat said that while Fast Flip attempts to recreate some of the experience of consuming news offline, the service will also incorporate many features of the modern Web. For instance, Fast Flip will rely partly on Google’s algorithms and partly on user behavior to rank articles. Those that are clicked on or e-mailed the most often will rise in the rankings. And when users save an article they like, their friends may be automatically notified.
There have been other attempts to make reading electronic news more efficient. They include Times Reader, an application that allows users to download The Times onto their computers, and electronic versions of newspapers available for e-book readers like Amazon.com’s Kindle. But those attempts have gained only limited acceptance.
Mr. Bharat said that Google will offer a version of Fast Flip for some mobile phones. In the future, Google may allow news publishers to use Fast Flip’s underlying technology directly on their sites, he said.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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