Last week Google announced that it is now going to let the people featured IN a news story comment about the story on Google News.
Many journalists – you know who you are – may not be happy to see journalism evolving in this way but I can say that as someone who is often on both sides of the journalism fence, I’m happy to see this web 2.0-based improvement to the way news is consumed. And, it looks like I’m in good company – Paul Gillin thinks the same.
Here’s why I feel this way:
Late last year I was interviewed by a reporter from a very large business publication. Of course, we all were excited that our company would be featured in such a prestigious publication.
In the first five minutes of speaking to the reporter, I knew she knew absolutely zippo about social media and could only cobble together what she had learned from other interviews.
Nevertheless, ready to impress, I gave the best interview of my life – an hour and fifteen minutes of information, URL’s, resources and explanations. Surely, this would get me some good ‘air time’ in the article? Or, at the very least, a pithy quote?
No such luck. They even fact checked the article before they ran it. All the information they asked me about, I said that I attributed. But absolutely no attribution was given *AND* I was only given a quote about some arcane social media subtopic that seemed as if it were shoved into the article at the last minute! Humph!
We told everyone we would be covered and some people even went out to look for the publication the day it was printed. How embarrassing!
The only reason I haven’t outed the reporter to her editor is because the reporter was referred to me by a very close, respected colleague and I would never do anything to jeopardize that relationship.
I wish I’d had Google News then. Maybe we would have used it, maybe not. But, at least we would have had the opportunity to share our side of the story with anyone who was reading.
Because of this one, horribly wasted experience, we make our own audio recording of all interviews and we definitely plan to use Google News’ new service if this ever happens again.
Would you use the Google News comments to correct a news story about your company?
Note to publications: this is what happens when you send a generic writer to cover a topic that should clearly be assigned to a writer who specializes in the subject matter – as opposed to just lumping everything under ’small business’.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Journalism, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
