The Online Journalism Review (OJR) has an in-depth interview with Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News. (Here's a photo of the Google News team with the Webby Award they won.)
There are no press releases on the browsable pages or news pages. We have a higher editorial responsibility on those because we're telling you where you should look. On the news pages, we do not intend to use press releases. We would never do anything to compromise the objectivity of the product. We don't even show advertising … we do this because we think it's useful. Making a press release available as part of the search results gives the full facts that were available to the reporter when they wrote it.
I want this to be a force for a democracy. I want us to be an honest broker, and I want newspapers featured on our site to get traffic from us. … There's never been a more controversial time on the planet. I think it's great to be a news source at this point because there's so much hunger for news. You see a lot more diversity in the news coverage on our site than on others. I think the diversity is a mirror to the diversity of opinion there is worldwide. One of the things that makes us objective is we show all points of view. Even if you disagree with one, we give you both -- the majority and the minority point of view. The ones you don't agree with are education. It's nice to know what the other side is thinking. You'll see left-leaning ones as much as much as you see right-leaning ones. Frankly, the software doesn't know the difference between left and right, which is good.
Google News is available in ten different national versions.
Posted by Aaron Swartz on October 07, 2003 06:01 AM