FattyB - 4:17 pm on Oct 4, 2007 (gmt 0)

It should be good for sites who publish a lot of original content (though we have not seen this happening) but mostly it will mean some newspapers will drop wires and do wire rewrites. Though I would guess the effect will be limited as print based still get most of their income from print and use the agencies there.

Will be intersting to see if the agencies involved see a large dip in subscription to their web services. Especially as they have been investing so much in it.

So instead of you visiting site Y and seeing a story from Reuters or AP you will see one written by the site's staff but in many international cases it will just be based on the agency reports. This happens already to some extent. Often you can tell when lots of outlets publish the same error...it is because they cannibalise each other's reports. I won't mention any names but there are a few 'news agencies' who clearly have no reporters on the ground and just sell rewrites.

Why? Well hardly anyone can afford to have dozens or hundreds of journalists all over the world. So for breaking international news they rely on agencies, who tend to have good local contacts and offices in lots of countries. Just the agency model is not suited for online, though it works fine in print.

Areas where it is easier to produce original content (not relying on rewriting agency reports) are tech, entertainment, health, business, etc. Since they often allow more remote coverage. Breaking world news is the hardest I think.

Rewriting is bad since it is another level in the chain for errors, lack of corrections etc.

Where the move might be good is in encouraging more original analysis, opinion pieces etc. But those sort of articles can have lower value than breaking news, since take longer and often get less traffic.

Personally we have seen a drop in traffic to original articles since Google made the switch. We don't use any agencies they publish though so I am not sure why...though we have a direct link between our organic serp positions and our G News ranking...so somewhat cyclic.

For those interested newsknife do a good analysis, for a fee, of what is really happening on G News.

[edited by: FattyB at 4:30 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2007]