How to get a blog site included with Google News

do you have to do anything in particular to get yr site included in GN?

[richards1052]

I run a blog which is mostly political commentary along with some material about music & family issues. I don't usually blog in a vein that's pure news. But last week I had a big scoop (at least for me) that Steve Jobs had lost a court fight to demolish a historic landmark home in CA. I wrote a post about the CA. Superior Ct. ruling & then wrote to several news outlets notifying them about my scoop.

Naturally no one picked up on it. A guy publishing real estate news at Forbes.com wrote about the story (he didn't read my post) & AP picked it up & now its listed in Google News at 100 news sites.

SO my question is does anyone know whether you have to do anything in particular to get your site crawled for Google News? My site is of course crawled & included in Google searches, but GN didn't pick up that Jobs story & I would've liked to have gotten a shot at getting credit for a scoop.

[BillyS]

You can apply to have your blog picked up as a news source:

[google.com...]

But if you take a look around, you'll see that they are looking for News sites. I can tell you that if you do apply, they will look at your site and get back to you - telling you if your website has been accepted (mine wasn't - but I don't really publish "news.") So it cannot do any harm in applying.

As for your "scoop" there are probably other ways to get noticed such as through one of the wire services. I don't use them, so maybe you want to check one of the other forums here for that kind of information.

[dauction]

PrWeb has an expediated release

[richards1052]

I've surfed the Google News pages in the past & found several blogs included which were posting hard ideological & non newsworthy material. So some blogs do get in. But I'm with you--98% of my posts are political commentary or music reviews & don't generate news. I also don't do the cold hard stuff reporters do like traipse out to interview people at their homes. But once in a while like this time a scoop comes right to my door. I'd like to be able to take advantage of that to get more exposure for my blog.

I did apply last night. We'll see what happens.

Thanks for that suggestion about prweb. It looks like a great tool though I don't know how widely read it would be by news services like AP/UPI, etc.

[richards1052]

BTW, I just registered with prweb but cannot generate a press release because the site is asking for my username & I don't see any way to enter one. I must be missing something. Do you have to pay to become a full member of the site & file press releases? I don't see anything that indicates that.

[richards1052]

BillyS: What other forums here are you referring to which deal with wire services? I was unclear what you meant by a wire service. Do you mean submitting an article to AP?

BTW, I WAS rejected by Google News but not for the reasons any of you might expect. They said they only accept sites written by "groups" but not by "individuals." I thought this highly prejudicial against news blogs (most of which are written by individuals) & told them so.

Google News FAQs say they are eager to work with "individual publishers" to feature their content at GN. As bloggers ARE individual publishers, this is at best imprecise & at worst a direct conflict w. what they told me.

If anyone wants to to read my blog post on this, send me a pm & I'll provide the link.