Google is going to offer people an opportunity to point out journalistic errors, right alongside the stories:

We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report.

As always, Google News will direct readers to the professionally-written articles and news sources our algorithms have determined are relevant for a topic. From bloggers to mainstream journalists, the journalists who help create the news we read every day occupy a critical place in the information age. But we're hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that -- whether they're penguin researchers or presidential candidates-- a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story.

Not to mention a whole new perspective. And often a dose of reality.

As Glenn writes, this is bad news for many so-called journalists, and good news for the rest of us.

I think Glenn's view is wishful thinking. Let's use the Beauchamp example. What Google is saying is that participants in the story can comment. Other than the US Army, who would restrict comments to their PAO, who are the other participants? The others never existed, so that would leave Beauchamp and TNR as the only others available to comment. I don't expect comments from them to be pointing out the errors.

Same thing with Memogate. Do you think President Bush or Tony Snow would comment to Google? That leaves CBS, Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, and Bill Burkett.

For it to work as Rand and Glenn suggest, Google would have to open comments to interested third parties. Unless that happens, I expect news organizations (particularly those who do stuff like TNR and Dan Rather) to game the system and stack the deck.

I do think the Google concept might have brought down Jayson Blair earlier.

I hope this doesn't fall prey to the signal to noise issues of normal article comments on the internet.

And yes, I note the irony of posting that in your comments. :)

I think Glenn's view is wishful thinking.

Mmmm, yes, since the way you get published by Google News is by convincing Google News that you were a "participant" in the story.

What's a "participant?" If it's the Beauchamp story (say), then I guess we can all agree Beauchamp himself is, as well as his victims, if they exist. But who else? His company commander, his platoon-mates, people who were there and should have seen stuff happen but didn't? His wife at TNR who has a strong opinion about whether or not ol' Beau would ever tell a lie? The TNR editors? The guy at Weekly Standard who's investigated the stories? Folks who were considering joining up but now won't?

It's a subtle question, in fact, who a "participant" in a news story is. A question decided routinely by journalists writing up the story, of course. They quote "participants" in their stories all the time, and do not quote "non-participants," all according to their judgment of who is which. And it's exactly by an artful choice of who is a participant and who is not that the agenda reporter gets his spin onto the story.

All that's happening here is that the judgment of the original reporter as to whose opinion should be quoted in the story will be supplemented by the opinion of a Google editor. Big deal. Next up, the New York Times publishes a "Letters to the Editor" section where "reasonable" responses to news stories from readers will be published, and it will be found, golly, that everyone with a "reasonable" opinion praises the paper's objectivity and judgment!

For quite a while I've been hoping that Google would do something like this with Google Scholar (their academic research search engine), or allow easy access to blog entries on published research.

> What's a "participant?"

I'm not sure if this is exactly the standard Google will end up applying, but on their page they say "We want to hear from anyone who has been mentioned in a news story."

http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/answer.py?answer=74121&topic=12285

I don't think the "peer comments" will work all that well but I hope they do and it's definetly worth a try, maybe it will catch on. As far as creating news goes ("we don't report it, we create it") it's far better than what most media companies do.

But I think the real story behind this is something different:
I would hope most people are a bit peeved at getting individual search results where almost all are minor variations of AP or Reuters releases. I'm sure it has made Google News less relevant than it could have been since it drowns out any independent reporting.

Perhaps Google has noticed a lack of visitors (or at least visitors that use their news-story search engine) but hasn't yet realized the cause?

If I remember correctly Google has some of the outspoken "semantic web" people on their payroll and the above irritation is an excellent job for them; run all the news search results through a semantic filter and group every item within 25% divergence into one item headed AP or Reuters depending on root source (25% might be way too high, it could be that a mere 5% would catch all the relevant results).

It will likely make the search result pages look empty but so what?

Anyway I still want to congratulate Google for the public service their pages inadvertently provide: one click on any of the "all #### news articles »" links on their news front page and the visitors should be well on their way to realizing just how pitifully shallow the MSM is.

Just a clarification: the "peer comments" part above was not a reply to the Google Scholar comment by Neil H.

On the topic of GS I would love to see Google spending some resources on scanning and providing papers that have been published long ago but aren't presently available on the net. It's always a drag to do a search and in the results only find the paper you're looking for as a reference in the paper where you found it in the first place ^_^

Ah. So if a news story begins with Critics of the Bush Administration have long maintained that... then Google will publish the comments of anyone who's a critic of the Bush Administration? Seems problematic.

Or does it only work if someone's mentioned by name? The UN Undersecretary for Undersecretaries said today that he has stopped beating his wife... Oops...wait...maybe if you're not mentioned by name, but by a specific job title, and not just your generic identity? Ticket-holders waiting in line for the concert were outraged when Senator Obama was arrested by the Bush Gestapo before he could even take the stage... Drat. Er...maybe you qualify if you're the subject of any topic sentence in the first four paragraph of the article? If you aren't an employee of Google and haven't won an on-air contest in the last six weeks? Help!

I've no doubt that Google has an algorithm for deciding who to publish. So do journalists. My point is that the existence of an algorithm implies the ability to spin a story ipso facto, and you can only believe Google's algorithm won't spin stories if you believe Google wouldn't ever want to.

The wife of imprisoned protester Hu Flung-pu, arrested after Google, Inc. provided details of Hu's search history to Chinese authorities in exchange for exclusive rights to name the 2008 Olympics mascot, sorta kinda implied (if you read between the lines of the note enclosed with the kilogram of dogshit she mailed to Google founder and chairman Sergei Brin) that she doesn't really blame the Internet search company for her husband's impending execution...

Hmmm.