Bloggers and opinion writers usually scrounge through Google News feeds to find worthy news links hoping to write their opinions on news as it happens.
This not only makes sense for bloggers to attract readership and engage their audience, but also helps them to stay in sync with news as it happens. However, when one searches for news online with keywords, Google News brings a lot of different sources, which may not really be editorial in quality.
A few days ago, Google News announced ‘Editor’s Picks’ which you can find in the right-hand column of the U.S. edition. No matter where you live, if you are a content writer, and wish to bring the latest in technology and Internet to your readers, I assume you would already have customized your Google News page to show the U.S. edition. If not, you could easily change the edition by altering news settings. Google News aims to connect readers with the best write-ups of news publishers.
Most importantly, the ‘Editors’ Picks’ are customizable, which means that you could enter the keywords that you like, and Editor Pick’s from publishing leaders from a particular news area would appear on the right hand side. I mostly browse for social media, luxury and current affairs related news and predictably, I find editorial picks from The Huffington Post, Market Watch, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, The Atlantic, Politico, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
At the moment, it seems to be a win – win situation for publishers, mainstream publishers and Google as well. While the reader gets to read the best editorial content from websites that are picked based on news preferences, publishers would be able to drive targeted traffic to their websites. Moreover, if you run a news organization yourself, you could get in touch with Google’s Help Centre to get started. However, if you really want this feature to work, I would suggest you tweak your Google News preferences with the right keywords, topics and locations. Only when you do so would you get editorial content that would matter to you.
Google has been doing a major overhaul of its products and recently gave Gmail for Mobile a great makeover.
