The slow death of newspapers and print journalism has been well chronicled over the last few years. Consistently declining subscribers and advertising revenues have long been blamed on the rise of the internet and the way it has changed the journalism industry. Google, the company that has come to represent the internet as a whole, has taken a disproportionate amount of blame for changing reading habits and causing the resulting impact on the print journalism industry.
However, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a strong believer in the importance of print institutions and has publicly stated his belief that Google has a responsibility to help these institutions manage the transition they currently face.
Google News, which most news organizations view as a major threat, recently created a new experimental section called Editors Picks, to help promote mainstream news publications. This section provides a select group of news organizations including The Washington Post, Reuters and BBC News the opportunity to display links to articles chosen by their editors. This represents a radical shift from Google News existing policy of displaying/ranking stories solely based on other, non-human factors.
The question is, will this gesture by Google meaningfully change the fate of print journalism and how will users of Google News react to this change in policy.
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