Defining News Sources
I use search engines specializing in news because I think they’re going to give me links to articles in real news organizations. One of my gripes with Google News is that it often returns results for sources I don’t consider to be news. I run at least three searches in their search engine a day and use their alerts. Several times a month, I follow a link to a news source I haven’t visited before. Many times, these are what I would consider to be legitimate sources. Sometimes, these sites are blogs or appear to be a Web site providing news, but not the site of a news organization. Google News also sometimes includes scholarly papers as news.
When I go to a site I’m not familiar with, there are several things I check to make sure it’s the site of a legitimate news organization. Evaluating a site might take 5-15 minutes, depending on how clear their site is and how much time I have to put into the effort before coming to a satisfactory answer. The articles I’m looking for must come from real news outlets, not just sites that provide news or sites a search engine tells me are news outlets. I haven’t had the same kind of results with other news search engines I’ve tried, like Yahoo! News, but I don’t use those regularly enough to know whether they return similarly questionable sources.
Perhaps the problem lies in the definition of what a search engine considers to be a news source. Apparently, my definition does not match how Google News defines a news source. I realize there are many more sources of news out there, but I think there’s a difference between the Wall Street Journal and a Web site of a man whose hobby is paying attention to business on Wall Street. A museum might have a public relations department and a section of its Web site devoted to news, but is it appropriate to include that in the search results? And, yes, of course I believe blogs can be great sources of news, but are all of them news? Should any of them be included in news search results? Does including sources that aren’t news organizations change the quality of the search results?
But what exactly is a legitimate news organization? Is it only established entities like The Jerusalem Post, National Public Radio, Aljazeera, or CNN? Someone suggested it’s a source with multiple contributors and editors, but aren’t there established news outlets run by one person? And don’t scholarly journals have multiple contributors and editors? If a media directory does not include a source, does that mean it should be removed from the list?
Are my standards too high for what I’m expecting from news search engines?
What kind of sources do you expect to find in a news search engine? How do you define a news source?
