Google News for mobile devices has added a “news near you” section that displays headlines related your device’s current location.
Its ease of use is impressive — just grant the site access to your device’s current location and it pulls up local headlines. While it goes further than any other mobile news aggregation site, it has flaws that leave room for another company or news organization to do better.
...Google News has had a local section on its website since 2008, but this new addition to the mobile version has precise location targeting. The desktop site places me in the Washington metro area, and shows me headlines from all over D.C., Maryland and Virginia. The mobile site detects my location specifically (and correctly) in Arlington, Va., and serves only very local news and features. Now for the flaws, which leave room for a competitor to elbow into this mobile/local aggregation market.
First, the sources I see in my local feed from Google are not so diverse. Most of my headlines are from The Washington Post; a couple come from the Arlington Sun Gazette community newspaper. Google does, however, show me a couple posts from an active local news blog, ARLnow.com. There is room for either Google or a competitor to make a more comprehensive product.
The bigger problem for Google is that location is only one piece of the quest for the holy grail of online news: relevancy. So far, Google News is doing a good job of determining my location and aggregating stories that mention that location. But that’s where it ends, and that’s not good enough. What’s missing is the curation after the aggregation.
...There remains an opportunity for media companies to be the dominant source of news aggregation and curation in their local markets, if they leverage their human touch and institutional knowledge as an advantage over Google and catch up on some of the technological systems. But many news organizations will first have to conquer reflexive fears about linking out and sending readers to other sites.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-media/132544/what-google-got-right-with-news-near-you-mobile-service-and-what-and-news-organizations-can-do-better
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