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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

To be fair - that's what news sites do - they summarize information happening elsewhere.

Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news sites what news sites have been doing to other people since forever.

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At some point someone is actually doing journalism though (in the best case at least.) News outlets that summarize things from e.g. Reuters or AP tend to have agreements which pay money for the information. You could reasonably argue that google should be doing the same, right?

I think the reality is that journalism was a ridiculously inefficient business.

A big national event happens. News organizations collectively send 30 different reporters to the scene.

Those 30 reporters each write up a firsthand story. Now hundreds of smaller news organizations (local papers, local TV news stations, etc.) rewrite it in their own words and put it in their version.

In the end, for any major story you end up with hundreds of articles being written, but out of those there are only a handful of genuinely different narratives, each retold in slightly different words hundreds of times. It's rare that a local news organization adds any significant value.

In my opinion, NPR is the only organization that gets it right: there's a single national organization that does the news at the top of every hour, and local stations then come on to give local news following that. A single national organization does morning and evening long-form news shows with the national shows, and each local station does its own long-form shows with local news. Very little redundancy.

Whoever is doing journalism, it's not those sites that now want a governmental tax handout to continue being bad.

It often is though. Many of these sites are employing the journalists who are uncovering the original story.

If Google was doing what news sites did, it would have journalists writing articles, researching data, investigating, etc. Yet they do none of that.

Your statement is absurd.

I kinda wonder at what point would Google enter the field by sucking AFP's feed, auto filtering it and AI generate articles.

Yahoo News wasn't that, but a search engine getting into the news business would not be unprecedented.

I believe they're working on it

https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unrele...

All of this still requires actual journalism to happen at some point, though. Someone needs to conduct interviews. AI isn’t going to do that any time soon.

Yes, that work would still happen under AFP or any other aggregator that deals with sourcing the news, syndicate it and manage the revenue sharing.

There is and was so much news outside of AFP and aggregators.

Local news is a biggie, and it's hurt just as bad. Frankly, local news touches our lives far more that national news, more, and yet it is vanishing.

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