While Google has yet to release a dedicated app for both Android and iOS for its news platform, the company just announced a revamped mobile experience. This news comes on the heels of Google revealing the end of its alternative news application, Currents which is being rolled in with Newsstand.
Google announced today on the official Tech News blog that it’s rolling out new features for Tech News users including an expanded 4-day weather section built into the right side of the homepage, more Editors’ Picks throughout various News sections, and sports scores:
For avid sports fans, a newly introduced “Sports Scores” section on the News homepage and the Sports page will give a snapshot of live, recently concluded and imminent sporting activity. From this summary, it’s easy to dive in further and do things like click on a score for details of the match or on a specific team to get recent news about it. The section is customizable; for example, if you prefer not to see hockey scores, you can turn hockey ‘off’ while keeping the other sports ‘on’. You can also remove the entire section if you prefer. At the outset, we’re launching in the US, with the big four sporting organizations covering basketball, football, baseball and hockey. Over time, this section will expand to other countries and sports. Stay tuned.
Google notes that the new weather section will automatically adjust to your current location and it is now including more Editors’ Picks sections across Technology and Business pages instead of just on the News homepage.
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It looks like Google might be repairing a new section in the Google Play store specifically for news content in subscription and issue form. While Google already has a dedicated Magazine section on the Play store, AndroidPolice first noticed clues in code for the web version of Google Play that hint Google could be preparing to launch a new service dubbed “Google Play News.”
While we don’t get much information about the service, we do learn Google Play News could offer “issues” and “subscriptions”. This makes us think the company could be preparing a subscription news service that rivals Apple’s Newsstand on iOS. Apple currently offers both issues of newspapers and magazines in subscription form through its Newsstand app.
It’s not clear how exactly the Play News section would differ from the existing Magazine section, but AndroidPolice noted that the Google Play code points to the section having its own heading color. This suggests it will indeed be a dedicated category on the store.
As I’m sure you know, the Play Store is color themed – Books are blue, Music is orange, etc. So the most important question a discovery like this raises is “What color will the News section be?” It turns out we can actually answer this one thanks to the Play Store CSS (mirror). It’s yellow. The News section will be yellow.
It’s a possibility Google will eventually merge this new newspaper feature with magazines like how Apple’s Newsstand app works, but we’ll have to wait to find out for sure what Google officially has planned for the service.
The Association of Newspapers in Brazil is not happy with Tech News, as it recently opted out of the free news aggregator, over complaints that Google crops news headlines and lede paragraphs for the decade-old service without permission nor monetary reimbursement.
The 154-member ANJ roughly equals 90 percent of Brazil’s newspaper circulation. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reported on a dispute that occurred earlier this week between an ANJ member’s lawyer and a Google executive at the American Press Association General Assembly in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The contention apparently “fueled one of the most intense debates during the Inter American Press Association’s 68th General Assembly.”
According to the Knight Center:
On one side of the debate were defenders of news companies’ authoring rights like German attorney Felix Stang, who said, “platforms like Google’s compete directly with newspapers and magazines because they work like home pages and use content from them.”
On the other, Google representatives said their platform provides a way to make journalistic content available to more people. According to Marcel Leonardi, the company’s public policies director, Tech News channels a billion clicks to news sites around the world.
ANJ president Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto specifically told the Knight Center that providing the “first few lines of our stories to internet users, (Google) reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites.”
Google Public Policy Director Marcel Leonardi refuted Neto’s comment during the IAPA debate, claiming if the reader is “satisfied with the small blurb (we offer), that means the story did not call his attention that much.”
Google announced on the official Tech News blog three new features coming to the U.S. edition of the site, including: new larger images on the main news page; real-time updates that will cover only the latest content; and new integration with Google+ content.
The realtime coverage page provides access to “every news story as soon as they become available to Tech News.” The page will also include “Google+ Discussions” to the right, which will even display on the refreshed News homepage. The discussions will only appear to those signed into to Google+ and will consist of comments from journalists, politicians, and those in your Circles currently discussing breaking news.
The Google+ discussions, new realtime coverage page, and larger images will roll out over the next week, but you can upgrade now (here). Google also provided the following instructions to turn off the Google+ integration:
Google has made a small tweak to their Tech News algorithm, which will enable the news aggregator to display featured stories alongside their usual content. A publication can attempt to get their story featured by adding a certain metadata code, and if picked the story will then be recognized by a “featured” tag.
If a publication misuses the tag by adding it to stories more than seven times a week, the algorithm will learn to disregard or sometimes not even recognize the publication. We’d certainly hope they wouldn’t.
Google has released a redesign for Tech News, an aggregated source of news content around the world. The redesign looks very similar to the Plus-esque design we’ve seen across all of Google’s properties — sporting the black bar at the top, more whitespace, new colors, and redesigned search box at the top. Specifically to News, in the left margin users can sort through top stories and categories, in the middle top stories are displayed, and to the right you’ll find recent stories.
