In early September, Google announced it had changed its news algorithm to highlight original reporting on the web. When Richard Gringas, vice president for Google News, published the change on a blog post, a wave of reactions surged for and against the measure. In online news, it’s hard to break a story and easy to publish articles with similar information once the story is out. Google wants to prioritize that original reporting, bump it up in its Google searches and, thus, make it get more clicks and ad revenues. It doesn’t sound bad, but it points to a more significant concern—the influence that Google has over the news business
