COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 26/09/2019
Mathew Ingram
While the US obsessed on Wednesday over what technically constitutes impeachment for a sitting American president, European news publishers were focused on something quite different: namely, a decision by Google to play hardball with French media companies when it comes to linking to their content in its search results. As of Wednesday, unless a French publisher specifically says that it wants Google to do so, the search giant will no longer include short excerpts from news stories in its results. Instead, there will just be a headline. It’s not exactly clear how this will look in practice—in an earlier mockup that Google provided of search results with text from news publishers excluded, there was just a big white space where the excerpt and image were supposed to go. Needless to say, not something that is likely to get a lot of clicks.