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  • Matters Arising
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Local news in Google News

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 1042–1044 (2022)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 11 August 2022

The Original Article was published on 21 September 2020

arising from S. Fischer et al. Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00954-0 (2020)

Research has shown the benefit of news aggregators to (particularly small) publishers1,2,3,4. Fischer et al.5 seek to inform whether the struggles of local news outlets are impacted by the frequency with which Google News chooses to display their articles, asking if it leads users and revenue away from local newspapers, eventually claiming that local news outlets are disadvantaged relative to national ones. I find the authors’ measures of inequality in Google News’ results to be highly biased by a significant error in their construction; its correction reduces their measure on average 56% and up to 86% for some topics. Additionally, the authors fail to highlight that the vast majority of even the first few results for local topics are from local outlets, which casts doubt on the general claim that ‘Google News users are exposed to far more national news outlets than local outlets’. I find that the authors take their conclusions further than their data and results can support.

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Data availability

Data for the original analysis in ref. 5, used for replication in this study, are available via the associated OSF repository for the original authors’ project (https://osf.io/hwuxf/?view_only=3fa7499661df487689031e11b8ea20b4).

Code availability

Original code is available via the associated OSF repository for this project (https://osf.io/ufrmw/?view_only=640aa0fb41364008b118ee5d001f2f65).

References

  1. Athey, S., Mobius M., & Pal, J. The Impact of Aggregators on Internet News Consumption (NBER, 2021); http://ww.nber.org/papers/w28746

  2. Calzada, J. & Gil, R. What do news aggregators do? Evidence from Google News in Spain and Germany. Mark. Sci. 39, 134–167 (2020).

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  3. Chiou, L. & Tucker, C. Content aggregation by platforms: the case of the news media. J. Econ. Manag.Strat. 26, 782–805 (2017).

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  4. Impact on Competition and on Free Market of the Google Tax of AEDE Fee: Report for the Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodical Publications (AEEPP, 2017).

  5. Fischer, S., Jaidka, K. & Lelkes, Y. Auditing local news presence on Google News. Nat. Hum. Behav. 4, 1236–1244 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Abernathy, P. M. The Expanding News Desert (UNC Press, 2018).

  7. Mahone, J., Wang, Q., Napoli, P., Weber, M. & McCollough, K. Who’s Producing Local Journalism? (Duke Univ., 2019).

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Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge comments from F. Curto Millet. Any errors are my own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Google LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA

    Evan Magnusson

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  1. Evan Magnusson
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E.M. drafted and revised the manuscript, as well as performed the data analyses.

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Correspondence to Evan Magnusson.

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At the time of writing, the author was employed by Google LLC. The views represented here, however, are personal and do not bind Google.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Christo Wilson, Jinhyuk Yun and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Magnusson, E. Local news in Google News. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1042–1044 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01421-8

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