My homepage is Google News. Use it all the time, every day.
But here’s one huge problem with a news aggregator that (reportedly) relies solely on software to make editorial judgments: You get headlines such as this one — “4 locals among Circuit City layoffs” — listed as the second most important business story of the moment. First paragraph:
Four workers at the Fort Collins Circuit City store, 4414 S. College Ave., were laid off Wednesday as part of a corporate-wide plan to cut 3,400 higher paid workers and replace them with lower-paid new hires.
Now please don’t think I’m picking on the Coloradoan here; I spent half my life working for a local newspaper and “the local angle,” as we like to call little nuggets such as those four layoff victims, is what local journalism is all about.
But Google News isn’t a local news outlet.
Oh, sure, I can and did scan down to find a version of the same story written from a national perspective, but need to do that demonstrates once again why human editors get the big bucks.
