Google. And the news.

Who knew?  I think I'm relatively savvy on topics such as this - technology and the changing nature of the news.  But this aggregation and algorithm story from Megan Garber in The Atlantic is worth a read for a deeper dive into the topic.

Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry - Megan Garber - The Atlantic

There is, on the one hand, an incredibly simple explanation for the shift in news organizations' attitude toward Google: clicks. Google News was founded 10 years ago -- September 22, 2002 -- and has since functioned not merely as an aggregator of news, but also as a source of traffic to news sites. Google News, its executives tell me, now "algorithmically harvests" articles from more than 50,000 news sources across 72 editions and 30 languages. And Google News-powered results, Google says, are viewed by about 1 billion unique users a week. (Yep, that's billion with a b.) Which translates, for news outlets overall, to more than 4 billion clicks each month: 1 billion from Google News itself and an additional 3 billion from web search.

As a Google representative put it, "That's about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute."

Google emphasizes numbers like these not just because they are fairly staggering in the context of a numbers-challenged news industry, but also because they help the company to make its case to that industry. (For more on this, see James Fallows's masterful piece from the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic.) Talking to Google News executives and team members myself in 2010 -- the height of the industry's aggregatory backlash -- I often got a sense of veiled frustration. And of just a bit of bafflement. When you believe that you're working to amplify the impact of good journalism, it can be strange to find yourself publicly resented by journalists. It can be even stranger to find yourself referred to as a vampire. Or a pirate. Or whatever.