Hey, Bloggers: Now When You Break a Story, Google Could Credit You For It

If you’ve been wondering whether you blogging and online reporting ever gets noticed, Google is coming to the rescue. Recently, it announced a new meta tag for journalists and bloggers, which credits the publisher who first breaks a story on the Internet.

Sounds good in theory, but in the article “The New Google Journalism Tag Could Work in Reverse,” at the blog SEO and Tech Daily, Charlie Anzman says there are still problems.

First of all the meta tag is actually tags – one for the first person to have the story attributed to them, and one for the first person to syndicate the story online.

The problem with this, Anzman says, is twofold:
1. Most current reputable blog and news organizations credit their source with a link. Now, they could decide to quit doing that and then just use the tag, which isn’t visible to the reader. So the author of the story gets no visibility for his/her work.

2. Anzman says the current trend to switch to popular blogging software means that a plug-in for that software needs to be created to accommodate the meta tag. That means a re-writing of code, so any major adaptation of this meta tag is not in the near future.

Anzman says this doesn’t really solve the problem of “story stealing,” a problem so prevalent that Reuters now prohibits its reporters from breaking stories on Twitter. Other writers pick up the scoops and claim them as their own.

In short, Anzman feels that for Google, it’s back to the drawing board.