A Note on the Two Faces of Google News

The desktop version of Google news has two interfaces: an older “News Archives” version and a newer “Breaking News” interface. Here’s what they look like.

The “News Archive” view:

rupert murdoch1

The new “Reader” view, rolled out in July 2017:

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The big differences are the reduction is clutter, the use of a card-based interface, the better highlighting of local and in-depth coverage, and better paths to related content, whether through fact-checks or topical tags. For people browsing the news, the new interface does a better job of flagging expertise and exposing people to diverse perspectives.

While the “reader” interface provides a better reading and browsing experience it provides a bad experience for verification. There are no snippets of keywords in context, there’s no access to date filters, and old content is not available through the interface.

Here, for example, is what we get when we search for the DART officer story in the “News Reader” interface:

DART

This is because the event, which happened two weeks ago, is already is already too old for the “reader” view. If you click the Google News Archive link, it will take you to both the older interface and the older news articles.

The reader view also is missing a number of important tools for verification that we’ll talk about using later, like full date range filtering and keyword in context.

If you use the select-and-right-click method we show here, you should end up at the “news archive” view which is what you want. If you end up in the news reader by mistake, your best move is to go to google.com, make your search, and click the news tab. In general use the reader view for browsing recent news, but avoid it when using Google News for verification purposes.