Shane Richmond: "From a newsprint point of view wire copy makes perfect sense. It allows us to cover stories that we don’t have resources to cover ourselves. … Online, however, wire copy is redundant."

Yet again, an important reminder: Google News is a much smaller wire-service aggregating operation than Yahoo News. And MSN. And AOL.

"Publishers that routinely carry wire stories on their sites could lose traffic, affecting the prices they charge online advertisers".

"Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the articles it is licensing from news agencies."

Google News will now link directly to stories by the news agencies Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Press Association and the Canadian Press, rather than identical stories on newspapers’ web sites
.