Google News has a method of submitting a feed to them of just your "Editors' Picks." Stories you think are exceptional and deserve more attention on Google News should be ticked off as Editors Picks.
Google said in their help documents:
Editors' Picks enables you to provide up to five links to original news content you believe represents your organization’s best journalistic work at any given moment, and potentially have it displayed on the Google News homepage or select section pages. For instance, you might want to link to a slide show, video page, or topic page that Google News otherwise might not index.
Gawker Media shared some data on how well it works, and it does work well, at least for them.
They said they noticed that their stories that are selected with this option lead to better quality readers from Google News, plus their stories show up more often in the new In The News box in the Google web search results - leading to more traffic. Gawker wrote:
(1) The direct traffic we have been getting from the module has been low volume, but high quality, on the order of 10,000 visits per day (across all site). and those visitors are basically all new to GMG and spend 60% longer reading the articles than average visits.
(2) More importantly, it looks like we are getting picked up by the news block with greater frequency. I looked at the weekly percentage of our traffic that is coming from organic search (from Google Analytics): the jump in the last two weeks is immediately noticeable.
Here is a graph they shared:
Stacie Chan from Google posted this story in the Google News Help forum, hoping more publishers would use this tag wisely. She added, "while I can't comment on some of his hypotheses, glad to see his reported increase in direct, high-quality traffic to Gawker Media's best articles. Plus, he said implementation of Editors' Picks was easy."
I certainly hope this doesn't get abused and thrown away.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
