Editors’ Picks enables you to provide five links to original news content that you believe represents your organisation’s best journalistic work at any given moment and potentially have it displayed on the Google News homepage. For instance, you might want to link to a slide show, video page or topic page that Google News otherwise might not index.
We believe that Editors’ Picks will help readers follow their favourite news sources and discover other interesting sources that they may not currently know. Readers can also easily express a preference for the sources they like or indicate that they prefer not to see that source very often - thereby building a more direct relationship with publishers.
To participate in Editors’ Picks as a publisher, you will need to create and submit a customised RSS feed. There are guidelines for supplying and managing the feed, as well as technical specifications.
If, upon reviewing the RSS feed, we find that it does not meet our guidelines, we may disable it in our system. Additionally, pending our own quality measures and user feedback, we may re-review or automatically disable your RSS feed at any time.
RSS Feed Guidelines
- We only accept news content for Editors’ Picks. Your picks should reflect the best pieces of journalism on your site at any given time! Do not include links to subscription offers, how-to articles, stock quotes, classified ads, weather forecasts or the like.
- We require a logo image to be linked in the feed. The image must follow these specifications:
- Image dimensions must match one of two options:
- Option 1: Width of 250 px, Height of between 20 and 40 px
- Option 2: Height of 40 px, Width of between 125 and 250 px
- Image must be in .png format.
- File size should only be as large as necessary, i.e. just a few KBs.
- Logo background should be transparent.
- Avoid any white space around the logo.
- Please add at least one additional item to the feed every 48 hours. Feeds not updated at all within 48 hours will not be shown to users. Individual items in the feed can be older than 48 hours, as long as at least one item in the feed has been recently updated. Ideally, the feed would be updated once or twice per day.
- We require authors' names for each article. If the article has no specific author, please provide a generic byline, such as “[Your News Org] Staff”. The formatting that you use will be reflected on Google News, so we ask you to use standard capitalisation and hyphenation for authors' names. For example, you should use "John Smith" rather than “JOHN SMITH”. You do not need to include the word “by” within the <author> tags.
- If possible, keep your headlines short. We truncate headlines in Editors’ Picks if they run beyond 75 characters.
- We will only show articles from RSS feeds containing at least three articles. If you include more than five articles, we will only display the top five articles in Editors’ Picks.
After you have reviewed the technical specs below, please submit your RSS feed via our contact form.
Technical Specifications
NOTE: We accept both standard RSS and Atom feeds.
Standard RSS feeds
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom10='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<channel>
<link>http://www.link_to_channel.com</link>
<description>Description of the channel (e.g. News Site’s best articles of the day)</description>
<title>News Site’s editor’s picks</title>
<image>
<url>http://www.link_to_logo_image.png</url>
<title>text to use as alternative for the image</title>
<link>http://www.link_pointed_to_by_the_image.com</link>
</image>
<item>
<title>Headline for first article</title>
<link>http://www.newssite.com/long-island/first-article-1.2654166</link>
<description>Some details</description>
<author>Author's name</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Headline for second article</title>
<link>http://www.newssite.com/second-article-1.2654350</link>
<description>Some details</description>
<author>Author's name</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Headline for third article</title>
<link>http://www.newssite.com/third-article-1.2654952</link>
<description>Some details</description>
<author>Author's name</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Headline for fourth article</title>
<link>http://www.newssite.com/fourth-article-1.3732094</link>
<description>Some details</description>
<author>Author's name</author>
</item>
<item>
<title>Headline for fifth article</title>
<link>http://www.newssite.com/fifth-article-1.2654358</link>
<description>Some details</description>
<author>Author's name</author>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Additionally, we request (but do not require) publishers to give us:
<lastBuildDate>date</lastBuildDate> in the <channel> tag <pubDate>datetime</pubDate> in the <item> tag
Atom feeds
If you submit an Atom feed, you can provide the article link either in the link tag (i.e. link href=”http://www.newssite.com/article” rel=”alternate” type=”html/text”) or the <content> tag. Please be consistent for each entry throughout the feed. If you use both, we will extract the article URL from the link tag.
<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?-->
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<title>News Site’s editor’s picks</title>
<link href="http://www.link_to_channel.com" rel="self">
<id>unique:id</id>
<logo>http://www.link_to_logo_image.png</logo>
<updated>2011-03-15T10:30:00Z</updated>
<entry>
<title>Headline for first article</title>
<id>unique:id</id>
<content>http://www.newssite.com/first-article-1.2654166
</content>
<updated>2011-03-15T10:30:00Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Author's name</name>
</author>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Headline for second article</title>
<id>unique:id</id>
<content>http://www.newssite.com/second-article-1.2654166
</content>
<updated>2011-03-15T10:30:00Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Author's name</name>
</author>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Headline for third article</title>
<id>unique:id</id>
<content>http://www.newssite.com/third-article-1.2654166
</content>
<updated>2011-03-15T10:30:00Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Author's name</name>
</author>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Headline for fourth article</title>
<id>unique:id</id>
<content>http://www.newssite.com/fourth-article-1.2654166
</content>
<updated>2011-03-15T10:30:00Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Author's name</name>
</author>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Headline for fifth article</title>
<id>unique:id</id>
<content>http://www.newssite.com/fifth-article-1.2654166
</content>
<updated>2011-03-15T10:30:00Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Author's name</name>
</author>
</entry>
</feed>