Google News refuses to index MyBallard.com and Cory Bergman, who runs the Seattle neighborhood news site with his wife, is bugged big-time:

Both my wife and I are longtime journalists, and I have several national and regional journalism awards. Approximately 80-90 percent of our coverage is original (the rest is aggregation). We publish multiple stories and photos a day, and our coverage routinely beats every Seattle news organization to Ballard news. We have 23,000 monthly unique users in a neighborhood of 40,000 people — one of the most successful neighborhood news sites in the country.

What’s incredibly frustrating is breaking a story and watching a local TV station or newspaper duplicate it in a matter of hours. The local media version appears on Google News. Ours does not. This happens every few days.

So why does Google refuse to list us? I wish I knew. In our last exchange, they asked that we display “organizational information, including evidence of multiple writers and editors, and accessible contact information.” We adjusted our “about” page to ensure we clearly listed our organization, Next Door Media LLC, as well as our names and our email address. They then asked where they could find this information, so we told them, um, to click “about” in the main navigation. […]

[T]his is the new model of community journalism: neighborhood reporters working out of their homes, providing a layer of journalism over a vibrant community (something, I might add, does not always require “multiple writers and editors.”) This is the future of low-cost, high-relevancy, community-powered local coverage. But oddly, Google News enforces the old definition of a news organization. It’s discriminatory, narrow-minded and exclusive.

And certainly evil.

He makes a good point. Public policy in the U.S. has long favored media localism even as technological developments undermine the rationale. Media economics push what’s left of localism towards coverage of huge regional media market stories. Local news programs are filled with syndicated, general-interest, feature packages tarted up as local reports while important “hyper-local” stories go unreported.

The Internet has long been viewed as an opportunity to put the “local” back in localism. Blogs and social networks make media into a platform ordinary citizens can use to report on their neighborhoods. A whole new level of localism has thus been enabled, even as finding an economic model to make it work has proven difficult.

That a giant multinational corporation would choose to add to that difficulty by using a Big Media definition of news should not come as a surprise. That Google, despite its “do no evil” egalitarian philosophy, has chosen that definition is a serious blow. Those of us who care about localism can only hope Google has the good sense to revise their definition.