Google last week announced a change to how the 10,000 people who rate its search results treat original reporting. These raters provide the human feedback that trains the search engine’s algorithm. The goal of the rater guidelines changes is to boost original news reporting. Google’s blog post on the changes noted news organizations that invest in bringing important stories to light often see their stories disappear from the top of search results as other outlets publish stories pointing to the original scoop. The Verge offered useful analysis of what the impact could be for websites.

The announcement last week came as newspaper publishers, in a rare joint lobbying effort, pushed a bill in Congress that would provide the publishers an antitrust safe harbor to give them greater (any) leverage with tech giants like Google and Facebook.

Google got some praise from journalists who believe the change will allow great reporting from smaller outlets to punch above their domain authority weight:

From a media relations perspective, this tweet from a prominent health technology reporter caught my eye:

As Farr noted in another tweet, she already tends to ignore embargoed announcements, preferring to allocate her time to original reporting. Her tweets got me thinking about how the changes may affect strategy for announcements.

The first thing is, will this really have an impact? It will take months for publishing outlets to determine how much this affects their models. Over time, that will affect their editorial decisions.

If the impact is real, outlets are going to be even less interested than they are now in having a story that everyone else will have too. It’s going to take finding specific angles that appeal to different reporters and outlets because it speaks to their audiences in a particular way. The reporter and outlet that extensively covered your last announcement may not be the right place for the next one.

Even if this has a significant impact on boosting original reporting, I’m not sure it will dissuade companies from using an embargo for, say, a product announcement. An outlet that covers the cell phone industry will still want to have content on new handsets being announced, for example.

Perhaps the biggest impact will be on online reputation management: If original reporting is boosted in Google results long term, a tough story about your product or organization perhaps is less likely to drift off the first page over time.

What do you think will happen? What signs should we watch for to measure the impact of the changes on websites that will change editorial behavior?