If I were Google, how would I charge for news?

Custom sources.

• Named sources.
  • Google News Beta covers about 4000 feeds. I bet you'd love to get coverage of more news sources directly related to your occupation, industry, market segments, and country. Ask your workforce for their 20 favorite news sources. List your 100 competitors. Trade rags. Your suppliers, and their trade publications. The schools you hire from. The agencies that regulate you.
• Private sources.
  • Get news from your intranet. Departmental sites. In-house and partner klognets. Customer facing blogs. System generated reports.

Tweaked ranking.

• Favor internal and named sources over common, generic sources.

Geocoding.

• Get local with news. Your enterprise has physical locations. So do your customers, competitors, partners, and suppliers. Tweak rankings to keep you up to speed on your backyard.

Custom categories.

• "Business" is a huge category. So is "Sci/Tech." If you're a pharmaceutical company, you want a category for each application of each medicine you make. You want categories for each regulatory body (help that legal department), for each major customer (help that sales force), for each technology you use (help that R&D department).

Faster refresh.

• From 15 minutes or so to every 30 seconds? If you're bidding on Government contracts, trading stocks, or assessing terrorist threats, you want speed.

GoogleBox hosting.

• Host the application on your Google Appliance. Faster search. Access to intranet sources. Secure access to content and categories.

Private label for corporate web sites.

• Put real, live industry headlines on your public media relations page.
• Put real, live industry headlines about you on your public media relations page.  

Transcoding.

• Deliver content to portable devices: SMS, PDAs, iMode, hiptops, field tablets.
• Speak the news, for the audio centric.
• Assemble a synthetic television station, Google Headline News, featuring video clips assembled from across the net.  

Personalization.

• Features aren't evident yet but I expect to be able to customize all of the above down to the individual user. My GoogleNews. Portal friendly RSS feeds.

So there's a business here, especially for customers feeling the pain of information overload, overwork, rapidly changing environments, and high employee turnover.

Feed your news junkies well and they will always come back for more.

See also:

• Google Compute opens doors.
• A few challenges for Google Intranet.
• Five Potential Extensions to the Google Toolbar by Michael Sippey.