Google continues its invesment in mobile services with the addition of locally relevant headlines to its Google News mobile service. 

The ?News near you? location-based service for Google News mobile will be available in the United States for Android smartphones and the iPhone. It surfaces news relevant to the city a user is in as well as the surrounding areas.

?We're constantly updating our mobile products, and this is just another example of our continued investment in mobile services,? said Jeannie Hornung, a spokesperson for Mountain View, CA-based Google. ?For readers, this is one more way they can find a wide variety of stories from the thousands of news sites that Google News sends millions of people to every day.?

Google introduced Google News for mobile in 2006 and first made location-based news available via the desktop-based Google News in 2008.

Serving locally relevant headlines is accomplished by analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

?I don?t think this is surprising as Google has been continuing to push into local markets from maps to show times to search,? said Josh Martin, senior analyst, WMS, at Strategy Analytics, Newton, MA. ?News is a natural evolution of the product line.?

Distinct print, mobile markets
To use the new location-based mobile feature, users can visit Google News from the browser of an Android smartphone or iPhone. First-time visitors will see a pop-up asking them if they want to share their location. Those who do will see a new section called ?News near you? at the bottom of the homepage.

The feature can be turned off at any time.

?This is a way for Google to provide what it thinks are more relevant news articles to people,? said Carl Howe, director of consumer research at Yankee Group, Boston. ?But people don?t always want local news, for example people traveling want news from home.?

For those consumers that do want local news, Google will have to compete with local newspapers and local TV news, per Mr. Howe.

?Clearly this is a threat to newspapers that tend to focus on local news,? he said. ?You are going to end up with distinct markets since some people like news in paper form and some like it electronically.?

The new service comes at a time when there media companies continue to push into mobile with their own apps. However, newspapers haven?t led the charge on location-based news, per Mr. Martin.

?This could actually be a boon for local papers that may not be equipped to create location-based news offerings but instead rely on Google to direct users to articles on partners? sites,? Mr. Martin said.

?The alternative perspective is that increased reliance on Google could diminish the newspaper brand and simply turn it into a link on a search page instead of a source for news,? he said.

One interesting question raised by Google?s move into this location-based mobile news service is whether it will include nearby Tweets into a news feed, which could further diminish the role of the newspaper, per Mr. Martin.

?If newspapers learn how to work with Google (perhaps geo-tagging stories for location accuracy for example) it could be a new way that users consume news and a new traffic driver to mobile newspapers,? he said.

Final Take