There was a time when Google News languished at having 4,000 sources — at least that’s what it said on the front page. These days the front page of Google News doesn’t say anything about source numbers, so I was very interested to see a Google News blog post
that mentioned 25,000 sources being used in the news search engine.

But that’s actually not what the blog post was there to announce. It was announcing that you can now search Google News for the work of specific journalists. Actually you can do a lot more than that so let’s have some fun.

The special syntax for finding article by author is author:. It can be combined with keywords and other special syntax; thus author:smith intitle:football location:ca is a perfectly acceptable query for Google News.

That’s the other thing. When you’re using the author syntax you don’t have to search for full names. You can see which authors named Fred are writing about baseball in Kentucky. You can check out which writers have the last name of Staff (there’s actually quite a few of them.) And you can check out which authors for some reason got an AP appended to their names for some stories and sometimes they didn’t. (I know they work for the AP, it’s just how their names are formatted sometimes. Search for author:”Jeannine Aversa” and then search for author:”Jeannine Aversa-AP” to see what I mean.

Not quite sure how I’ll use this yet, but I’m always happy to see more special syntax.