Google News Showcase signs deal with 80 news publishers in one year

Launched last year in May with 30 news publishers on board, Google News Showcase has signed deals with more than 80 partners representing more than 130 publications in a year. 

Google has onboarded publications including national, regional and local news organisations like Times Group, The Hindu Group, HT Digital Streams, Indian Express Group, ABP LIVE, India TV, NDTV, Zee News, Amar Ujala, Deccan Herald, Punjab Kesari, The Telegraph India, IANS and ANI for News Showcase. 

Google News Showcase has also expanded to more languages over the past year and now supports a total of eight languages including Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Bengali - along with English and Hindi.

In a blog post, Kate Beddoe, Director, News Partnerships, APAC and Durga Raghunath, Head of India News Partnerships at Google, wrote, “This time last year, we announced a package of investments to support India’s news ecosystem, including launching Google News Showcase - our new product experience for readers and licensing program for news publishers. One year on, we continue to learn and evolve the program, work with more publishers and strengthen our partnership with the news industry through training and tools designed to equip newsrooms to leverage the digital opportunity.”

Google has been providing training and resources for news businesses and journalists, for example, GNI Startups Lab, GNI Newsroom Leadership Program and GNI Advertising Lab.

GNI Startups Labs

The tech giant recently concluded the GNI Startups Labs program in India, with 10 news media start-ups participating in the 4-month program designed to support and contribute to the acceleration of the news ecosystem in the digital environment. The program began in December 2021 and participating news start-ups had access to mentorship, training and workshops on topics such as audience-centricity, digital products, business models, marketing, strategy, community building and fundraising.

GNI Advertising Lab

Google also completed the GNI Advertising Lab, a six-month effort launched in partnership with Dataleads and Mediology (Readwhere) to support more than 200 small and medium news organisations in their digital advertising journey. The goal of the GNI Advertising Lab is to help publishers increase their advertising revenue with product training and technical implementation.

GNI Newsroom Leadership Program in collaboration with Columbia School of Journalism

Google called for applications late last year and the program kicked off in April 2022 with its first India-only cohort, comprising fellows from a variety of newsrooms, both legacy and digital native.

The program aims to strengthen the leadership skills and decision-making capacity of newsroom leaders working and living in India, with a particular focus on applied technology, audience understanding, design thinking, data applications, emerging business models and editorial innovation.

The projects that the fellows have chosen to work on focus on topics like citizen journalism, managing a remote workforce, environment and climate change reporting, artificial intelligence, podcasting and subscriber growth among others.

Expanded support for newsrooms to combat misinformation

Last year Google announced that, with increased support from the News Lab, it will train 50,000 journalists and journalism students, with a focus on verification and tools to combat misinformation online. Google also expanded programs to connect Indian journalists and fact-checkers, building on our existing work with the GNI India Training Network in partnership with DataLeads.

To date, it has trained over 39,000 Indian journalists in 10 languages, touching more than 1,200 news organisations and more than 1100 universities. Google also supported Ekta Coalition, a consortium of six independent fact-checking groups and Meedan, a global technology non-profit, to run a media literacy and fact-checking training and fellowship for journalism students.

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