Google India has introduced Google News Showcase, a new online experience and licensing programme. According to the IT giant, this programme incentivises and supports news publishers to curate high quality content on Google’s News and Discover platforms, connecting readers with the news they need.
The tech giant is also stepping up its efforts to strengthen digital skills in newsrooms and journalism schools across India. It will train 50,000 journalists and journalism students over the next three years, it stated.
It will introduce several new programmes to help small and mid-sized publications achieve financial sustainability – all part of the GNI Digital Growth Program, which has already trained executives at 100 Indian news organizations since launching last year.
This builds on news showcase deals signed by 700 news publications in more than a dozen countries, including Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, the U.K. Australia, Czechia, Italy and Argentina, more than 90 percent of them representing local or community news — with discussions underway in several other countries.
Google added, “These investments will help people find quality journalism, contribute to the sustainability of news organizations, and expand our programs under the Google News Initiative — enabling newsrooms to engage their readers in new and compelling ways through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.”
Content from Indian publisher partners in English and Hindi will begin to appear in dedicated News Showcase panels in Google News and on Discover.
The company is committed to launching in additional Indic languages this year and will continue to incorporate more languages in the future. “As part of our licensing agreements with publishers, we're also paying participating news organizations to give readers access to a limited amount of paywalled content. This feature means readers will have the opportunity to read more of a publisher’s articles than they would otherwise be able to, while deepening readers’ relationships with publishers and encouraging them to subscribe,” it stated.
