Google on Tuesday announced the launch of its global product called News Showcase in India. Launched in October 2020, News Showcase is a global vehicle to pay news publishers for their content online. It also allows partnering publishers to curate content and provide limited access to paywalled stories for users.
The tech giant has sealed agreements with 30 Indian publishers to offer access to some of their content on News Showcase, including HT Digital Streams Ltd, The Hindu Group, Indian Express Group, ABP LIVE, India TV, NDTV, Zee News, Amar Ujala, Deccan Herald, Punjab Kesari, The Telegraph India, IANS (Indo Asian News Service), and ANI.
The content from these publishers will begin to appear in dedicated News Showcase panels in Google News and on Discover pages in English and Hindi. Support for more local languages will be added in the future.
Google has signed licensing agreements with publishers for editorial curation and it will also pay participating news organizations to give readers access to a limited amount of paywalled content.
“That’s something we are working on with each publisher individually,” said Brad Bender, vice-president, product management, news, Google Inc.
News Showcase is currently live across multiple countries, including UK, Germany and Australia with over 700 news publications.
Google also announced that under the Google News Initiative (GNI) programme, it will train 50,000 journalists and journalism students in strengthening their digital skills to aid reporting and combat misinformation online.
With the GNI Digital Growth Programme, the company said it will offer new business free training workshops in audience development and product innovation.
It will also invest in product training sessions and implementation support to help more than 800 small- and mid-sized Indian news organizations and growing their digital ad revenue with its existing GNI advertising lab. It will launch The GNI Transformation Lab, a programme for 20 local small- and mid-sized Indian news organizations to help them transform every aspect of their business to succeed online.
“From business point of view, we know life will become tougher for businesses in these challenging times. We want to collaborate with news publishers to help them engage with readers and make data-driven decisions to improve their business and reporting efforts,” said Sanjay Gupta, vice president, Google India.
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