Tag Archives: Google News Initiative

Launching the AI Academy for small newsrooms

As people searched for the latest information on COVID-19 last year, including school reopenings and travel restrictions, the BBC recognized they needed to find new ways of bringing their journalism to their audiences. They released a new online tool, the BBC Corona Bot, which uses artificial intelligence to draw on BBC News’ explanatory journalism. It responds with an answer to a reader’s specific question where possible, or points to health authorities’ websites when appropriate. AI technology allowed BBC News to reach new audiences and drive more traffic to their stories and explainers. 

This is one example of how AI can help newsrooms. AI can help build new audiences and automate tasks, freeing up time for journalists to work on the more creative aspects of news production and leaving tedious and repetitive tasks to machines. However, newsrooms around the world have told researchers they worry that access to AI technology is unequal. They fear big publishers likely will benefit most from artificial intelligence, while smaller news organizations could get left behind. 

To help bridge this gap, the Google News Initiative is partnering with Polis, the London School of Economics and Political Science’s journalism think tank, to launch a training academy for 20 media professionals to learn how AI can be used to support their journalism. 

The AI Academy for Small Newsrooms is a six-week long, free online program taught by industry-leading journalists and researchers who work at the intersection of journalism and AI. It will start in September 2021 and will welcome journalists and developers from small news organizations in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region.

By the end of the course, participants will have a practical understanding of the challenges and opportunities of AI technologies. They will learn examples of how to use AI to automate repetitive tasks, such as interview transcription or image search, as well as how to optimize newsroom processes by getting insights on what content is most engaging.

For example, other newsrooms using AI technology in the region include Schibsted, a Nordic news outlet that developed an innovative model to reduce gender bias in news coverage, while in Spain, El Pais uses an AI-based tool to moderate toxic comments.

Most importantly, participants will create action plans to guide the development of AI projects within their news organizations. JournalismAI will share these plans openly to help other publishers around the world.

This pilot program — which we plan to launch in other regions in 2022 — is part of a broader training effort over the last three years by JournalismAI, a partnership between the GNI and Polis to forester AI literacy in newsrooms globally. More than 110,000 participants have already taken the online training modules available on the Google News Initiative Training Center.

This year, JournalismAI will also create an AI Journalism Starter Pack to make the information about AI in journalism more accessible to small and local publishers. It will include examples of AI tools that can solve small and local publishers' basic needs such as tagging or transcribing.

Find more detailed information on the AI Academy for Small Newsrooms and how to apply on the JournalismAI website. The deadline for applications is 11:59 PM GMT on August 1, 2021.

How local news in Argentina is using News Showcase

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series we’re doing featuring local publishers using Google News Showcase. Thanks to the three Argentinian publishers who shared their thoughts and insight on the impact that News Showcase is providing for their coverage. In the coming months we’ll have more from local News Showcase news partners around the globe. 

ADIRA, The Asociación de Diarios del Interior de la República Argentina, is a regional press association that brings together newspaper publishers throughout Argentina. Many of our partner publications have worked with Google over the years, through Google News Initiative, trainings and now nearly 50 of them are a part of Google News Showcase. Google's efforts have been important in helping our journalism reach and develop stronger relationships with readers and diversify our revenue.

The transition from print to digital for newspapers outside the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires is slow and difficult, where smaller papers can’t generally afford to hire the necessary tech professionals to make digital changes needed to reach readers. But it has been easy for smaller publications to use News Showcase, helping them reach new audiences. 

News Showcase, alongside Google’s other product efforts and programming from the Google News Initiative, has great potential to grow and deepen reader relationships for newsrooms in Argentina through new ways to highlight stories, greater control over showcasing our brand and additional tools for paywalled content.

Here is how three local ADIRA publications — El Litoral, La Opinión de Rafaela and La Gaceta — are using News Showcase to expand their digital strategies and build relationships with readers. 

El Litoral

Magalí Suarez, Content Coordinator at El Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina

Founded in 1918, El Litoral is a regional newspaper in Santa Fe, Argentina, producing several supplements, specialized magazines, a second provincial newspaper, a TV channel and more. 

News Showcase came at a critical time for all media, especially for those of us who are strongly betting on digital growth. Even in the middle of an unprecedented health and economic crisis, we’ve continued to produce quality content for our readers. News Showcase allows us to "package" our journalists’ content, provide context to the information and offer readers more tools so they can inform themselves around stories responsibly. 

Overall News Showcase has allowed us to improve engagement by including related news, create panels that better position our stories/content for our target audience, highlight the journalism that distinguishes us from other news organizations and give our readers a way to get information and context in an easy, organized way.

We think News Showcase has helped us to solve complex challenges such as how to better engage with readers in a crowded news environment. This is a very good start in laying the foundations for sustainability in the future. 

An image that shows four different News Showcase panels from our news partner El Litoral in Argentina.

An example of how News Showcase panels look for El Litoral in Argentina. 

La Opinión

Nestor Fenoglio, Newsroom manager, Rafaela, Argentina

At La Opinión we work to cover the stories that the people of Rafaela, a city of 100,000 people in Argentina, rely on. We’re constantly striving to find ways to bring our storytelling closer to readers alongside developing new strategies to relay what is relevant to our region. At the same time, we also want to find ways to bring our work from smaller communities closer to larger audiences in the cities.

Having financial support with programs like Google News Showcase allows us to continue betting on newsroom structures that guarantee quality journalism, the kind of journalism our town deserves.

We are continuing to test out the product to find new ways to highlight our content and offer additional context to readers. So far, the content that has worked best has in general been related to the COVID-19 pandemic: news about restrictions, the evolution of the virus, life stories of people impacted by it and how the pandemic evolved in different parts of the country.


La Gaceta 

Daniel Dessein, President of La Gaceta.

La Gacetais a leading journalistic company in the North of Argentina that publishes a regional newspaper with the largest circulation in the country, is involved in television production, and runs an online edition with four million unique monthly users and more than 20,000 digital subscribers.

The News Showcase feature called extended access lets our readers read select paywalled content, opening the way for us to give our thoughtful and in-depth journalism a greater audience than it might have had and hopefully turn them into eventual subscribers. This feature has substantially reduced user friction to access these kinds of stories in La Gaceta, and significantly increased the daily number of new readers who have signed in. This has helped diversify our revenue and provided access to potential new subscribers we didn’t have before.

A screen grab of a News Showcase panel by La Gaceta that demonstrates how extended access, a feature that gives readers access to select paywalled stories, looks.

An example of how extended access looks on a News Showcase panel by La Gaceta in Argentina.  

A reader survey we carried out provided positive feedback about News Showcase. The majority of people told us they like having a flexible, well-selected menu of news stories, with the necessary context to decide which they want to read. And overall, the content that worked best for us was related to the pandemic, but sports articles have also performed well in the last month. We look forward to continuing to use and test the product. 

Cause and effect: The outlook for American news media

The outlook for American news journalism has significantly shifted over the years. To shed light on what caused this shift, my team at Accenture recently completed an analysis of newspaper revenues over two decades. And while some suggest that tech companies like Google have taken the ad revenue from news publishers, our analysis reveals a more complex story. 


Smartphones and high-speed broadband brought the wonders of the internet to our fingertips. With technological advances have come tremendous volumes of content from around the world — academic sources, specialist and topic-specific news and other content — offering consumers choice about how, where and in what format they access content. 


This availability of digital news and other content has fragmented audiences and, in turn, advertiser revenue and balance sheets shrunk. Thousands of American journalists have been laid off, and the industry has consolidated as publishers cut costs. 


Now, with a growing debate about how tomorrow’s news industry should be shaped, it’s important to consider how digitization brought change to the news business of today. 

Americans are deepening their engagement with news

In our report, we found the underlying consumer demand for news is growing. A quarter of Americans report a significant increase in the amount of news they consume and more Americans are paying for news.

A chart showing that 54% of Americans report increasing their news consumption over the past five years

Total newspaper readership grew to 62 million paying readers and, between 2015 and 2018, 17 million more American readers purchased an online subscription. This mimics the global trend of growth in digital news circulation far exceeding any print readership decline.


Pew Research also reports readers are increasingly turning to local news outlets, with one in four Americans becoming more engaged with local content through the pandemic.

Publisher revenues in decline

As readers become more attuned to digital devices and digital news, advertisers have followed, with corresponding impacts for news publishers. 

Newspaper revenues peaked ahead of the 2005 global financial crisis, but fell by more than 52% to $27.4 billion over the 15 year period to 2018 in nominal terms. Display advertising revenues earned by news publishers fell to $13.4 billion over this period but the majority of the decline in total newspaper revenues resulted from the loss of classified revenue — which fell more than 86% to $2.6 billion.

A chart showing the decline on spending on classifieds ads accounts for 53% of the overall newspaper revenue decline

Of course, classifieds didn’t simply disappear. We still seek out used cars, jobs and homes on Craigslist, Zillow, eBay and other sites, and classified advertising revenues have continued to grow, but more than $15.8 billion in classifieds revenue has gone from publisher balance sheets and is no longer available to subsidize newsrooms.

A chart showing that newspapers have lost classifieds revenue to "pure play" classifieds websites over time

Online advertising revenues drive overall ad market growth

Our research did not find a single category of media advertising that declined materially in absolute value since 2003 in a way that is attributable to online search. The growth in online advertising, which includes digital classifieds, display and search ad revenues, reflects the consumer shift to the online world, and themore cost-effective nature of online ads. 

A chart showing that growth in online advertising has supported overall advertising growth since 2004

Spending on search advertising has reached $55 billion in annual revenue, almost three quarters of which came from overall market growth, not from classifieds. In other words, search advertising has attracted new advertising dollars that would not otherwise have been directed to other categories. 

A chart showing that search advertising has grown $51.4B, predominantly from new opportunities

The outlook ahead

While news publisher revenues have come under significant strain since advertising revenues peaked in the early 2000s, we can be reassured that Americans continue to engage with and value news.


We shouldn’t downplay the challenges, including the open questions about the role of journalism in modern society and related issues of trust in the media. But as the economy recovers, there are reasons for optimism. Some publishers report that ad revenues have fully rebounded from pandemic-induced lows and stronger revenue growth is expected in 2021 than at any time in the past 40 years. 


A study from the association of Local Independent and Online News publishers (LION) identified “tremendous growth” in the number of digital native, local news organizations in North America. Perhaps most encouraging - while media jobs are still being lost, hundreds of media jobs are starting to be added.


Without doubt, the outlook for news journalism remains a complex story — one that deserves careful attention and fact-based debate. I hope this study helps contribute to the conversation. 

Working together to transform journalism training

Ignoring vowels, removing connecting letters and recording up to 150 words a minute. It’s not the latest algorithmic advance, but instead something many U.K. journalists will recognise as Teeline: a shorthand transcribing skill which forms part of a formal journalism qualification.


Two decades ago, as a journalism student in London, I was taught the importance of law, ethics and editorial values, as well as the technical skills required to be a journalist. While the fundamentals of journalism may not have altered since, it’s clear technology has radically changed how journalists work, not to mention the changing habits of their audiences.


Alongside the shifting landscape, we’re announcing our support for the  Journalism Skills Academy (JSA): an e-learning platform from the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ). This will help digitally transform the way they provide assessments, qualifications and workshops, while also helping how they overhaul their approach to learning and education. 

NCTJ’s CEO, Joanne Butcher, says the new platform means distance learners no longer need to receive materials in the post, but instead can access them with a few mouse clicks. “It’s the latest move to ensure our work remains compelling, relevant and innovative,” she says. The organisation plans to develop a range of new courses and resources over the next 18 months. 


The Journalism Skills Academy website

The Journalism Skills Academy website


In addition, for the fifth consecutive year, we’re also supporting the Journalism Diversity Fund to help the next generation of journalists. As lead sponsor of the fund, we join 20 associations, broadcasters and publishers to provide bursaries to people from underrepresented backgrounds who need help funding their NCTJ journalism training. 


Joanne says the NCTJ is “absolutely delighted that we will be able to strengthen further the relationship between our organisations in the years ahead, as we grow these key areas of the NCTJ’s work.”

A group of people in professional attire stand in front of a wall with several Reuters logos.

Recipients of the Journalism Diversity Fund attending an event in London.


Training never stops when you become a qualified journalist. For a second year, the Google News Initiative is supporting the University of Central Lancashire to deliver the Journalism Innovation & Leadership Programme to provide postgraduate training opportunities for mid-career journalists from the U.K. and abroad.


Academics will select experienced journalists who apply to take part in an intensive 30-week course seeking to develop leadership, operational and product thinking skills, helping to connect people and build lasting relationships across the industry. The curriculum is grounded in industry insights tracking emerging trends and relevant themes. 


“It's perhaps never been more critical for those committed to the sustainability of journalism to take time out of the newsroom to think and learn from others as they assess new opportunities and ways of working,” says Dr François Gilson from UCLan. 


At the Google News Lab, we provide online resources on a range of digital tools, and in recent years we’ve trained 14,000 U.K. journalists and journalism students. We’re continuing to work with partners around the world, to find new ways to support personal development, both for staff journalists and freelancers.

We’re expanding our support of news in Canada

Access to trustworthy information is important to all of us, and it’s vital for society to continue supporting the reporters who work tirelessly to deliver us news. That’s why today we are announcing new investments to continue our support of Canadian newsrooms and journalists across the country. 

Support for Canadian journalism through News Showcase

We have signed agreements with a number of Canadian publishers for Google News Showcase, a product and licensing program that provides a space for newsrooms to curate their content for readers across Google News and Discover. These deals will help support Canadian newsrooms that provide comprehensive general-interest news to the communities they serve. This long-term investment will support news organizations in producing, distributing and explaining essential information to readers. The first Canadian partners for News Showcase are Black Press Media, Glacier Media, The Globe and Mail, Métro Média, Narcity Media, SaltWire Network, Village Media and Winnipeg Free Press.

Together, these eight publishers represent national, regional and local news that touches communities in both official languages from coast-to-coast-to-coast in Canada. Today’s announcement builds on News Showcase deals signed by nearly 800 news publications around the world. More than 90% of these publications represent local or regional news. 

This image shows the logos of Google’s current partners for News Showcase in Canada: Black Press Media, Glacier Media, The Globe and Mail, Métro Média, Narcity Media, SaltWire Network, Village Media and Winnipeg Free Press

 Logos of our current News Showcase news partners in Canada

As part of our licensing deals, we’re also paying news organizations for access to select paywalled content, giving Canadians access to a wide range of news content. We work closely with news outlets to determine the right amount of content to share to help drive subscriptions as users experience the benefits of subscribing to authoritative news outlets.

There will be more partnerships to come as we continue to engage in active negotiations with publishers across Canada. We look forward to launching News Showcase here soon. 

What publishers are saying about News Showcase

  • “We are pleased that Google has stepped up to the plate and signed an important partnership with Black Press Media and others,” says Rick O’Connor, CEO and President, Black Press Media, home to some of the most established newspapers in B.C. and Alberta. “There are many other benefits as part of the agreement where Google will assist us in further developing our digital properties. I am pleased to see that Google will also be assisting the small, independent newspapers and websites adapt to an increasing digital world."
  • “Google News Showcase will help support news in communities across Canada large and small, and increase accessibility to daily content. In addition, Glacier Media and our partners have benefited directly from the Google News Initiative,” says Alvin Brouwer, President Glacier Media Digital, which owns more than 60 community media outlets throughout Western Canada. “Their new initiatives to train more than 5,000 journalists in Canada over the next three years to enhance their digital skills, and to provide business-oriented workshops to small and mid-sized news organizations will also help in communities across the country.”
  • “Google News Showcase will introduce even more readers to our award-winning journalism and we're pleased to count Google as a global strategic partner,” says Phillip Crawley, CEO & Publisher of The Globe and Mail. “Reaching new audiences and showing them how The Globe can add value to their daily lives is a necessary step in continuing to grow our digital subscriber base, which is the largest in Canada. This long-term, comprehensive partnership will not only support the extraordinary work of our journalists, but it will also help to accelerate our continued investment in technological innovation and improving the reader experience.”
  • “Our partnership will help enhance our effort to create original local journalistic content and strengthen our mission to give a voice to citizens of Montreal and Quebec City,” says Andrew Mule, president of Métro Média, which owns Journal Métro and local community publications in the Montréal area and in Quebec City. “The GNI training has been a source of inspiration for our teams.”
  • “An investment like this not only benefits us financially as a publisher to help us recruit talented journalists across the country but also widens our audience distribution by attracting readers that might not have considered Narcity as a daily local news source before,” says Chuck Lapointe, CEO of Narcity Media, one of the fastest-growing digital media publishers for millennials in North America.
  • "Google News Showcase will highlight our best local content and help put it in front of more people,” says Steve Bartlett, senior managing editor at SaltWire Network, an Atlantic Canadian-based media organization with more than 100 journalists.
  • “We’re excited to participate in this new project by Google to present fact-based, independent journalism to readers and connect them to trusted sources of news,” says Bob Cox, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, a leading news publisher in Western Canada. “It will be a substantial boost to our business, exposing our work to a wider audience and providing a more sustainable, long-term model for local news.”
  • “We are thrilled to now be working with the Google team as a part of News Showcase, a project we strongly believe will have a positive impact on the future of our local news ecosystem here in Canada,” says Jeff Elgie, CEO, Village Media, a fully-digital news service serving communities across Ontario.


Expanded support through Google News Initiative 

News Showcase is just one part of our longstanding, overall commitment to the Canadian news industry. Today we are also announcing additional investments through our Google News Initiative, a global effort to help journalism thrive in the digital age: 

Training journalists in digital skills:Over the next three years we’ll train 5,000 Canadian journalists and journalism students on strengthening digital skills in newsrooms – a five-times increase from the 1,000 journalists we’ve already trained to date. 

Supporting business sustainability: We’ll expand our business-oriented workshops for small and mid-sized news organizations on topics including audience development, reader revenue and advertising revenue. The 10 sessions will be delivered in French and English and build upon our award winning News Consumer Insights tools.

We are introducing our first custom designed GNI Startups Boot Camp dedicated exclusively to aspiring Canadian news entrepreneurs starting a business or non-profit journalism project in Canada.  Applications open in the fall. 

Promoting news innovation: We are announcing our third North American Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge to fund selected projects focused on helping local publishers think about new ways to understand, enhance and serve the needs of their communities. Applications are now open. 

“When the Halifax Examiner joined GNI Startup Labs, I was cautiously optimistic that it would be of value. But the actual experience has been beyond anything I could have dreamed of,” says Tim Bousquet, editor and publisher of the Halifax Examiner. “Thanks to speaking with other media operators struggling to make sense of our industry, and especially thanks to working hand-in-hand with a coach who walked us through our challenges, the Examiner now has a deeper and more fruitful understanding of our business model, the approach to revenue, and how to prepare for the future and grow.”

These new and expanded programs build on our long-term support for Canadian news organizations of all sizes. In 2019 alone, Google sent five billion clicks to Canadian news sites, for free (an estimated half billion dollars in value, according to Deloitte). During the COVID-19 pandemic, our Journalism Emergency Relief Fund directly supported more than 200 different newsrooms across Canada to keep journalists working and Canadians informed. 

Today's news represents a shared goal that Google and news publishers in Canada are focused on – long-term success for journalism in Canada. That’s why Google is committed to playing a constructive role alongside publishers to enable a sustainable future for news that Canadians can depend on for years to come. 

We’re expanding our support of news in Canada

Access to trustworthy information is important to all of us, and it’s vital for society to continue supporting the reporters who work tirelessly to deliver us news. That’s why today we are announcing new investments to continue our support of Canadian newsrooms and journalists across the country. 

Support for Canadian journalism through News Showcase

We have signed agreements with a number of Canadian publishers for Google News Showcase, a product and licensing program that provides a space for newsrooms to curate their content for readers across Google News and Discover. These deals will help support Canadian newsrooms that provide comprehensive general-interest news to the communities they serve. This long-term investment will support news organizations in producing, distributing and explaining essential information to readers. The first Canadian partners for News Showcase are Black Press Media, Glacier Media, The Globe and Mail, Métro Média, Narcity Media, SaltWire Network, Village Media and Winnipeg Free Press.

Together, these eight publishers represent national, regional and local news that touches communities in both official languages from coast-to-coast-to-coast in Canada. Today’s announcement builds on News Showcase deals signed by nearly 800 news publications around the world. More than 90% of these publications represent local or regional news. 

This image shows the logos of Google’s current partners for News Showcase in Canada: Black Press Media, Glacier Media, The Globe and Mail, Métro Média, Narcity Media, SaltWire Network, Village Media and Winnipeg Free Press

 Logos of our current News Showcase news partners in Canada

As part of our licensing deals, we’re also paying news organizations for access to select paywalled content, giving Canadians access to a wide range of news content. We work closely with news outlets to determine the right amount of content to share to help drive subscriptions as users experience the benefits of subscribing to authoritative news outlets.

There will be more partnerships to come as we continue to engage in active negotiations with publishers across Canada. We look forward to launching News Showcase here soon. 

What publishers are saying about News Showcase

  • “We are pleased that Google has stepped up to the plate and signed an important partnership with Black Press Media and others,” says Rick O’Connor, CEO and President, Black Press Media, home to some of the most established newspapers in B.C. and Alberta. “There are many other benefits as part of the agreement where Google will assist us in further developing our digital properties. I am pleased to see that Google will also be assisting the small, independent newspapers and websites adapt to an increasing digital world."
  • “Google News Showcase will help support news in communities across Canada large and small, and increase accessibility to daily content. In addition, Glacier Media and our partners have benefited directly from the Google News Initiative,” says Alvin Brouwer, President Glacier Media Digital, which owns more than 60 community media outlets throughout Western Canada. “Their new initiatives to train more than 5,000 journalists in Canada over the next three years to enhance their digital skills, and to provide business-oriented workshops to small and mid-sized news organizations will also help in communities across the country.”
  • “Google News Showcase will introduce even more readers to our award-winning journalism and we're pleased to count Google as a global strategic partner,” says Phillip Crawley, CEO & Publisher of The Globe and Mail. “Reaching new audiences and showing them how The Globe can add value to their daily lives is a necessary step in continuing to grow our digital subscriber base, which is the largest in Canada. This long-term, comprehensive partnership will not only support the extraordinary work of our journalists, but it will also help to accelerate our continued investment in technological innovation and improving the reader experience.”
  • “Our partnership will help enhance our effort to create original local journalistic content and strengthen our mission to give a voice to citizens of Montreal and Quebec City,” says Andrew Mule, president of Métro Média, which owns Journal Métro and local community publications in the Montréal area and in Quebec City. “The GNI training has been a source of inspiration for our teams.”
  • “An investment like this not only benefits us financially as a publisher to help us recruit talented journalists across the country but also widens our audience distribution by attracting readers that might not have considered Narcity as a daily local news source before,” says Chuck Lapointe, CEO of Narcity Media, one of the fastest-growing digital media publishers for millennials in North America.
  • "Google News Showcase will highlight our best local content and help put it in front of more people,” says Steve Bartlett, senior managing editor at SaltWire Network, an Atlantic Canadian-based media organization with more than 100 journalists.
  • “We’re excited to participate in this new project by Google to present fact-based, independent journalism to readers and connect them to trusted sources of news,” says Bob Cox, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, a leading news publisher in Western Canada. “It will be a substantial boost to our business, exposing our work to a wider audience and providing a more sustainable, long-term model for local news.”
  • “We are thrilled to now be working with the Google team as a part of News Showcase, a project we strongly believe will have a positive impact on the future of our local news ecosystem here in Canada,” says Jeff Elgie, CEO, Village Media, a fully-digital news service serving communities across Ontario.


Expanded support through Google News Initiative 

News Showcase is just one part of our longstanding, overall commitment to the Canadian news industry. Today we are also announcing additional investments through our Google News Initiative, a global effort to help journalism thrive in the digital age: 

Training journalists in digital skills:Over the next three years we’ll train 5,000 Canadian journalists and journalism students on strengthening digital skills in newsrooms – a five-times increase from the 1,000 journalists we’ve already trained to date. 

Supporting business sustainability: We’ll expand our business-oriented workshops for small and mid-sized news organizations on topics including audience development, reader revenue and advertising revenue. The 10 sessions will be delivered in French and English and build upon our award winning News Consumer Insights tools.

We are introducing our first custom designed GNI Startups Boot Camp dedicated exclusively to aspiring Canadian news entrepreneurs starting a business or non-profit journalism project in Canada.  Applications open in the fall. 

Promoting news innovation: We are announcing our third North American Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge to fund selected projects focused on helping local publishers think about new ways to understand, enhance and serve the needs of their communities. Applications are now open. 

“When the Halifax Examiner joined GNI Startup Labs, I was cautiously optimistic that it would be of value. But the actual experience has been beyond anything I could have dreamed of,” says Tim Bousquet, editor and publisher of the Halifax Examiner. “Thanks to speaking with other media operators struggling to make sense of our industry, and especially thanks to working hand-in-hand with a coach who walked us through our challenges, the Examiner now has a deeper and more fruitful understanding of our business model, the approach to revenue, and how to prepare for the future and grow.”

These new and expanded programs build on our long-term support for Canadian news organizations of all sizes. In 2019 alone, Google sent five billion clicks to Canadian news sites, for free (an estimated half billion dollars in value, according to Deloitte). During the COVID-19 pandemic, our Journalism Emergency Relief Fund directly supported more than 200 different newsrooms across Canada to keep journalists working and Canadians informed. 

Today's news represents a shared goal that Google and news publishers in Canada are focused on – long-term success for journalism in Canada. That’s why Google is committed to playing a constructive role alongside publishers to enable a sustainable future for news that Canadians can depend on for years to come. 

A Challenge to understand the needs of local readers

How can local news publishers create the next generation of news products without knowing what their readers need? And how can they flourish without understanding the needs of the larger majority of community residents who do not read their work?

These are crucial questions, and we want to encourage local publishers to explore them in greater depth. Starting today, we are launching the third Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge in North America to help local publishers to think about new ways to understand, enhance and serve the needs of their communities.

We're inviting publishers to submit ideas for projects that will generate research approaches to better understand these local audiences in order to rethink product and overall strategy. 

Since 2019,Google News Initiative Innovation Challenges have supported 67 projects in Canada and the U.S. with over $11 million in funding. Past recipients include projects to tackle big challenges in local news and in diversity, equity and inclusion. California Independent Television Service (ITVS) producedan interactive survey tool designed to allow viewers to share feedback and interact in real time with fellow audience members. Save the Black Press, a project from Black Voice News, is building an open site to allow news organizations to access datasets about the Black population to produce more powerful stories and generate higher engagement with a more informed public.


10:25

Applications are open from now until August 26. Established local publishers, online-only players, news startups, academics, publisher collaborations and local industry associations are all eligible to apply. Projects will be evaluated against five criteria: 


  1. Research methodology

  2. The innovative nature of the approach to the research

  3. The potential for creating more diversity, equity and inclusion

  4. The publisher plans in using the research to communicate the value brought by their journalism

  5. The plan for sharing lessons with both the community and the wider industry 


We encourage applicants to think about collaborative approaches to their projects, and employ an iterative “test and learn” approach that leads to redefined priorities and product strategy. 

Selected projects will be eligible to receive up to $200,000, not to exceed 70% of the total project cost. Please see the website for full details and application process.

How to apply

Applications, in English or French, must be made online via our website and are open until Monday, August 26 at 23:59 GMT. We will also be holding an online town hall on July 1st at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time with a live presentation, including the opportunity to ask questions. (Please note that Google does not take any equity or IP in any projects or submissions.) 

We are looking forward to seeing new ideas, projects and big bets to come this round. For more information about the Challenge, visit g.co/newsinnovation.

Seeking journalists who want to start something new

Megan Raposa felt torn.

She enjoyed the routine of her reporting beat at the local paper. But she wanted to build something new -- a news startup that would better serve her neighbors in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Raposa was ready to become a journalism founder. She just wasn't sure how to start.

Megan applied and was accepted to the Google News Initiative’s Startups Boot Camp, which provided her with the training, support and funding she needed to launch her email-focused digital startup, Sioux Falls Simplified. Five months later, Sioux Falls Simplified has continually grown its audience, earned local advertising revenue and even converted new members who support its mission.

Applications are officially openfor the 2021 GNI Startups Boot Camp. We're looking for our next group of aspiring journalism entrepreneurs to mentor every step of the way as they turn their ideas into real businesses.

During Megan's eight-week stint in the 2020 GNI Boot Camp, my team and I supported her journey as a founder through a real-world practical curriculum, relevant case studies, weekly one-on-one coaching, and support from peers working toward similar goals. 

“[Through the Bootcamp,] I learned that there is an appetite for another news option in my community, and I can be the person to provide that,” Megan says. “I don’t have to sit and ride out the sinking ship of the local newspaper, watching desks empty year after year.”

Megan isn’t the only success story among the 24 teams in the program, of course. Bria Felicien’s newsletter, The Black Sportswomen, has grown the newsletter’s subscriber base to a size that results in a steady stream of people choosing to support the project financially. Annelise Pierce’s project, Shasta Scout, has brokenimportant local stories and recently incorporated as a non-profit newsroom. Luke Baumgarten launched RANGE to cover local issues and has already grown past 1,000 email newsletter subscribers, 100 of which are paying. And Camille Padilla Dalmau’s publication, 9 Millones, recently raised a five-figure sum in less than 48 hours from readers. The list goes on.

If you’re a journalist who’s ready to start a new project, we’re here to help. Your launch team includes experienced coaches, the entire LION Publishers staff and LION News Entrepreneurs community, as well as the team at the Google News Initiative. When you join the Bootcamp, you benefit from the collective experience and wisdom of founders who have very likely faced the challenges you’re about to face yourself. You’ll also benefit from a curriculum based on the GNI Startups Playbook, published in partnership with some of the leading practitioners and thinkers in the entrepreneurial news space, as well as an official LION Publishers membership.

The first step, however, is to apply.

Applications are now open to U.S. residents for the fall 2021 Boot Camp. The U.S. program will run from September 7 to November 5, 2021 (with a one week break) and aims to accept 24 projects. The application window opens today and closes Sunday, August 1 at 11 p.m. PT. To get a better idea of the types of projects we think are a good fit,read our detailed FAQs and join one of our upcoming live Q&A sessions.

Later this year, we’ll also open applications for our first Startups boot camp dedicated exclusively to Canadian founders. The Canadian boot camp will be custom-designed to address the realities of starting a business or non-profit journalism project in Canada, addressing country-specific questions like tax status, business registration, legal preparedness, and the Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization Designation. We will also look at ways to strengthen Canada's media ecosystem by tackling issues like diversity and how to increase support for Canadian communities currently under-served by news.

As someone born in Toronto General Hospital, who spent childhood summers with family in Quebec and Nova Scotia, and later working for a startup newsroom in Vancouver, the opportunity to bring the Boot Camp to Canada is a real honour.


News Brief: May updates from the Google News Initiative

Last month, we supported new programs to drive business development, media literacy and elections reporting around the world. We’re collaborating with news partners through virtual events, supporting innovation in journalism through new tools, and much more. Read on for May updates.

Providing new resources to drive Advertising revenue 

Starting June 1, the GNI Digital Growth Program is launching Advertisingworkshops in six languages. Workshops will be available in English in North America and the Asia Pacific region, as well as Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian. Register today to join them live or on-demand. 

Developing LGBTTQI+ leaders in Latin American media

We partnered with Chicas Poderosas to launch a Leadership Incubator aimed at addressing workplace dynamics in Latin American newsrooms. The program will provide mentoring and training to journalists at local and hyperlocal startups founded by women and people who identify as LGBTTQI+. Participants will work with experts to create a plan to strengthen innovation, collaborative work, diversity and gender perspectives on their teams.

Strengthening Media Literacy in Spanish-speaking Latin America

We’ve launched DigiMente — the first major media literacy program for young people in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Over 12 months the project will provide 20,000 students with the skills to sort fact from fiction online using relevant topics such as memes, video games and music, among others. Building on the foundational work of Google-supported projects such as Civic Online Reasoning (Stanford University) and EducaMidia (Brazil), this new effort was developed in partnership with Movilizatorio and Teach for All. 

Celebrating GNI Innovation Challenge recipients

Building on the Digital News Innovation Fund in Europe, GNI Innovation Challenges have supported more than 150 projects that inject new ideas into the news industry. Around the world, we’re learning from former Innovation Challenge recipients who are using their funding to drive innovation in news.


Daily Maverick’s membership team posing for a team picture

Daily Maverick’s membership team

Daily Maverick, an online national South African publisher, combined multiple data sources from within its organization — from newsletters, website analytics, memberships and newsroom — to create one essential data hub. The "RevEngine” (short for relevancy engine) then displays daily reports and alerts in easy-to-use dashboards, which have become an essential resource for the publisher’s membership and editorial teams. Membership grew 110% year over year in 2020 and highly engaged readers doubled, thanks to actionable insights derived from RevEngine. Meanwhile, it has also saved the Daily Maverick more than $50,000 in 3rd party SAAS fees.

Young people and educators at a DocsScale event in Oakland

Attendees at a DocsScale event in Oakland

Independent Television Service (ITVS), a California-based public broadcasting partner, has producedDocSCALE, an interactive survey tool designed for both engaging audiences and generating data. It allows viewers to share feedback, and the chance to interact with fellow audience members in response to programming. The platform has improved the depth and diversity of membership engagement, increased opt-in email subscriptions and filled a qualitative data gap for public television stations. See DocSCALE in action at thisevent from May 27 withMaryland Public Television.


The Reveniu Team meets virtually

The Reveniu Team

Chilean consortium Mecenas Spa has signed up 20 newsrooms to its Reveniu platform, which enables publishers to sell memberships, solicit donations and easily collect payments. As a result, one membership client raised more than $30,000 dollars in six months — almost a third of its entire budget — using the platform. Investors have jumped on board, with expansion to Peru, Colombia or Mexico due later this year. 

Supporting Germany’s election with resources for journalists

In the run up to Germany’s national election in September, we partnered with dpa (the German Press Agency) to launch FaktenCheck21. The program will support local and national newsrooms, establishing fact-checking teams through training bootcamps, an open learning platform called dpa factify and a Slack community to encourage collaboration. Journalists from more than 100 newsrooms across Germany already participated in the training and 400 are collaborating on Slack. GNI also launched the GNI live training series for German journalists on online security, verification and data journalism.

Enhancing media literacy in Germany 

In partnership with German publisher DIE ZEIT, we sponsored and co-hosted ZEIT for teachers, a digital unconference as part of the learning platform ZEIT for schools. More than 950 German-speaking teachers from 26 countries including Brazil and Argentina participated in the two-day virtual conference with panels, workshops and networking opportunities.  We tackled topics such as media and information literacy, new teaching tools, resilience and disinformation.  

Connecting European publishers through News Impact Summits

As part of its ongoing partnership with the GNI, the European Journalism Centre (EJC) will host twoNews Impact Summit events in 2021. One will be devoted to diversity, equality and inclusion, while the other will focus on data journalism. On June 15, “Democratising data: Making data a tool of effective journalism" will explore how data visualisation can impact public debate. “Diversity, equity and inclusion in the media industry: How can journalism better cover our changing societies?” will follow on September 23. 

Innovating with AI in Asia Pacific

The London School of Economics, GNI’s partner within theJournalismAI initiative, hasannounced the five selected newsrooms for this year'sCollaborative Challenge in Asia Pacific: Fuji Television (Japan),  Initium Media (Hong Kong), Singapore Press Holdings (Singapore), South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) and The Quint (India). They will work with theTimes School of Media and the Computer Science Engineering Department of Bennett University to explore how AI-driven audience insights can help newsrooms produce more relevant coverage. The outcome of their work will be presented at theJournalismAI Festival later this year.

Checking Vaccine Misinformation in India

In India, our longstanding training partnership with DataLEADS continues with a specific fact-checking Town Hall Series to help journalists explore tools and strategies they can use to identify and combat vaccine-related misinformation. VaxCheck will hold 30 workshops for journalism students and media professionals across the country. The program  runs through June 8th. 

Convening industry leaders at Newsgeist

We co-hosted Newsgeist 2021, an “unconference” organized by Google along with leaders and thinkers across the news industry. The virtual event series, which held sessions on May 18–20 with more scheduled for June 15–17, features discussions about the future of news with a program crowd-sourced by the attendees themselves.

Setting startups on a sustainable path

10 participants of the first NorthAm Startups Lab, which is being run in association with LION Publishers, completed an in-depth curriculum on business sustainability. GNI will now fund revenue and audience growth experiments for each participant, to be designed by each publisher alongside their experienced Startups Lab coaches, Lizzy Hazeltine, Lillian Ruiz and Brian Boyer.

Growing the Tiny News Collective

After launching an ambitious outreach plan this spring, Tiny News Collective received 43 organization applications from 53 aspiring and diverse founders hoping to start their own Tiny News businesses. An experienced team of industry experts and veteran startup founders narrowed the applicants to a finalist round of eight publishers. Six entrepreneurs will ultimately be invited to join the Tiny News cohort in June.


That’s all for May updates. Follow along on social and sign up for our newsletter for more.

A new tool to find stories from underrepresented voices

Editor’s note:  Rachel Hislop is the Editor in Chief of Okayplayer, which represents the innovative, artistic and progressive voice of black culture through the amplification of music, art, film and politics.


In December of 2019, I was onstage at a Google News conference in Chicago giving a short presentation about creating stories for diverse audiences. I wanted to introduce Okayplayer’s approach towards telling stories about marginalized communities to the room of small to midsize publishers. My thesis was straightforward: If you want to change the story, you have to change the storyteller. The following months would prove me right: There’s a very real need to find new storytellers.

Nearly 200 counties in the United States do not have a local news publication — this means nearly 3 million people nationwide are very likely to be unaware of what’s happening in their communities. Publications, journalists, and credible news accessibility are all destabilized when access to local stories is limited.

It was clear that there needed to be some innovation around how newsrooms get stories out the door, and how new bylines — of those most qualified to tell the stories of their communities — got on our pages. 

With bootstrapped budgets and disappearing resources due to archaic advertising models, getting new voices on the page is a difficult task for newsrooms. The pandemic and resulting lockdown also limited mobility and made people more reliant on community news. The social justice protests last summer are a perfect example: We saw cities like Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. become hubs for stories with global impact while publications scrambled to get more diverse voices on their pages.

One of the main complaints about representation in media is finding journalists from diverse backgrounds with differing world views. This is the problem Okayplayer focused on as a recipient of the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge — we used the support to address the decline of on-the-ground reporting opportunities for local journalists. In addition to targeting the issues affecting our newsroom, we wanted to focus on the industry-wide need for revenue model innovation that amplifies new voices and local stories. From that, The Byline Project was born.

The Byline Project is a completely free digital tool that empowers small and mid-size publishers and local storytellers to help bring local reporting back to their communities while connecting the work of storytellers to financial support from a broader digital audience.

The Byline Project is open-source software that publishers can install into their WordPress platform. It will streamline the reporting process, starting with receiving pitches from writers, photographers and creators, and take editors all the way through to the moment a story goes live. It will also integrate with industry-standard collaboration Google products — like Google Docs. And once stories are published, the online community can financially support content creators directly by tipping writers.

For writers and storytellers,The Byline Project provides direct access to editors who are accepting pitches. It also provides a centralized hub where they can collaborate on projects as well as the previously mentioned capability to directly earn money for their work from readers.

We hope The Byline Project can support a community-driven local reporting landscape on Okayplayer’s pages, while giving small and mid-size publishers like ourselves the tools to do the same.

Journalists can begin submitting pitches to Okayplayer via thebylineproject.com. Local news publishers can learn more about installing The Byline Project software for their news platforms by visiting TheBylineProject.com.