Camille Padilla Dalmau and Mackenzie Clark are doing similar work, 2,244 miles apart.

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, Camille creates stories for the 9 million Puerto Ricans who live around the world through 9 Millones. Mackenzie recently launched the Lawrence Times in Kansas, funded by an online campaign that brought in more than $8,000 over six days.

Camille and Mackenzie are part of a new wave of local news sites launching across the U.S. and Canada. Some 266 local news organizations have started over the last five years, at a rate of 50 per year. That’s explosive growth in the field and it’s happening with no coordinated support, even though — as we know — this is hard work.

Today LION Publishers and theGoogle News Initiative are announcing the findings of Project Oasis, first-of-its-kind research which provides information about the paths these entrepreneurs take — and points to the way forward to a sustainable future for local news. This project was undertaken in partnership with the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Douglas K Smith (architect of Table Stakes), and with support from Michele McLellan (creator of Michelle’s List). The results are a database and research report that illustrate the state of the local news industry, as well as a step-by-step guide for aspiring news entrepreneurs on how to get started.

The Project News Oasis database features rich information on 711 publishers across the U.S. and Canada, including breakdowns of their distributional, editorial and financial operations. We’ll use it to help existing publishers, who can add or update their information at any time, as well as to inform the next generation of news entrepreneurs.

Next, the Project Oasis research report puts our research findings in context — it highlights the  revenue streams publishers use to fund their newsgathering, the communities they aim to serve and the size of the teams they hire to do the work. It also provides benchmarks designed to help new startup publishers develop their own practical goals for what their operation can look like three years out.

So how might we encourage responsible growth in the local news industry? That brings us to the third resource we’re releasing today: The GNI Startups Playbook. The playbook will demystify the process of launching a digital news startup and, by tackling key activities such as building a product, growing an audience and developing a revenue stream, it will help news entrepreneurs build a business that’s financially viable and has a positive journalistic impact on local communities. 

This comprehensive resource, which will soon be available in Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian, includes contributions from GNI, LION and a small army of experts. The playbook itself will provide the basis for much of GNI’s and LION’s joint programming moving forward, including the GNI Startups Lab and Boot Camp, as well as our collaboration with Tiny News Collective, a low-cost platform and set of shared services aimed at helping news entrepreneurs build a news organization from scratch.

The database, the research report and the playbook are intended to be living resources that will be updated regularly. We’re committed to working with the Google News Initiative to fully capture the experiments and learnings of this rapidly evolving field, and over the coming months we’ll collaborate once again to help the GNI conduct a global series of live workshops for aspiring entrepreneurs on the Digital Growth Program site. After you’ve looked at these resources, we'd love your input: What’s valuable? What would you like more information about? We’ll incorporate your feedback into the next editions.

Our goal is to ensure the next Camille and the next Mackenzie will have a smoother, better-lit road ahead of them. We’re confident that as this work continues, and the path is made clearer, we’ll build a sustainable future for local digital news by focusing on what founders and organizations need along the way.

All over the world, a massive immunization effort is underway. 

The rapid nature of the COVID-19 vaccine development process and the great anxiety caused by the pandemic have made the topic of vaccination particularly susceptible to misinformation. Journalists can play a fundamental role supporting an evidence-based discourse by listening to their audiences’ concerns and providing corrective information about misconceptions that circulate online and offline.

To support this work, the Google News Initiative launched a $3 million Open Fund in January. Over a three-week window, we received more than 309 applications from 74 countries.

Today, we are announcing the 11 projects that were selected through an extensive review process that included a 17-person project team and an expert jury reviewing the highest-scoring applicants.

These projects stood out for their attempt to reach underrepresented audiences, explore new formats for fact checks and rigorous strategies to measure their impact. Each recipient will be sharing more details on their own channels in the upcoming weeks. Here’s a brief overview of the projects:

Africa Check, in partnership with Theatre for a Change, will produce a series of interactive radio drama shows in Wolof in Senegal and Pidgin in Nigeria to present fact checks in a more participatory format.

Agência Lupawill provide COVID-19 vaccine fact checks to a network of community radios covering Brazilian “news deserts” and work with digital influencers to promote media literacy on the topic.

Aleteia, I.Media and Verificat.cat will work with a scientific committee and two research centers to source misinformation and create a database of related fact checks available in seven languages for Catholic media outlets around the world.

Chequeado will continue spearheading the collaborative project Latam Chequea that includes more than 20 fact-checking organizations across Latin America. It will aim to reach senior citizens, indigenous populations and 18-to-26-year-olds through dedicated formats.

The hyperlocal digital site Escenario Tlaxcala, assisted by local doctors, will produce fact-checking content and distribute it across the Mexican state in Nahuatl and Otomí through various formats including by using “perifoneo” loudspeakers to reach offline audiences.

Katadata will provide a platform debunking COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and work with the Indonesia Traditional Wet Market Merchants Association (Asparindo) to disseminate this content to wet markets across the country.

In Uruguay, la diaria will publish fact checks and co-created content around COVID-19 misinformation, broadening its reach by partnering with trap music performer Pekeño 77 and screenwriter Pedro Saborido.

Servimedia and Maldita.eswill join force to create fact-checking content relevant for Spaniards with disabilities, in formats that are accessible to them. 

Stuff will work in partnership withMāori Television and thePacific Media Network to fact-check misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine in New Zealand.

A broad collaborative project led by The Quint in India will seek to source hyper-local misinformation and distribute fact checks through a grassroots network of rural women.

Univision Noticias andFactCheck.org will work together to produce fact checks about COVID-19 immunization as short bilingual video explainers, with a plan to measure their impact systemically and reach a majority of U.S. Hispanic households.

Our goal is for the lessons learned from these initiatives to support our collective understanding of how best to combat misinformation about health topics, whether it’s through new audience strategies or new approaches to measuring the impact of fact checks. Stay tuned for more updates from us as these projects get underway.

At the Google News Initiative last month, we felt the love for new publisher tools, training programs and newsroom success stories. See February updates below.

One World Media Fellowship opens for applications

The One World Media Fellowship is a year-long, GNI-supported program aimed at aspiring journalists and filmmakers who seek to report on stories from countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Working in film, print, audio or multimedia, fellows’ projects bring together integrity and creativity to present underreported stories that break down stereotypes and build cross-cultural connections.

Applications are open until April 7, and we particularly encourage submissions from underrepresented ethnic groups, applicants who identify as women, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities ands people from and based in the global south.

Fostering diversity in Latin American newsrooms

We supported the Diversity in News and in Newsrooms course, developed by the Knight Center. More than 1700 journalists from 12 countries participated in the four-week course, which addressed the challenges of diversity, equity and equality and how to cover these issues. Special guests Keith Woods, NPR's Chief Diversity Officer, and Krissah Thompson, Diversity Editor of the Washington Post, among others, shared their experience and best practices.

San Francisco Chronicle improves mobile subscriptions rate by 54%

GNI Canada event brings together local newsrooms

We hosted a GNI Canada event focused on supporting and engaging with the Canadian news industry, enabling connection, learning and growth. More than 100 attendees from local Canadian newsrooms participated in sessions focused on training journalists, growing audience engagement with News Consumer Insights and increasing revenue. 

The Frenchand English sessions are available to view on demand, and Canadian publishers can access resources from the event online.

Taiwanese publisher READr uses audience participation to boost reader engagement

Taiwan’s READr relies on its audience to support its fact-checking platform. Teaming with GNI’s Design Accelerator program in Asia Pacifc, READr boosted reader engagement through opportunities for audience participation, allowing readers to interact with content and provide feedback. The changes grew page views 400% in the first week, increased time spent on site, and helped add 40,000 new users in the first two months. 

That’s all for February. Check back next month for more updates, and follow along through our newsletter and social for more newsroom resources.

Radio reaches more Americans every week than any other platform. Public radio stations in the United States have over 3,000 local journalists and each day they create audio news reports about the communities they serve. But news audio is in a similar place as newspaper articles were in the 1990s: hard to find, and difficult to sort by topic, source, relevance or recency. News audio can not delay in improving its discoverability. 

KQED is the most listened to public radio station in the United States, and one of the largest news organizations in the Bay Area. In partnership with Google, KQED and KUNGFU.AI, an AI services provider and leader in applied machine learning, ran a series of tests on KQED’s audio to determine how we might reduce the errors and time to publish our news audio transcripts, and ultimately, make radio news audio more findable. 

“One of the pillars of the Google New Initiative is incubating new approaches to difficult problems,” said David Stoller, Partner Lead for News & Publishing at Google “Once complete, this technology and associated best practices will be openly shared, greatly expanding the anticipated impact.” 

What makes finding audio so much harder?

In order for news audio to be searched or sorted, the speech must first be converted to text.  This added step is trickier than it seems, and currently puts news audio at a disadvantage for being found quickly and accurately. Transcription takes time, effort and bandwidth from newsrooms — not something that is in abundance these days. Even though there have been great advances in speech to text, when it comes to news, the bar for accuracy is very high. As someone who works to make KQED’s reporting widely available, it is frustrating when KQED’s audio isn’t prominent in search engines and news aggregators.

The challenge of correctly identifying who, what and where

For our tests, KQED and KUNGFU.AI, applied the latest speech-to-text tools to a collection of KQED’s news audio. News stories try to address the “five Ws:” who, what, when, where and why. Unfortunately, because AI typically lacks the context in which the speech was made (i.e. identity of the speaker, location of the story), one of the most difficult challenges of automated speech-to-text is correctly identifying these types of proper nouns, known as named entities. KQED’s local news audio is rich in references of named entities related to topics, people, places, and organizations that are contextual to the Bay Area region. Speakers use acronyms like “CHP” for California Highway Patrol and “the Peninsula” for the area spanning San Francisco to San Jose. These are more difficult for artificial intelligence to identify.

When named entities aren’t understood, machine learning models make their best estimation of what was said. For example, in our test, “The Asia Foundation” was incorrectly transcribed as “age of Foundations” and “misgendered” was incorrectly transcribed as “Miss Gendered.”  For news publishers, these are not just transcription errors, but editorial problems that change the meaning of a topic and can cause embarrassment for the news outlet. This means people have to go in and correct these transcriptions, which is expensive to do for every audio segment. Without transcriptions, search engines can't find these stories, limiting the amount of quality local news people can find online.

A machine learning ↔ human ↔ machine learning feedback loop

At KQED, our editors can correct common machine learning errors in our transcripts. But right now, the machine learning model isn’t learning from its mistakes. We’re beginning to test out a feedback loop in which newsrooms could identify common transcription errors to improve the machine learning model. 

We're confident that in the near future, improvements into these speech-to-text models will help convert audio to text faster, ultimately helping people find audio news more effectively. 

For many people, the new year comes with resolutions to learn new skills or adopt healthy habits. We at the Google News Initiative are focusing efforts to make training programs more accessible and learn from newsrooms that are driving innovation in journalism. Read on for highlights from January.

The GNI Subscriptions Lab returns to Europe

One World Media Awards support innovation in journalism

We’re continuing our support for the One World Media Awards. Established in 1988, the awards recognize the media coverage and specifically focuses on stories that break through stereotypes. With the Digital Media Award, the Google News Initiative supports a category celebrating creative and innovative use of technology in journalism, all designed to help people gain an understanding of important, underreported stories. In a recent guest blog post, we laid out why we support this award and introduced a number of free digital tools to help journalists.

More than 6,000 German students participate in media literacy competition

We supported the Students for President media literacy competition hosted by our German partner Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Students were invited to write the inauguration speech of the next U.S. president, and a jury selected seven winning projects. The response was overwhelming: More than 6,000 students participated, contributing to more than 500 creative texts, videos, and podcasts.

Innovation Challenge recipients tackle ethics, subscriptions and audio 

Building on the €150 million Digital News Innovation Fund, GNI Innovation Challenges have supported more than 150 projects that inject new ideas into the news industry. Here’s a look at how some of those projects around the world are using their funding.

Two years ago, ThePlain Dealerin Ohio launched its Right to Be Forgotten project as a way for people to have old stories and mugshots removed or amended from old news articles. They join a growing number of newsrooms that are considering how past news coverage can be a permanent obstacle for someone’s future.  Now, The Plain Dealer is using GNI Innovation Challenge Funding to develop digital tools that can help identify and remove problematic content more efficiently.

Bytecast, based in the U.S., is an app for reporters in the field to easily record, edit and distribute audio clips. It  was developed after receiving funding from the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge. The app is currently in beta testing and will be available for other publishers in the future. 

News Consumers Insights (NCI) expands into commerce

While many publishers around the world have been using NCI to make data-informed business decisions that increase digital subscriptions and advertising revenue, we recently worked with Complex Networks to help the publisher grow its commerce business. Using insights from NCI, Complex increased the number of shoppers purchasing by 300% on its Complex SHOP. To learn more about the changes implemented to improve the site’s shopping experience and conversion rates, check out our case study.

Diversity in News and Media course launches in Latin America

In partnership with the Knight Center, we offered the Diversity in News and Media course to explore issues related to diversity, gender and equality in the newsroom. More than 1,700 editors and journalists from 15 Spanish-speaking Latin American countries participated. 

That’s a wrap for January. For more updates, follow along on social media and our newsletter.