New Delhi, Dec 18 (IANS) From major elections across the globe to conflicts and crises, the year 2024 was critical for the news industry, said Google News on Wednesday.
These significant events highlighted the important role of newsrooms in providing accurate and timely information, said the company, highlighting its contributions to fight misinformation in the Indian news ecosystem.
In 2024, the tech giant supported the Shakti initiative — a collaboration to combat misinformation and provided AI training to newsrooms.
It also empowered India’s news ecosystem through initiatives like the Indian Languages Programme, boosting user engagement and ad revenue for local publishers, as well as expanded Google News Showcase.
“We’re proud of the significant impact of our scaled and in-depth work with Indian news publishers, spanning efforts to understand new user behaviors and revenue streams, programmes that have driven modernisation and substantial revenue increases, and collaborative initiatives like Shakti, which has established a robust framework for combating misinformation,” said Durga Raghunath, Head of India News Partnerships.
Raghunath noted that the Shakti initiative brought together over 50 news publishers and 300 journalists to debunk misinformation and deepfakes in 10 local languages, reaching a vast audience.
She added that the programme “enabled newsrooms to publish fact-checks 78 per cent faster and facilitated the creation of over 67 new fact-checking desks”.
“In just three months, over 6,600 fact-checks were amplified, leading to a 180 per cent surge in regional language fact-checks and a 92 per cent increase in election-related fact-checks,” Raghunath noted.
Further, recognising the transformative potential of AI in journalism (with transcription, research, translation, or data analysis), Google in 2024 introduced new training programmes. These programmes were aimed at “empowering news organisations to integrate these technologies responsibly”.
The company also expanded Google News Showcase in 2024. Showcase now covers 8 languages including Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, English, and Hindi.
In addition, Google News Initiative’s (GNI) Indian Languages Programme has since June 2023 “supported 500+ publishers from 28 states in nine languages” who saw “a 15 per cent increase in active users and a 32 per cent increase in page views”.
Raghunath said the company further aims to “create value for both news publishers and Google in 2025”.
–IANS
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