From major global elections to conflicts and crises, 2024 was an important year for the news industry, Google News said on Wednesday. These milestones highlighted the important role of newsrooms in providing accurate and timely information, the company said, highlighting its contributions in fighting misinformation in the Indian media system.
In 2024, the tech giant supported the Shakti campaign — a joint fight against misinformation and provided AI training to newsrooms.
It has also empowered India’s news ecosystem with initiatives such as the Indian Language Program, increasing user engagement and ad revenue for local publishers, and the expansion of the Google News Showcase.
“We are proud of the significant impact of our measured and intensive work with Indian news publishers, continuous efforts to understand new user behavior and revenue sources, programs that have improved modernity and increased revenue significantly, and collaborative programs like Shakti, have established a strong framework to fight misinformation,” said Durga Raghunath, Head of India News Partnerships.
Raghunath noted that the Shakti program brought together more than 50 news publishers and 300 journalists to release fake news and deepfakes in 10 local languages, reaching a large audience.
He added that the program “enabled newsrooms to publish fact-checks 78 percent faster and facilitated the creation of more than 67 fact-checking desks”.
“In just three months, more than 6,600 facts were added, resulting in a 180 percent increase in regional language fact-checking and a 92 percent increase in election-related fact-checking,” Raghunath noted.
In addition, seeing the potential to transform AI in journalism (by writing, research, translation, or data analysis), Google in 2024 is launching new training programs. The programs were intended to “empower media organizations to integrate these technologies responsibly”.
The company is also expanding the Google News Showcase in 2024. Showcase now covers 8 languages ​​including Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, English, and Hindi.
In addition, the Google News Initiative (GNI) Indian Languages ​​Program as of June 2023 “supported 500+ publishers from 28 states in nine languages” who saw “a 15 percent increase in active users and a 32 percent increase in page views” .
Raghunath said the company also aims to “create value for both news publishers and Google by 2025”.
