Tag Archives: Google News Initiative

The media platform helping Indonesians donate for good

Editor’s note from Ludovic Blecher, Head of Google News Initiative Innovation: The GNI Innovation Challengeprogram is designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas for the news industry. The story below by Andrias Ekoyuono, Chief of Corporate Strategy at kumparan, is part of an innovator seriessharing inspiring stories and lessons from funded projects.

As an avid news reader, I would read stories in the media every day about social problems and natural disasters, which made me want to help by donating to those in need. However, it was difficult to find a way to donate because I had to search for other websites that could channel the funds. I would also have to ensure that the donation was channeled by a credible party. My main takeaway became this: the experience of giving donations after reading the news should be easier.

Enter kumparan, one of the most widely respected online media organizations in Indonesia. Launched in 2017, it consists of 130 journalists and a media network across 34 provinces which helps media startups grow. It serves as a key resource, giving local media the opportunity to disseminate information and voice concerns at the forefront of Indonesia’s national consciousness. Its establishment has helped the general public to understand and empathize with the problems facing their neighbors every day.

In 2020, kumparan received funding from the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge to help create kumparanDerma, a tool that shortens and streamlines the donation process to provide aid during disasters and emergencies.

The platform allows news consumers to have direct social impact, as they can read articles and give to causes that matter to them in a one-step process through available payment options. There have been ten donation campaigns across Indonesia, including in Riau, East Nusa Tenggara, North Sulawesi, Kalimantan, East Java, and West Java, resulting in over 1,400 transactions with a total readership of roughly 600,000 article views.

These campaigns have raised money for a host of different causes, including support for people whose homes had been destroyed by an earthquake and funding for a child in a remote area who needed a mobile phone to access online school classes during the pandemic.

This is a photograph of the Chief of Corporate Strategy at kumparan, called Andrias Ekoyuono. He is standing up and looking directly at the camera wearing a white T-shirt with the kumparan logo across the chest in blue with orange highlights.

Andrias Ekoyuono, Chief of Corporate Strategy at kumparan

One of the fundraising campaigns was “Blurred Portrait of Sikka Children, Struggling with Pain Amid Limitations.” Two children in Sikka (East Nusa Tenggara) had been suffering from malnutrition and hydrocephalus for years. Both had received treatment from local health facilities in the past, but were unable to receive treatment for a period of five months because of the cost of transportation to obtain their medicines. As a result, kumparanDerma opened donations to support these children’s daily needs. While one of the boys sadly died, the money raised was eventually enough to help the surviving child and three others in similar circumstances.

kumparanDerma — with GNI’s support — has helped facilitate change through news readers’ donations, ensuring their generosity and compassion reach people across Indonesia. As we continue to expand kumparanDerma, we hope that building out donation processes through news platforms is just the beginning of the social impact we can make together.

These 25 publishers want to know their communities

We can’t write about our communities without understanding them and being part of them. We don’t want to just parachute ourselves in and stick the microphone under their mouths, we really want to come at this as a way to serve them. Christelle Saint-Julien, journalist at La Converse

The third North America Innovation Challenge has selected 25 projects out of 190 from Canada and the U.S. to receive a share of more than $3.2 million USD to help build their ideas that address the need for research in local news.

This latest Challenge, part of a program designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas focused on the news industry, was launched in June to support news innovators looking to research how they could better understand the local communities they serve. The selection process involves a rigorous review, a round of interviews and a final jury selection effort.

Among the successful applicants are:

  • Documented, a non-profit newsroom from the Brooklyn Community Foundation, which provides local news for and about New York City’s 3.1 million immigrants. They will use research to define, test and pilot a product and messaging strategy to expand their reach to Chinese and Caribbean immigrant communities.
  • Metroland, the community news media branch of Canadian national publisher Torstar brings Metroland Indigenous: Truth Through Storytelling — a dedicated effort to address a deficiency in news coverage of and for Indigenous peoples in Ontario.
  • A group of nonprofit and for-profit organizations based in Georgia coordinated by the women-led local publisher The Current is building a framework for organizers to collaborate on online local news delivery in the interest of better serving their community.
  • Minnesota-based news startup Sahan Journal is collaborating with three community media outlets to launch Citizen Lab, a series of public editorial meetings to check in with the communities they collectively serve and produce news in Somali, Hmong and Spanish.
  • La Converse in Quebec will be testing new approaches in order to broaden their French language offering in terms of stories and formats — for example, they’re testing things like text-based news service and audio formats.
  • Wick Communications, a family-owned local news company, will partner with ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication to research new products and strategies to facilitate healthy online discourse in small Arizonan communities.

Read the full list of the successful recipients at newsinitiative.withgoogle.com. We extend our sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to apply .

Trends and learnings

Today’s North American winners brings our total of Innovation Challenges to nine running across 93 countries over the past three years. The program initially launched in Asia Pacific with a call for applications looking at new ideas to generate reader revenue. Across all these challenges, we’ve received over 2,500 project applications, creating 227 projects covering Latin America, the Middle East, Turkey and Africa and North America and resulting in over $30 million USD in funding. While there’s been much to learn along the way, the selected news organizations have reported results beyond expectations, with 75% of projects bringing a measurable increase in audience growth and engagement and more than 50% of the recipients already seeing a measurable increase in monetization.

A group of people standing against a brick wall, all looking into the camera and smiling.

The team from successful Innovation Challenge recipient Borderless Magazine from Illinois, which serves a diverse audience of people mostly under 40 years of age. They will be experimenting with new distribution and engagement strategies for their Spanish and English audiences.

Over 50% (1,301) of the applications we received across all Innovation Challenges were focused on audience engagement and monetization. Many North American local or regional publishers recognized the need for direct reader revenue, and over time their focus has shifted to optimization and retaining subscribers .

North American online-only publishers, and local or regional publishers from other areas such as Africa, Asia and Latin America, are still focused on scale, but they are also beginning to experiment with reader revenue and understand the need for improved engagement.

We’re also seeing a need for cultural change, in newsrooms and in coverage, becoming an area of focus for these Innovation Challenges. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) have been necessary elements for applicants’ projects since early 2020. As a result it drove 1,000 applications, 223 interviews and over $13 million in funding. Over 60% of applicants reported that DEI was of strong importance to their organization.

You can read more about the successful recipients around the globe. The Innovation Challenges program will continue in 2022, with application dates to be announced on the Keyword blog and through the GNI Newsletter.

And over the next week, we’ll be highlighting a series of stories from news innovators who have launched projects in France, Indonesia, India, the U.S. and Chile — stay tuned to this space for more.

Supporting media literacy with new partnerships

From the COVID-19 pandemic to the climate crisis, we’ve seen how misinformation can have catastrophic consequences. Misleading information can spread among family and friends, impacting not only the way people see the world and relate to each other, but the decisions they make for their health, and for their loved ones and communities.

Separating fact from fiction online has gotten more difficult, and no generation is immune: A 2019 Pew Research study found that only 26% of U.S. adults could identify a factual statement from an opinion. A Stanford University study from the same year found that two-thirds of high school students surveyed couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and sponsored content.

Communities need to be able to spot a fake story when they see it and stop it in its tracks. That’s why today, the Google News Initiative (GNI) is building on our commitment to strengthen media literacy in the U.S. through partnerships with PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs, the News Literacy Project, and Poynter’s MediaWise program.

Bridging generations with PBS Student Reporting Labs

Started in 2009, PBS Student Reporting Labs (SRL) is a leader in the youth media landscape, currently operating in more than 160 classrooms and after-school programs across the U.S. Thousands of teachers have used SRL’s journalism, civic engagement and video production resources, which train students on the ins and outs of producing reliable news, learning journalism ethics, fact checking and engaging with their communities.

Insherah Qazi from Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas explains what local school boards do and why they’re important. When the American Rescue Plan became law in March of 2021, more than 120 billion dollars was sent to K-12 schools. The money is being used for safe reopening, addressing learning loss and whatever else the district decides is necessary. Local school boards are the ones making these decisions, so it's never been more important to understand what they do and how students can get involved. This piece was produced and edited by youth media producer Becky Wandel. #AmericanRescuePlan #BacktoSchool #SchoolBoards
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As part of our partnership, Student Reporting Labs will build educational resources to help teach young people how to have conversations about misinformation with older family members and friends. The hope is that new audiences, and those already familiar with PBS NewsHour and local public media station partners, will come together to help tackle misinformation.

“Through storytelling and co-production with students, we’ll explore the media literacy needs of different communities and generations, and how they can connect with each other to find solutions,” says SRL Founder Leah Clapman.

Expanding to rural communities with News Literacy Project

Through online classes, events and in-person visits to schools, the News Literacy Project (NLP) provides media literacy education to students, educators and the public. More than 300,000 students have completed lessons on NLP’s virtual classroom platform, Checkology, since its launch in 2016.

The Google News Initiative’s partnership will help the NLP bring their Newsroom to Classroom program to even more journalists and educators. NLP is now expanding into rural areas of California, Colorado, Texas, Iowa and Nebraska — places hit particularly hard by the decline in local news.

“News literacy is an essential skill for everyone everywhere in a healthy democracy,” Claudia Borgelt, Vice President of Development at NLP says. “Access to news literacy education should not be limited by a community’s zip code.”

Expanding Spanish-language resources with Poynter’s MediaWise

Our efforts extend beyond students and educators. The GNI was the original supporter of Poynter’s MediaWise project, which was initially focused on students and has since expanded to seniors. Launched in 2020, the MediaWise for Seniors program has trained more than half a million Americans to date.

We’re joining forces with the team again to translate their “How to Spot Misinformation Online” course into Spanish, and create a text-based version of the course that will be delivered via SMS, which is how many seniors find and share news.

Two mobile phones side by side. Both are showing a text message of paragraphs in Spanish, including various emojis like fire alarms and smiley faces.

“More than 41 million people in the U.S. speak Spanish at home,” says MediaWise Director Katy Byron. “Research shows that health and vaccine-related falsehoods and conspiracy theories are some of the most pervasive forms of misinformation targeting Hispanic communities. Making these Spanish-language educational resources available in multiple formats, on platforms popular with the 50+ Hispanic population, will help combat the Spanish language misinformation gap.”

Teaser trailer for an upcoming television segment on Telemundo about the new MediaWise project.
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These partnerships build on Google’s other media literacy efforts around the world, including a €25 million contribution to the European Media and Information Fund. Along with products like Fact Check Explorer and the “about this result” feature in Search, Google is committed to equipping people with the skills they need to stop the spread of misinformation and sort fact from fiction online.

Fighting the digital divide for diverse news publishers

The digital divide and technology gap that hundreds of US based Black- and Latino-owned publications face is something the Google News Initiative is working to bridge in partnership with news associations like National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP) and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN).

As a result, we jointly developed the GNI Ad Transformation Lab, a program to support publishers serving underrepresented communities in their transition to digital. The first round of the Lab helped 28 Black, and Latino publishers advance their digital businesses and build digital advertising capabilities required to achieve growth today. This was done by providing extensive analytical and technical support alongside personalized coaching to address each organization’s distinct digital business transformation.

And while we recognize that this shift requires years of hard work, we’re encouraged by the early results. On average, participating publishers experienced a 25% increase in programmatic revenue, a 10% increase in traffic and a 30% improvement in PageSpeed scores.

Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., President and CEO of the NNPA has noted that “it’s crucial to embrace a digital first business priority to remain financially sustainable.” And that’s why we will be continuing this partnership to launch a second Lab to help more Black- and Latino- owned publications on their steps towards a digital future.

“At first, we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” says Bethany Lane, Revenue Strategist at QCity Metro based in Charlotte, North Carolina. “The GNI Ad Transformation Lab was an intense education. It has pushed us further down the road toward sustainability.” QCity Metro experienced 100%+ growth in direct sold advertising revenue and average revenue per client, and secured a number of new advertising clients due to participation in the program.

“With the GNI, we learned how to use new tools, set up digital advertising campaigns, and significantly improve our site. In seven months, we were able to grow our advertising revenue, improve our site speed, better the user experience, and motivate and energize our team,” says Jose Zelaya, Editor-in-Chief of Miami-based Noti Bomba.

Other publishers experienced similar growth. In their own words:

This is a video of Dana Peck, Director of Digital Solutions at The AFRO, sharing her experience in the GNI Ad Transformation Lab.
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This is a video of Will Medina, Director of Sales and Marketing at Prensa Arizona, sharing his experience in the GNI Ad Transformation Lab.
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We look forward to sharing the insights we’ve learned with a new group of publishers next year. The application for the 2022 Ad Transformation Lab is now live. The application window will close on Monday, November 29 at 11:59 p.m. EST. We encourage news organizations and publishers who serve diverse and underrepresented communities in the United States and Canada to apply.

The GNI remains dedicated to sharing best practices with the broader community of news organizations and will continue to incorporate resources into our ongoing Digital Growth Program, available to all publishers around the world for free online.

A new fund to support investigative reporting

Investigative journalism has changed drastically over the past decade. Technology is playing a growing and evolving role in everything from gathering documents to processing data. New tools allow real-time collaboration across newsrooms and continents. While a few news organizations have the staff and resources to take advantage of these technological advances, not enough local news organizations and freelancers can say the same.

Before our current roles at Northwestern and Google, we worked together at The Washington Post. We were fortunate to be able to arm reporters with ultra-modern technology to work on document-centric news stories. The powerful combination of tools and reporters showed not only in the prizes the reporting won, but also in the tremendous impact it had on lawmakers and society. Our colleagues on The Post’s investigative team relied on technology to process and understand the large document sets that powered their award-winning work on projects like the Opioid Files and the Afghanistan Papers. These projects also motivated policy makers to bring about important societal changes.

While we met in a national newsroom, we both have roots in local journalism. We know how important accountability reporting can be to local communities. Smaller newsrooms, especially those that cover marginalized groups, need more resources to supply critical, accountability coverage.

Supporting journalists all over the world and creating tools to help them do their work more efficiently, regardless of their organization’s size, is an essential part of the Google News Initiative. Last year, the GNI launched Journalist Studio, a suite of Google tools to help journalists. This includes Pinpoint, which uses the best of Google’s search, artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to help reporters quickly search through large amounts of documents.

Today, we’re announcing The Data-Driven Reporting Project, a partnership between the GNI and the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. Medill will run The Data-Driven Reporting Project, which aims to address the inequality of resources for local newsrooms and freelancers when doing essential data-driven, investigative reporting. The project is committed to awarding $2 million to journalists working on document-based investigative projects that serve local and underrepresented communities throughout the United States and Canada.

The goal of the program is to help qualified applicants publish meaningful stories which make use of modern tools and resources. Medill will provide specialized training, expertise and resources to award recipients. The program also seeks to build a greater sense of community among journalists doing this kind of work. When possible, awarded projects will contribute to a growing collection of publicly accessible data for other journalists to explore and use. Medill will put together a jury of academics, journalists and technologists to vet applicants and choose projects to fund. Google will have no role in the jury or project selection process.

The Data-Driven Reporting Project reflects Journalist Studio’s focus on giving reporters access to tools and training. Pinpoint can transcribe audio files and recognize handwriting and text in images. The tool has proved useful to several journalists at, for example, The Boston Globe, which analyzed hundreds of documents in their Pulitzer-Prize-winning series Blindspot; Mexico-based Quinto Elemento’s investigation into corporate corruption; and the Philippines-based Rappler’s examination of CIA reports from the 1970s.

This illustration shows papers that have the same word and shows that Pinpoint can find them regardless if they are in text or in handwriting.

An illustration of how Pinpoint can find words across documents.

Building on powerful technology like this, the Data-Driven Reporting Project highlights three of Medill’s core strengths: its history of using investigative journalism to lift the oppressed, a focus on local newsrooms and a commitment to exploring the intersection of technology and journalism. The Medill Investigative Lab was involved in the recent publication of the Pandora Papers, a project that used technology to interrogate millions of documents to expose secret dealing by politicians and the ultra-wealthy. Medill’s Local News Initiative is working with dozens of newsrooms around the U.S. to bolster their business strategies. And Northwestern’s Knight Lab (an experimental community for journalists, technologists and designers) is working on a pair of AI-related projects, the 2021 CollabAI: Americas and the Knight Foundation’s AI for Local News initiative that seeks to apply AI methods to investigative reporting.

The Data-Driven Reporting Project will begin accepting applications beginning in December 2021. If you have a project rooted in data and documents, that could benefit from more resources, technology and training, learn more on how to apply.

Introducing the GNI News Equity Fund

The last few years have been challenging for everyone, none more so than marginalized communities. That’s something we recognize at the Google News Initiative, where we are committed to the fight for equity and are pushing ourselves to build diversity, fairness and inclusion standards into the fabric of every program that we build and every partnership that we create.

Given the scale of these challenges and the task ahead, we are announcing our GNI Global News Equity Fund, a multi-million dollar commitment to provide cash awards up to $250,000 to news organizations that are owned by or serve underrepresented communities around the world. These are non-dilutive awards, meaning companies won’t have to exchange ownership for the funding. We will provide more details on how to participate in the fund in early 2022.

Without question this is a movement, not a moment. All too often, efforts related to equity and representation are an isolated afterthought. We believe this new funding allows us to build on some early foundational work we have done to create a more representative and inclusive news industry, from accelerating the digital transformation of diverse publishers, to driving innovation among underrepresented news organizations, to supporting research that shines a light on the key issues facing underrepresented journalists and communities.

One of our goals at the GNI is to help in the digital transformation of diverse publishers. It’s the reason we partnered with a number of news associations in creating the Ads Transformation Lab to help 28 Black and Latino-owned publications in the U.S. grow their business for a digital future. There are some encouraging early results, with participating publishers experiencing an average of 25% increase in programmatic revenue and a 10% increase in traffic. “The GNI Ad Transformation Lab was an intense education,” says Bethany Lane, Revenue Strategist at QCity Metro in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It has pushed us further down the road toward sustainability.” QCity Metro experienced more than 100% growth in direct sold advertising revenue and average revenue per client, and secured a number of new advertising clients as a result.

Through the GNI’s North America Innovation Challenge, we funded Jambalaya News Lousiana’s project to reach their audiences in a unique and accessible way: creating an SMS alert system that sends parish-specific breaking news, local stories, events and services to the Latino, Spanish-speaking and immigrant community in Louisiana.

A video about Jambalaya News and its mission to provide news to the Spanish speaking community in New Orleans and how the GNI’s Innovation Fund helped them create a new way to reach people via text messages
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We’re also supporting experimental local newsrooms serving communities that have historically gone uncovered. In the U.S, we are coming on board as a financial supporter of Capital B, a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization that will launch in Atlanta in early 2022. Their goals include publishing impactful investigative journalism, combating misinformation and filling the basic information needs of Black residents in areas where they are underserved.

Understanding the scale of any problem often starts with data. That’s why we have partnered with organizations around the world to quantify the issue of diversity in tangible ways. A landmark study we supported from Media Diversity Australia looked at broadcast news and found almost 76% of journalists on Australian screens were found to have an Anglo-Celtic background. In Europe, our work with the German NGO Neue Deutsche Medienmacher involved industry-wide research that led to the development of a first of its kind Diversity Guide including best practices and a tool kit on hiring, team culture and reporting for all German newsrooms and broadcasters.

At this moment in time it is important to strengthen leadership across the industry to help address these challenges. In Latin America, we’ve supported theLeadership Incubator, developed by Chicas Poderosas, which provides mentoring that focuses on transformative leadership, redefining collaboration, mental health for leaders, promoting diversity and inclusion in the newsroom, and training to journalists and editors of young local and hyperlocal media founded by women and people who identify as LGBTQI+. To empower a network of women leaders in news organizations across Europe, Middle East and Africa, we created the Women in News Leadership Programme in partnership with INSEAD. The program will provide a forum to learn, connect and grow through a carefully designed curriculum.

We recognize that we have a long way to go, and that it starts within our own walls. That’s why we’re making these efforts to operate with inclusive principles and create lasting and meaningful change. People come to Google to access quality information, and we will continue to ensure that they are presented with a variety of trusted sources and voices that reflect the diversity of the world we live in.

How technology powered a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation

Editor’s note: Brendan McCarthy, the Deputy Projects Editor at The Boston Globe, talks about how technology moved forward their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation “Blind Spot.” The team analyzed thousands of documents using Pinpoint, an AI tool from Google that enables journalists to upload and analyze documents in seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. Pinpoint is available now, and reporters can sign up to request access.

At the Boston Globe, we are privileged to have ample resources dedicated to accountability journalism, including the storied Spotlight Team and a quick-strike investigative team that tackles stories “off the news.” The result: We don’t just cover breaking news events but are able to pursue and dive into stories that people don’t know about yet — but they should. The best of these hold the powerful accountable.

Such a moment arose in 2019 when seven motorcyclists were killed in a New Hampshire crash. In short order, Globe reporters uncovered the truck driver’s terrible driving history and found that his license should’ve been suspended weeks prior, but wasn’t — simply because the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles had failed to open its mail and act on a warning notice from another state.

That led our reporters to ask a series of key questions: How had the driver slipped unnoticed through the cracks of the state licensing system? And how many others like him were out there?

The team requested public records from all 50 states, conducted a nationwide survey and built a database of vehicle crashes, trucking mishaps and more. Through voluminous data work and nose-to-the-grindstone reporting over the course of 11 months, the team found an answer: Deadly, preventable crashes like this are shockingly common.

Vernal wears a dark knit sweater and sits at his computer, looking at the screen and resting his hand on his face in thought.

Vernal Coleman was one of the investigative reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "Blind Spot.”

Despite nearly 50 years of warnings by federal safety officials, the United States has no effective national system to keep tabs on drivers who commit serious offenses in another state. Enforcement relies on state agencies to do their job, which they often don’t.

When we launched the investigation, we hadn’t gotten fully acquainted with Pinpoint, a new Google tool where you can upload documents to easily search for names, places and more for patterns. But midway through our reporting process, we were dumping troves of files — court documents, photos, handwritten files, spreadsheets and more — into the tool.

A couple of helpful aspects of Pinpoint are its ability to recognize text in images and organizational capabilities, like the opportunity to quickly see, and search documents for, the most mentioned names or places and connections between people. So often in journalism — especially when you are dealing with mass troves of data — you are looking for outliers. Pinpoint let us figure out what was NOT there as much as what was there.

There’s this image that comes to mind — it’s a bit of a Hollywood, true-crime, detective trope — of a corkboard with mugshots and documents tacked up with pushpins, and lines of colorful string connecting the suspects. Technology now lets reporters take the physical pushpins and colorful string and photos and put it all on their laptop. It helps us organize the complex and see the patterns of a story.

It’s remarkable to think of the arduous, painstaking document work that newsroom data specialists did for years, all by hand, all without a laptop and technology. Don’t get me wrong, producing in-depth investigative journalism like our recent investigation is still an immense challenge. But technology is making many processes in reporting much faster.

Brendan wears a light shirt and dark tie and sits at a long wooden table, editing a news article with a pen.

Brendan McCarthy, the Deputy Projects Editor at The Boston Globe, edits an article at the organization’s offices

In light of our reporting, officials in several states suspended dozens of licenses. At least five motor vehicle agencies and court systems launched investigations into their failure to flag thousands of dangerous drivers. The 11-month investigation also propelled several proposed legislative reforms and reviews.

The series forced readers to confront the reality that we’ve grown numb to countless preventable deaths, and tolerable of lax government oversight that we would never permit in other arenas of our lives. For this work, the Globe received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting.

New tools and features to support local news

Local news is essential to building healthy communities. One of the most obvious examples of this was the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, when different communities had different needs and were impacted in different ways. Local news ensured that people knew what to do.

More broadly, readers are looking for local news more than ever before. Queries on Google Search like “News near me” have increased three-fold over the past five years, reaching an all time high during the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020.

This image shows a trend line in the increase of searches of “news near me” which has increased 3x over the past 5 years worldwide.

At Google, we’re dedicated to finding new ways to help readers better connect with publishers and helping publishers more efficiently and creatively produce quality journalism their readers want. A year ago, we launched Journalist Studio, a set of free tools reporters can use in their daily jobs. Today we’re announcing a number of new features to help local publishers connect to readers, and new tools for reporters to produce deeper, more digitally focused work.

New product features for news

We have a number of new news features coming to Google Search to help readers find content from local publishers even more easily than before. First, we’re expanding a feature that we initially launched for COVID searches. Readers will soon see a carousel of local news stories when Google finds local news coverage relevant to their query. This carousel will be available globally in all languages and helps readers easily find stories near them from local news publishers. The feature helps local publishers by adding another way for their essential reporting to reach the community that needs it most.

Over the past few months, we've also been working on improving our systems so authoritative local news sources appear more often alongside national publications, when relevant, in our general news features such as Top Stories. This improvement ensures people will see authoritative local stories when they’re searching for news, helping both the brand and the content of news publishers reach more people.

In addition, we have improved the local news experience by refining our ability to understand topics beyond just broad areas, like sports, to narrower subtopics, such as football and high school football. When paired with our location signals, this helps readers get more relevant material for the topics they are searching. For example, if you’re in Detroit and search for football, we’ll now show you results for local high school and college teams, rather than just showing you results for, say, the professional team.

This GIF shows examples of different local news stories that demonstrate how Google will show additional subtopics for searches you make.

An example of how local news results will update to show additional subtopics

Social media can give readers additional information that they may be looking for about local issues. We recently launched a new way to help people find local information on the topics they’re searching for by surfacing tweets by local, authoritative sources and authors, including tweets from news organizations.

This GIF shows tweets from different news sources and authors can appear across Google News

An example of how tweets by local, authoritative sources and authors can appear.

New data tools for reporters

In addition to our product news, we’ve also been looking at how we can help reporters cover stories with locally relevant data.

The U.S. Census is one of the largest data sets journalists can access. It has layers and layers of important data that can help reporters tell detailed stories about their own communities. But the challenge is sorting through that data and visualizing it in a way that helps readers understand trends and the bigger picture.

Today we’re launching a new tool to help reporters dig through all that data to find stories and embed visualizations on their sites. The Census Mapper project is an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national, state and county level, as well as census tracts. It was produced in partnership with Pitch Interactive and Big Local News, as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative and in cooperation with theJSK Journalism Fellowships).

This image shows a detailed, country level view of the Census Mapper, showing arrows across the US depicting movements of people and other demographic information from the Census

Census Mapper shows where populations have grown over time.

The Census data is pulled from the data collected and processed by The Associated Press, one of the Census Co-op partners. Census Mapper then lets local journalists easily embed maps showing population change at any level, helping them tell powerful stories in a more visual way about their communities.

This image shows changing demographic data from North Carolina, with arrows showing different movements around the state.

With the tool, you can zoom into states and below, such as North Carolina, shown here.

As part of our investment in data journalism we’re also making improvements to our Common Knowledge Project, a data explorer and visual journalism project to allow US journalists to explore local data. Built with journalists for journalists, the new version of Common Knowledge integrates journalist feedback and new features including geographic comparisons, new charts and visuals.

This image shows a comparison of people in San Francisco, CA compared with Oakland, CA between 2011 and 2018.

An example of the new look of the Common Knowledge Project

This image shows an example of what the Common Knowledge Project can show you - this shows the difference in the number of people in San Francisco, California between 2011 and 2019.

Another example of the new look of the Common Knowledge Project

We’re dedicated to supporting local newsrooms at every level of their reporting — from helping find, collect and visualize data, to searching through the data for stories. We know the importance of local news to communities and we’re invested in continuing to help local news publishers reach and engage audiences looking for their essential reporting.

Google News Showcase, one year in

A little over a year ago we announced Google News Showcase, our new product experience and licensing program for news, to readers and publishers all around the world. Our goal is to help publishers more deeply engage with their readers and to help readers find, follow and support the news organizations covering the issues that matter to them. One year in, we continue to learn, update and expand the product, and we’ve seen strong, steady numbers both in terms of the number of publishers signing on for the product and how readers are interacting with the content.

Since News Showcase launched in October 2020, we’ve signed deals with more than 1,000 news publications around the world and have launched in more than a dozen countries: India, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Austria, the U.K., Australia, Czechia, Italy, Colombia, Argentina, and just a few weeks ago we launched in Canada and Ireland. More than 90% of the publications that are part of News Showcase represent local or community news. Local news is an essential way for readers to connect to their communities and ensure they get the news that impacts their day-to-day lives.

This image shows the flags where we’ve launched Google News Showcase so far including: India, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Austria, the U.K., Australia, Czechia, Italy, Colombia, Argentina, Canada and Ireland

Flags of the countries where News Showcase has been launched so far

We know how hard it can be to keep on top of the news. With News Showcase, readers see what stories key publications think are worth highlighting and get more insight directly from those publishers through curated panels. We give publishers a variety of News Showcase panel templates to use so they can give additional context to stories, add related articles, timelines and more. The panels give news publishers more direct control of their presentation and branding, helping them be more visible to their dedicated readers and to those who are just discovering them.

An animation showing a mobile phone screen and various News Showcase publishers’ articles.

Examples of how some of our News Showcase partners around the world will appear in the product

News Showcase panels can appear across Google, currently on News and Discover, and direct readers to the full articles on publishers’ websites, helping them deepen their relationships with readers. In addition to the revenue that comes directly from these more-engaged readers, participating publishers will receive monthly licensing payments from Google.

“As a regional publisher in south and east Germany, a key objective for us is to expand our digital presence and reach to audiences,” says Daniel Torka, member of the executive board of NPG (Südwest Presse), a daily regional newspaper. “Using News Showcase has allowed us to more deeply engage our readers on important stories and give us more opportunities to tell stories differently.”

"I always work to increase the number of our users, to reach a wider audience,” says Clara Inés Araújo, editor in chief of El Pilón, a regional newspaper in Colombia. “For this, Google News Showcase has been a strategic ally. With nice designs, readers feel closer to our stories. We provide them with organized information about what is happening in our region and the country. The future is about working together, and Google News Showcase is a great example."

"Local newspapers create essential reporting for their communities,” says Kobe Shimbun, a local newspaper in Japan that covers Hyogo Prefecture. “However, in the digital era, we need to build more touch points for us to be discovered by those readers. Google News Showcase provides us a new way for readers to find the articles they need, and enables us to strengthen our relationships with them."

“Le Devoir is a proud partner of Google News Showcase. Google’s assistance and tools are critical in Le Devoir’s strategy to build a digital audience,” says Brian Myles, editor of Le Devoir, a Quebec-based independent news publisher. “We rely mainly on digital subscriptions and our business model is sustainable. In this regard, Google News Showcase fits perfectly with our current efforts to build a larger community of readers. This partnership will bring us a step forward in our digital transformation, while delivering our trusted and fact-based brand of independent journalism to a wider audience.”

One year in, we’re seeing robust numbers from News Showcase that indicate both publishers and readers are getting value from the quality curated content found in the product.

This illustrated graphic shows that over 1 million News Showcase panels have been created so far by our news partners

To start, participating publishers have created over one million News Showcase panels to date. And readers clearly like what they see. People have tapped the Follow button on News Showcase panels over 1.5 million times, showing they’re looking for more content from their favorite publishers or ones they have just discovered. By following a news organization on News Showcase, readers are ensuring that they get to see regular updates from these publishers every time they open Google News.

This illustrated graphic shows that there have been over 1.5 million follows by readers from News Showcase panels

To further strengthen these relationships, we offer News Showcase readers the ability to read expanded access to select content from publishers. This feature means readers will have the opportunity to read more of a publisher’s articles, encouraging them to learn more about the publication — and potentially subscribe. Combined together, these features and numbers show that the product is supporting news organizations’ mission of reaching readers and helping to bring a deeper engagement.

We’re continuing to work with news organizations to learn more about how people engage with News Showcase to ensure we’re delivering on our long-term goal of strengthening the relationship between readers and publishers.

News Showcase is just one of our investments in our ongoing commitment to support journalism around the world. Through both our services and direct funding of news organizations, Google is one of the world’s biggest financial supporters of news. With the Google News Initiative, we offer training in digital skills and capabilities, programs like GNI Startups Lab and the GNI Digital Growth Program to accelerate small and mid-sized news organizations’ business growth, and products like News Consumer Insights and Subscribe with Google to help publishers understand their audiences and grow reader revenue. Since we launched the GNI in 2018, we’ve worked with more than 7,000 news partners in over 120 countries and territories and trained more than 450,000 journalists in 70 countries. More details on our GNI work over the past three years is available in our impact report.

Alongside governments, other companies and civic society, we’re dedicated to continuing to find ways to engage readers with journalism that matters to them and supporting the sustainability of the news industry around the world.