Tag Archives: Journalism & News

Introducing Google News Lite mode — faster news for slower networks

There are many parts of the world, like India, where slow 2G and 3G mobile networks are the norm. In places like this, when news breaks you’ll likely wait, and wait, and wait for articles to load on your smartphone. That’s why, starting this week, Google News and Weather for Android is introducing a new feature called Lite mode to help many of India’s 200 million smartphone users stay connected with news from around the world and in their local communities. We’ll be rolling this out to other countries in emerging markets in the coming months.

In the full (normal) mode of Google News, as seen below, we aggregate headlines, images and related content, making it fast and easy for people to find articles they care about. In the new Lite mode things look a little different — we keep the headlines and trim the rest of the components down to their essentials so that the app loads more quickly (and uses less than one-third of the data). When people read an article in Lite mode, they’ll also benefit from Google’s previously announced faster and lighter mobile web pages. By default Lite mode triggers automatically when a slower network is detected (users can also choose to control Lite mode directly).

News lite

Lite mode is part of our overall goal to provide news that matters to people around the world. A couple of months ago we started providing local news sources to users in all Google News editions globally (71 countries and 38 languages), building on an announcement back in May of a Local Source tag that surfaces local sources for national stories.

We’re also working to bring news to people in their local languages. In India, we embarked on this effort back in 2007 with Hindi and have since expanded to include Malayalam, Tamil, Telegu and English, from more than 1,000 India-based publishers.

We plan to bring Lite mode to users in Brazil and Indonesia later this year, and more places next year.

Digital News Initiative: Introducing the YouTube Player for Publishers

At Google and YouTube, we’re big fans of the news industry and recognise that technology companies and news organisations are truly part of the same information ecosystem — which is why we want to play our part in the fight towards more sustainable models for news in the future.

Today, through a unique partnership between YouTube and a number of leading European news publishers, we’re launching a new video solution specifically tailored to the needs of news industry; with a goal of reducing complexity and increasing reach and revenue potential, so newsrooms can focus on what matters most — creating stories that educate and excite, engage and inspire.

We owe great thanks to the members of the Digital News Initiative who have helped to craft and customise the Player for Publishers; their feedback, questioning, and testing have helped us to build a great solution. We are delighted with the early feedback from the publishers across Europe who are already testing the solution, and we’re excited to be opening access to the tool out for all European news publishers.

"Providing a truly satisfactory video experience on the internet has always been a challenge, and it's getting increasingly complex with new use cases,” says German Frassa, Digital Product Director at Unidad Editorial, the publisher of Spanish newspapers El Mundo, Marca, and Expansión which is increasingly focusing on video and emerging formats. Creating engaging content is the main concern of news publishers everywhere, but in an increasingly complex marketplace, advertising, security, cross-device compatibility and content protection can put creativity on the back-burner.

In addition to Unidad Editorial and Prisa from Spain, the wave of pilot partners currently testing the Player include France’s France24, The Guardian (United Kingdom), ze.tt(Germany), Dagbladet (Norway), and Oe24 (Austria).

“We’re very excited to partner with the brand that is synonymous of digital video worldwide,” says Frassa, “To make sure that along with our content, we will be delivering the best experience to all our users as well."

YouTube powers video hosting, streaming, rights management including the use ofContent ID, user analytics and monetization options for publishers, freeing up precious newsroom assets to focus on content creation, news-dissemination and the critical storytelling that we’ve come to expect from the free press.

Inspired by conversations with newsrooms across Europe, we developed the YouTube Player for Publishers, a new solution to provide a video hosting, streaming and ads management platform for publishers - powered by YouTube. Here’s how it works:

  • Better connecting audiences with news videos: The YouTube Player is available across 1000’s of devices, globally, optimised for the best possible user experience
  • Increasing control and maximising revenue: The new player gives publishers the option to control ad formats and ad load on their videos as well as giving priority sales rights across videos embedded in their own sites and applications.
  • Reducing complexity, enhancing control The Player helps publishers simplify video infrastructure and reduce cost. Over time, we’ll work to help publishers respond in an evolving landscape of user-generated content for news as well.
“The player from YouTube provides us the best of many things: A terrific product for providing video to our audience, lower operating costs, access to continuous technical innovation, ease of distribution on both our own domains and YouTube's network, and flexible monetisation models,” says Stephan Granhaug, Executive Vice President Digital in Aller Media Norway, the owner of Dagbladet.

We’re thrilled that our partners across Europe are finding early success with the Player, and are eager to extend the invitation for additional European publishers to become involved as we’re just getting started. For more information on progress from the Digital News Initiative, please visit digitalnewsinitiative.com. Publishers interested in learning more can contact us via this form.

Digital News Initiative: Introducing the YouTube Player for Publishers

At Google and YouTube, we’re big fans of the news industry and recognise that technology companies and news organisations are truly part of the same information ecosystem — which is why we want to play our part in the fight towards more sustainable models for news in the future.

Today, through a unique partnership between YouTube and a number of leading European news publishers, we’re launching a new video solution specifically tailored to the needs of news industry; with a goal of reducing complexity and increasing reach and revenue potential, so newsrooms can focus on what matters most — creating stories that educate and excite, engage and inspire.

We owe great thanks to the members of the Digital News Initiative who have helped to craft and customise the Player for Publishers; their feedback, questioning, and testing have helped us to build a great solution. We are delighted with the early feedback from the publishers across Europe who are already testing the solution, and we’re excited to be opening access to the tool out for all European news publishers.

"Providing a truly satisfactory video experience on the internet has always been a challenge, and it's getting increasingly complex with new use cases,” says German Frassa, Digital Product Director at Unidad Editorial, the publisher of Spanish newspapers El Mundo, Marca, and Expansión which is increasingly focusing on video and emerging formats. Creating engaging content is the main concern of news publishers everywhere, but in an increasingly complex marketplace, advertising, security, cross-device compatibility and content protection can put creativity on the back-burner.

In addition to Unidad Editorial and Prisa from Spain, the wave of pilot partners currently testing the Player include France’s France24, The Guardian (United Kingdom), ze.tt(Germany), Dagbladet (Norway), and Oe24 (Austria).

“We’re very excited to partner with the brand that is synonymous of digital video worldwide,” says Frassa, “To make sure that along with our content, we will be delivering the best experience to all our users as well."

YouTube powers video hosting, streaming, rights management including the use ofContent ID, user analytics and monetization options for publishers, freeing up precious newsroom assets to focus on content creation, news-dissemination and the critical storytelling that we’ve come to expect from the free press.

Inspired by conversations with newsrooms across Europe, we developed the YouTube Player for Publishers, a new solution to provide a video hosting, streaming and ads management platform for publishers - powered by YouTube. Here’s how it works:

  • Better connecting audiences with news videos: The YouTube Player is available across 1000’s of devices, globally, optimised for the best possible user experience
  • Increasing control and maximising revenue: The new player gives publishers the option to control ad formats and ad load on their videos as well as giving priority sales rights across videos embedded in their own sites and applications.
  • Reducing complexity, enhancing control The Player helps publishers simplify video infrastructure and reduce cost. Over time, we’ll work to help publishers respond in an evolving landscape of user-generated content for news as well.
“The player from YouTube provides us the best of many things: A terrific product for providing video to our audience, lower operating costs, access to continuous technical innovation, ease of distribution on both our own domains and YouTube's network, and flexible monetisation models,” says Stephan Granhaug, Executive Vice President Digital in Aller Media Norway, the owner of Dagbladet.

We’re thrilled that our partners across Europe are finding early success with the Player, and are eager to extend the invitation for additional European publishers to become involved as we’re just getting started. For more information on progress from the Digital News Initiative, please visit digitalnewsinitiative.com. Publishers interested in learning more can contact us via this form.

Digital News Initiative: Introducing the YouTube Player for Publishers

At Google and YouTube, we’re big fans of the news industry and recognise that technology companies and news organisations are truly part of the same information ecosystem — which is why we want to play our part in the fight towards more sustainable models for news in the future.

Today, through a unique partnership between YouTube and a number of leading European news publishers, we’re launching a new video solution specifically tailored to the needs of news industry; with a goal of reducing complexity and increasing reach and revenue potential, so newsrooms can focus on what matters most — creating stories that educate and excite, engage and inspire.

We owe great thanks to the members of the Digital News Initiative who have helped to craft and customise the Player for Publishers; their feedback, questioning, and testing have helped us to build a great solution. We are delighted with the early feedback from the publishers across Europe who are already testing the solution, and we’re excited to be opening access to the tool out for all European news publishers.

"Providing a truly satisfactory video experience on the internet has always been a challenge, and it's getting increasingly complex with new use cases,” says German Frassa, Digital Product Director at Unidad Editorial, the publisher of Spanish newspapers El Mundo, Marca, and Expansión which is increasingly focusing on video and emerging formats. Creating engaging content is the main concern of news publishers everywhere, but in an increasingly complex marketplace, advertising, security, cross-device compatibility and content protection can put creativity on the back-burner.

In addition to Unidad Editorial and Prisa from Spain, the wave of pilot partners currently testing the Player include France’s France24, The Guardian (United Kingdom), ze.tt(Germany), Dagbladet (Norway), and Oe24 (Austria).

“We’re very excited to partner with the brand that is synonymous of digital video worldwide,” says Frassa, “To make sure that along with our content, we will be delivering the best experience to all our users as well."

YouTube powers video hosting, streaming, rights management including the use ofContent ID, user analytics and monetization options for publishers, freeing up precious newsroom assets to focus on content creation, news-dissemination and the critical storytelling that we’ve come to expect from the free press.

Inspired by conversations with newsrooms across Europe, we developed the YouTube Player for Publishers, a new solution to provide a video hosting, streaming and ads management platform for publishers - powered by YouTube. Here’s how it works:

  • Better connecting audiences with news videos: The YouTube Player is available across 1000’s of devices, globally, optimised for the best possible user experience
  • Increasing control and maximising revenue: The new player gives publishers the option to control ad formats and ad load on their videos as well as giving priority sales rights across videos embedded in their own sites and applications.
  • Reducing complexity, enhancing control The Player helps publishers simplify video infrastructure and reduce cost. Over time, we’ll work to help publishers respond in an evolving landscape of user-generated content for news as well.
“The player from YouTube provides us the best of many things: A terrific product for providing video to our audience, lower operating costs, access to continuous technical innovation, ease of distribution on both our own domains and YouTube's network, and flexible monetisation models,” says Stephan Granhaug, Executive Vice President Digital in Aller Media Norway, the owner of Dagbladet.

We’re thrilled that our partners across Europe are finding early success with the Player, and are eager to extend the invitation for additional European publishers to become involved as we’re just getting started. For more information on progress from the Digital News Initiative, please visit digitalnewsinitiative.com. Publishers interested in learning more can contact us via this form.

Next Journalism School 2015 winners: Meet Korea’s next generation of data journalists

Editor’s note: We invited three participants of the Next Journalism School 2015 to share some of the highlights from their visit to the Google campus in Mountain View, California. The Next Journalism School is an annual program that was set up in 2014 to nurture our next generation of journalists and equip them with the skills they need in a digital era. If you’re studying journalism in Korea and are interested in joining the next cohort, applications open here today and close on July 24, 2016.

NextJournalistSchool2016.1.jpg
We were welcomed to Google’s Mountain View campus by the warm California sunshine, Korean Googlers and of course the green Android robot. Successful news gathering and reporting today relies a lot on advanced technology and data analysis. This year, there were 60 graduates from the Next Journalism School, and three of us were fortunate to have the opportunity to travel to Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, where we got a first-hand look at some of the latest innovations in this field.


  • Virtual reality. As 360 degree technology becomes more and more accessible, Google’s tools have made it easy to utilize VR imagery in journalism for a more immersive experience.
  • Google Trends show patterns in search across topics and over time, enabling a new form of storytelling based on real-time data. While most of us turn to Google Search for answers, it’s also a great tool to give journalists answers and insight into what is top of mind for people around the world.
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages optimizes content for mobile phones so pages load faster, making it more compelling for people to consume content on their handheld devices. Research has shown that readers will click away from a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. So AMP is incredibly important for engaging readers with news content, particularly in countries like Korea, where 48% of news is consumed on mobile--the highest in the world.

NextJournalistSchool2016.png
We met with Googlers who are passionate about tools that are making data journalism more accessible. From left to right: Inhyuk Seok and Donghwi Lee (software engineers on Google Search),  Otavio Good (software engineer on Google Translate), Richard Gingras (Head of News), Brian Sullivan (Program Manager with Google Earth Outreach)

Along with getting first hand exposure to the many media tools available, the real highlight of our trip was meeting and speaking with Googlers who are passionate about the future of journalism. It was exciting to hear how Google nurtures innovation and innovative-thinking in their own workplace. It’s an environment where people are encouraged to try new things, with one guiding principle: focus on the user. We look forward to replicating a lot of this thinking as we return to our own day jobs, and bring some of the innovations that we learned about to our readers.

Next Journalism School 2015 winners: Meet Korea’s next generation of data journalists

Editor’s note: We invited three participants of the Next Journalism School 2015 to share some of the highlights from their visit to the Google campus in Mountain View, California. The Next Journalism School is an annual program that was set up in 2014 to nurture our next generation of journalists and equip them with the skills they need in a digital era. If you’re studying journalism in Korea and are interested in joining the next cohort, applications open here today and close on July 24, 2016.

NextJournalistSchool2016.1.jpg
We were welcomed to Google’s Mountain View campus by the warm California sunshine, Korean Googlers and of course the green Android robot. Successful news gathering and reporting today relies a lot on advanced technology and data analysis. This year, there were 60 graduates from the Next Journalism School, and three of us were fortunate to have the opportunity to travel to Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, where we got a first-hand look at some of the latest innovations in this field.


  • Virtual reality. As 360 degree technology becomes more and more accessible, Google’s tools have made it easy to utilize VR imagery in journalism for a more immersive experience.
  • Google Trendsshow patterns in search across topics and over time, enabling a new form of storytelling based on real-time data. While most of us turn to Google Search for answers, it’s also a great tool to give journalists answers and insight into what is top of mind for people around the world.
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages optimizes content for mobile phones so pages load faster, making it more compelling for people to consume content on their handheld devices. Research has shown that readers will click away from a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. So AMP is incredibly important for engaging readers with news content, particularly in countries like Korea, where 48% of news is consumed on mobile--the highest in the world.

NextJournalistSchool2016.png
We met with Googlers who are passionate about tools that are making data journalism more accessible. From left to right: Inhyuk Seok and Donghwi Lee (software engineers on Google Search),  Otavio Good (software engineer on Google Translate), Richard Gingras (Head of News), Brian Sullivan (Program Manager with Google Earth Outreach)

Along with getting first hand exposure to the many media tools available, the real highlight of our trip was meeting and speaking with Googlers who are passionate about the future of journalism. It was exciting to hear how Google nurtures innovation and innovative-thinking in their own workplace. It’s an environment where people are encouraged to try new things, with one guiding principle: focus on the user. We look forward to replicating a lot of this thinking as we return to our own day jobs, and bring some of the innovations that we learned about to our readers.

Next Journalism School 2015 winners: Meet Korea’s next generation of data journalists

Editor’s note: We invited three participants of the Next Journalism School 2015 to share some of the highlights from their visit to the Google campus in Mountain View, California. The Next Journalism School is an annual program that was set up in 2014 to nurture our next generation of journalists and equip them with the skills they need in a digital era. If you’re studying journalism in Korea and are interested in joining the next cohort, applications open here today and close on July 24, 2016.

NextJournalistSchool2016.1.jpg
We were welcomed to Google’s Mountain View campus by the warm California sunshine, Korean Googlers and of course the green Android robot. Successful news gathering and reporting today relies a lot on advanced technology and data analysis. This year, there were 60 graduates from the Next Journalism School, and three of us were fortunate to have the opportunity to travel to Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, where we got a first-hand look at some of the latest innovations in this field.


  • Virtual reality. As 360 degree technology becomes more and more accessible, Google’s tools have made it easy to utilize VR imagery in journalism for a more immersive experience.
  • Google Trends show patterns in search across topics and over time, enabling a new form of storytelling based on real-time data. While most of us turn to Google Search for answers, it’s also a great tool to give journalists answers and insight into what is top of mind for people around the world.
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages optimizes content for mobile phones so pages load faster, making it more compelling for people to consume content on their handheld devices. Research has shown that readers will click away from a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. So AMP is incredibly important for engaging readers with news content, particularly in countries like Korea, where 48% of news is consumed on mobile--the highest in the world.

NextJournalistSchool2016.png
We met with Googlers who are passionate about tools that are making data journalism more accessible. From left to right: Inhyuk Seok and Donghwi Lee (software engineers on Google Search),  Otavio Good (software engineer on Google Translate), Richard Gingras (Head of News), Brian Sullivan (Program Manager with Google Earth Outreach)

Along with getting first hand exposure to the many media tools available, the real highlight of our trip was meeting and speaking with Googlers who are passionate about the future of journalism. It was exciting to hear how Google nurtures innovation and innovative-thinking in their own workplace. It’s an environment where people are encouraged to try new things, with one guiding principle: focus on the user. We look forward to replicating a lot of this thinking as we return to our own day jobs, and bring some of the innovations that we learned about to our readers.