The year 2024 was a critical one for the news industry, with major elections across the globe to conflicts and crises, according to Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) News on Wednesday.
These significant events have brought to the fore the role of newsrooms in giving out accurate and timely information, said the company, pointing out its contributions to fighting misinformation in the Indian news ecosystem.
It backed the Shakti initiative -- an initiative to fight misinformation in collaboration -- and gave AI training to newsrooms in 2024.
The company also empowered India's news ecosystem through initiatives like the Indian Languages Programme, which was set to boost user engagement and ad revenue for local publishers, as well as expanding Google News Showcase.
"We're very proud of the scale and depth of our work with Indian news publishers: efforts around understanding new user behaviors and revenue streams, programmes that've driven modernization and really large revenue growth, as well as initiatives like Shakti, which sets a robust framework for dealing with misinformation," said Durga Raghunath, Head of India News Partnerships.
Notably, the Shakti initiative mobilized more than 50 news publishers and 300 journalists to debunk misinformation and deepfakes in 10 local languages, engaging hundreds of thousands of people in a very short period of time.
She further explained that the program "has allowed newsrooms to publish fact-checks 78 percent faster and has created more than 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.
Additionally, as AI can revolutionize journalism (in terms of transcription, research, translation, or data analysis), Google, in 2024, announced new training programs. The training programs were meant for "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.
Besides, 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 added that the company would further focus on "creating value for both news publishers and Google in 2025".
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