NEW DELHI — 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”.
