Mountain View-based search giant Google has announced a new initiative aimed at tackling some of the problems facing modern digital journalism.
Dubbed the ‘Google News Initiative’ (GNI), the effort is a way for Google to continue its work with the media industry in order to “elevate and strengthen quality journalism.”
As part of the GNI, Google has launched the Disinfo Lab, in partnership with First Draft. In the U.S., the company has partnered with the Poynter Institute, Stanford University and the Local Media Association to launch MediaWise, a “project designed to improve digital information literacy for young consumers.”
The company is also launching ‘Subscribe with Google’ — a service designed to enable publishers to monetize their websites by allowing readers to more easily subscribe through their Google accounts.
“Subscribe with Google lets you buy a subscription, using your Google account, on participating news sites,” reads an excerpt from a March 20th, 2018 media release. “Select the publisher offer you’d like to buy, click ‘Subscribe,’ and you’re done.”
Subscribe with Google also allows subscribers to keep track of their subscriptions directly through a Google account. Google will also produce search results from subscribed publications when users search for a specific news topic.
“Paying for a subscription is a clear indication that you value and trust your subscribd publication as a source,” reads an excerpt from the March 20th Subscribe with Google media release.
Google previewed the Subscribe with Google feature back in October 2017, working with 60 news outlets from 18 countries.
Google is also launching an open-source tool called Outline “that lets news organizations provide journalists more secure access to the internet.”
Outline allows news organizations to set up a corporate virtual private network (VPN) on company servers to keep information private.
The tool was developed by Jigsaw, a technology incubator part of the Alphabet group of companies.
Source: Google
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