Ottobre, 2022

The WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress returned in 2022, with the promise to deliver “critical conversations about the future of news publishing.” Attendees from all over the world gathered in Zaragoza, Spain to celebrate “the craft of journalism” as Vivian Schiller from the Aspen Institute put so well during the World News Day celebration – and to reflect on how to build on the learnings of the past to work towards a more sustainable future for the industry.

The programme and speakers did not disappoint. Topics ranged from the urgent need to rebuild trust in journalism, to the importance of understanding and tapping into underserved audiences, and innovative strategies for digital revenue growth. The energy and optimism in Zaragoza were palpable.

During the event, the Google News Initiative announced some key developments in Europe, including:

• The 47 recipients of the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge for Europe, designed to stimulate innovation for small and medium-sized organizations that provide credible information when it’s needed most.
• The expansion of our strategic partnership with FT Strategies, where we’ll work with more than 500 publishers in 50 countries to deliver sustainable growth strategies.
• The launch of the fourth edition of the Table Stakes Europe programme in partnership with WAN-IFRA.

This was my first time at the Congress and I truly enjoyed getting to know more of our publishing partners, as well as hearing directly from industry experts. Here are some of my takeaways from this year:

Innovation is a priority for publishers of all sizes

Lisa MacLeod, Principal Publishing Lead at FT Strategies, is sure that, “necessity is the mother of invention.” From large to small publishers, Lisa used publisher engagement in digital transition programmes such as Table Stakes Europe and Google’s Digital Growth Programme, as proof that innovation is key for the sustainable future of news.

Publishers are pulling different levers on their path to digital revenue

From Pierre Louette, CEO of French publisher Les Echos, we heard that good content, served at the right time to the right audience, along with a focus on diversification of revenue streams, go a long way to build a sustainable business. Les Echos, a 115-year-old business, now sees the majority of its revenue coming from digital.

Diversity is essential to the news industry’s growth and quality of journalism

Katia Murmann, founder of Equal Voice, an advocacy group for women in media, offered her perspective on why diversity is so positive for the future of the news industry: “When Equal Voice started, only 35% of our readers at Ringier were women. Now, it’s 50%. By focusing on adding more female voices to our newsroom, we tapped into a whole new audience and potential revenue source.”

I’m leaving Zaragoza with a renewed perspective on the future of news, and feeling encouraged by the work to come. Thank you to our publisher partners who exhibited their fantastic projects in the Google News Initiative Innovation Corner and everyone who took the time to meet with our team onsite.

Voice-activated technologies, like Google Home or the Google Assistant, can help people do things like make a phone call to someone, adjust the lighting in their house, or play a favorite song — all with the sound of their voice. But these technologies may not work as well for the millions of people around the world who have non-standard speech. In 2019 we launched our research initiative Project Euphonia with the aim of finding ways to leverage AI to make speech recognition technology more accessible.

Today, we’re expanding this commitment to accessibility through our involvement in the Speech Accessibility Project, a collaboration between researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and five technology companies, including Google. The university is working with advocacy groups, like Team Gleason and the Davis Phinney Foundation, to create datasets of impaired speech that can help accelerate improvements to automated speech recognition (ASR) for the communities these organizations support.

Since the launch of Project Euphonia, we’ve had the opportunity to work with community organizations to compile a collection of speech samples from over 2,000 people. This collection of utterances has allowed Project Euphonia researchers to adapt standard speech recognition systems to understand non-standard speech more accurately, and ultimately reduce median word error rates by an average of more than 80%. These promising results created the foundation for Project Relate, an Android app that allows people to submit samples of their voice and receive a personalized speech recognition model that more accurately understands their speech. It also encouraged the expansion of Project Euphonia to include additional languages like French, Japanese, and Spanish.

There’s still a lot to be done to develop ASR systems that can understand everyone’s voice — regardless of speech pattern. However, it’s clear that larger, more diverse datasets and collaboration with the communities we want to reach will help get us to where we want to go. That is why we’re making it easy for Project Euphonia participants to share copies of their recordings to the Speech Accessibility Project. Our hope is that by making these datasets available to research and development teams, we can help improve communication systems for everyone, including people with disabilities.