Category "notizie dai blog"

Local news is essential to building healthy communities. One of the most obvious examples of this was the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, when different communities had different needs and were impacted in different ways. Local news ensured that people knew what to do.

More broadly, readers are looking for local news more than ever before. Queries on Google Search like “News near me” have increased three-fold over the past five years, reaching an all time high during the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020.

At Google, we’re dedicated to finding new ways to help readers better connect with publishers and helping publishers more efficiently and creatively produce quality journalism their readers want. A year ago, we launched Journalist Studio, a set of free tools reporters can use in their daily jobs. Today we’re announcing a number of new features to help local publishers connect to readers, and new tools for reporters to produce deeper, more digitally focused work.

New product features for news

We have a number of new news features coming to Google Search to help readers find content from local publishers even more easily than before. First, we’re expanding a feature that we initially launched for COVID searches. Readers will soon see a carousel of local news stories when Google finds local news coverage relevant to their query. This carousel will be available globally in all languages and helps readers easily find stories near them from local news publishers. The feature helps local publishers by adding another way for their essential reporting to reach the community that needs it most.

Over the past few months, we’ve also been working on improving our systems so authoritative local news sources appear more often alongside national publications, when relevant, in our general news features such as Top Stories. This improvement ensures people will see authoritative local stories when they’re searching for news, helping both the brand and the content of news publishers reach more people.

In addition, we have improved the local news experience by refining our ability to understand topics beyond just broad areas, like sports, to narrower subtopics, such as football and high school football. When paired with our location signals, this helps readers get more relevant material for the topics they are searching. For example, if you’re in Detroit and search for football, we’ll now show you results for local high school and college teams, rather than just showing you results for, say, the professional team.

Social media can give readers additional information that they may be looking for about local issues. We recently launched a new way to help people find local information on the topics they’re searching for by surfacing tweets by local, authoritative sources and authors, including tweets from news organizations.

New data tools for reporters

In addition to our product news, we’ve also been looking at how we can help reporters cover stories with locally relevant data.

The U.S. Census is one of the largest data sets journalists can access. It has layers and layers of important data that can help reporters tell detailed stories about their own communities. But the challenge is sorting through that data and visualizing it in a way that helps readers understand trends and the bigger picture.

Today we’re launching a new tool to help reporters dig through all that data to find stories and embed visualizations on their sites. The Census Mapper project is an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national, state and county level, as well as census tracts. It was produced in partnership with Pitch Interactive and Big Local News, as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative and in cooperation with theJSK Journalism Fellowships).

The Census data is pulled from the data collected and processed by The Associated Press, one of the Census Co-op partners. Census Mapper then lets local journalists easily embed maps showing population change at any level, helping them tell powerful stories in a more visual way about their communities.

As part of our investment in data journalism we’re also making improvements to our Common Knowledge Project, a data explorer and visual journalism project to allow US journalists to explore local data. Built with journalists for journalists, the new version of Common Knowledge integrates journalist feedback and new features including geographic comparisons, new charts and visuals.

We’re dedicated to supporting local newsrooms at every level of their reporting — from helping find, collect and visualize data, to searching through the data for stories. We know the importance of local news to communities and we’re invested in continuing to help local news publishers reach and engage audiences looking for their essential reporting.

Editor’s note: Brendan McCarthy, the Deputy Projects Editor at The Boston Globe, talks about how technology moved forward their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation “Blind Spot.” The team analyzed thousands of documents using Pinpoint, an AI tool from Google that enables journalists to upload and analyze documents in seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. Pinpoint is available now, and reporters can sign up to request access.

At the Boston Globe, we are privileged to have ample resources dedicated to accountability journalism, including the storied Spotlight Team and a quick-strike investigative team that tackles stories “off the news.” The result: We don’t just cover breaking news events but are able to pursue and dive into stories that people don’t know about yet — but they should. The best of these hold the powerful accountable.

Such a moment arose in 2019 when seven motorcyclists were killed in a New Hampshire crash. In short order, Globe reporters uncovered the truck driver’s terrible driving history and found that his license should’ve been suspended weeks prior, but wasn’t — simply because the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles had failed to open its mail and act on a warning notice from another state.

That led our reporters to ask a series of key questions: How had the driver slipped unnoticed through the cracks of the state licensing system? And how many others like him were out there?

The team requested public records from all 50 states, conducted a nationwide survey and built a database of vehicle crashes, trucking mishaps and more. Through voluminous data work and nose-to-the-grindstone reporting over the course of 11 months, the team found an answer: Deadly, preventable crashes like this are shockingly common.

Despite nearly 50 years of warnings by federal safety officials, the United States has no effective national system to keep tabs on drivers who commit serious offenses in another state. Enforcement relies on state agencies to do their job, which they often don’t.

When we launched the investigation, we hadn’t gotten fully acquainted with Pinpoint, a new Google tool where you can upload documents to easily search for names, places and more for patterns. But midway through our reporting process, we were dumping troves of files — court documents, photos, handwritten files, spreadsheets and more — into the tool.

A couple of helpful aspects of Pinpoint are its ability to recognize text in images and organizational capabilities, like the opportunity to quickly see, and search documents for, the most mentioned names or places and connections between people. So often in journalism — especially when you are dealing with mass troves of data — you are looking for outliers. Pinpoint let us figure out what was NOT there as much as what was there.

There’s this image that comes to mind — it’s a bit of a Hollywood, true-crime, detective trope — of a corkboard with mugshots and documents tacked up with pushpins, and lines of colorful string connecting the suspects. Technology now lets reporters take the physical pushpins and colorful string and photos and put it all on their laptop. It helps us organize the complex and see the patterns of a story.

It’s remarkable to think of the arduous, painstaking document work that newsroom data specialists did for years, all by hand, all without a laptop and technology. Don’t get me wrong, producing in-depth investigative journalism like our recent investigation is still an immense challenge. But technology is making many processes in reporting much faster.

In light of our reporting, officials in several states suspended dozens of licenses. At least five motor vehicle agencies and court systems launched investigations into their failure to flag thousands of dangerous drivers. The 11-month investigation also propelled several proposed legislative reforms and reviews.

The series forced readers to confront the reality that we’ve grown numb to countless preventable deaths, and tolerable of lax government oversight that we would never permit in other arenas of our lives. For this work, the Globe received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting.

The last few years have been challenging for everyone, none more so than marginalized communities. That’s something we recognize at the Google News Initiative, where we are committed to the fight for equity and are pushing ourselves to build diversity, fairness and inclusion standards into the fabric of every program that we build and every partnership that we create.

Given the scale of these challenges and the task ahead, we are announcing our GNI Global News Equity Fund, a multi-million dollar commitment to provide cash awards up to $250,000 to news organizations that are owned by or serve underrepresented communities around the world. These are non-dilutive awards, meaning companies won’t have to exchange ownership for the funding. We will provide more details on how to participate in the fund in early 2022.

Without question this is a movement, not a moment. All too often, efforts related to equity and representation are an isolated afterthought. We believe this new funding allows us to build on some early foundational work we have done to create a more representative and inclusive news industry, from accelerating the digital transformation of diverse publishers, to driving innovation among underrepresented news organizations, to supporting research that shines a light on the key issues facing underrepresented journalists and communities.

One of our goals at the GNI is to help in the digital transformation of diverse publishers. It’s the reason we partnered with a number of news associations in creating the Ads Transformation Lab to help 28 Black and Latino-owned publications in the U.S. grow their business for a digital future. There are some encouraging early results, with participating publishers experiencing an average of 25% increase in programmatic revenue and a 10% increase in traffic. “The GNI Ad Transformation Lab was an intense education,” says Bethany Lane, Revenue Strategist at QCity Metro in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It has pushed us further down the road toward sustainability.” QCity Metro experienced more than 100% growth in direct sold advertising revenue and average revenue per client, and secured a number of new advertising clients as a result.

Through the GNI’s North America Innovation Challenge, we funded Jambalaya News Lousiana’s project to reach their audiences in a unique and accessible way: creating an SMS alert system that sends parish-specific breaking news, local stories, events and services to the Latino, Spanish-speaking and immigrant community in Louisiana.

We’re also supporting experimental local newsrooms serving communities that have historically gone uncovered. In the U.S, we are coming on board as a financial supporter of Capital B, a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization that will launch in Atlanta in early 2022. Their goals include publishing impactful investigative journalism, combating misinformation and filling the basic information needs of Black residents in areas where they are underserved.

Understanding the scale of any problem often starts with data. That’s why we have partnered with organizations around the world to quantify the issue of diversity in tangible ways. A landmark study we supported from Media Diversity Australia looked at broadcast news and found almost 76% of journalists on Australian screens were found to have an Anglo-Celtic background. In Europe, our work with the German NGO Neue Deutsche Medienmacher involved industry-wide research that led to the development of a first of its kind Diversity Guide including best practices and a tool kit on hiring, team culture and reporting for all German newsrooms and broadcasters.

At this moment in time it is important to strengthen leadership across the industry to help address these challenges. In Latin America, we’ve supported theLeadership Incubator, developed by Chicas Poderosas, which provides mentoring that focuses on transformative leadership, redefining collaboration, mental health for leaders, promoting diversity and inclusion in the newsroom, and training to journalists and editors of young local and hyperlocal media founded by women and people who identify as LGBTQI+. To empower a network of women leaders in news organizations across Europe, Middle East and Africa, we created the Women in News Leadership Programme in partnership with INSEAD. The program will provide a forum to learn, connect and grow through a carefully designed curriculum.

We recognize that we have a long way to go, and that it starts within our own walls. That’s why we’re making these efforts to operate with inclusive principles and create lasting and meaningful change. People come to Google to access quality information, and we will continue to ensure that they are presented with a variety of trusted sources and voices that reflect the diversity of the world we live in.

Investigative journalism has changed drastically over the past decade. Technology is playing a growing and evolving role in everything from gathering documents to processing data. New tools allow real-time collaboration across newsrooms and continents. While a few news organizations have the staff and resources to take advantage of these technological advances, not enough local news organizations and freelancers can say the same.

Before our current roles at Northwestern and Google, we worked together at The Washington Post. We were fortunate to be able to arm reporters with ultra-modern technology to work on document-centric news stories. The powerful combination of tools and reporters showed not only in the prizes the reporting won, but also in the tremendous impact it had on lawmakers and society. Our colleagues on The Post’s investigative team relied on technology to process and understand the large document sets that powered their award-winning work on projects like the Opioid Files and the Afghanistan Papers. These projects also motivated policy makers to bring about important societal changes.

While we met in a national newsroom, we both have roots in local journalism. We know how important accountability reporting can be to local communities. Smaller newsrooms, especially those that cover marginalized groups, need more resources to supply critical, accountability coverage.

Supporting journalists all over the world and creating tools to help them do their work more efficiently, regardless of their organization’s size, is an essential part of the Google News Initiative. Last year, the GNI launched Journalist Studio, a suite of Google tools to help journalists. This includes Pinpoint, which uses the best of Google’s search, artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to help reporters quickly search through large amounts of documents.

Today, we’re announcing The Data-Driven Reporting Project, a partnership between the GNI and the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. Medill will run The Data-Driven Reporting Project, which aims to address the inequality of resources for local newsrooms and freelancers when doing essential data-driven, investigative reporting. The project is committed to awarding $2 million to journalists working on document-based investigative projects that serve local and underrepresented communities throughout the United States and Canada.

The goal of the program is to help qualified applicants publish meaningful stories which make use of modern tools and resources. Medill will provide specialized training, expertise and resources to award recipients. The program also seeks to build a greater sense of community among journalists doing this kind of work. When possible, awarded projects will contribute to a growing collection of publicly accessible data for other journalists to explore and use. Medill will put together a jury of academics, journalists and technologists to vet applicants and choose projects to fund. Google will have no role in the jury or project selection process.

The Data-Driven Reporting Project reflects Journalist Studio’s focus on giving reporters access to tools and training. Pinpoint can transcribe audio files and recognize handwriting and text in images. The tool has proved useful to several journalists at, for example, The Boston Globe, which analyzed hundreds of documents in their Pulitzer-Prize-winning series Blindspot; Mexico-based Quinto Elemento’s investigation into corporate corruption; and the Philippines-based Rappler’s examination of CIA reports from the 1970s.

Building on powerful technology like this, the Data-Driven Reporting Project highlights three of Medill’s core strengths: its history of using investigative journalism to lift the oppressed, a focus on local newsrooms and a commitment to exploring the intersection of technology and journalism. The Medill Investigative Lab was involved in the recent publication of the Pandora Papers, a project that used technology to interrogate millions of documents to expose secret dealing by politicians and the ultra-wealthy. Medill’s Local News Initiative is working with dozens of newsrooms around the U.S. to bolster their business strategies. And Northwestern’s Knight Lab (an experimental community for journalists, technologists and designers) is working on a pair of AI-related projects, the 2021 CollabAI: Americas and the Knight Foundation’s AI for Local News initiative that seeks to apply AI methods to investigative reporting.

The Data-Driven Reporting Project will begin accepting applications beginning in December 2021. If you have a project rooted in data and documents, that could benefit from more resources, technology and training, learn more on how to apply.

The digital divide and technology gap that hundreds of US based Black- and Latino-owned publications face is something the Google News Initiative is working to bridge in partnership with news associations like National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP) and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN).

As a result, we jointly developed the GNI Ad Transformation Lab, a program to support publishers serving underrepresented communities in their transition to digital. The first round of the Lab helped 28 Black, and Latino publishers advance their digital businesses and build digital advertising capabilities required to achieve growth today. This was done by providing extensive analytical and technical support alongside personalized coaching to address each organization’s distinct digital business transformation.

And while we recognize that this shift requires years of hard work, we’re encouraged by the early results. On average, participating publishers experienced a 25% increase in programmatic revenue, a 10% increase in traffic and a 30% improvement in PageSpeed scores.

Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., President and CEO of the NNPA has noted that “it’s crucial to embrace a digital first business priority to remain financially sustainable.” And that’s why we will be continuing this partnership to launch a second Lab to help more Black- and Latino- owned publications on their steps towards a digital future.

“At first, we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” says Bethany Lane, Revenue Strategist at QCity Metro based in Charlotte, North Carolina. “The GNI Ad Transformation Lab was an intense education. It has pushed us further down the road toward sustainability.” QCity Metro experienced 100%+ growth in direct sold advertising revenue and average revenue per client, and secured a number of new advertising clients due to participation in the program.

“With the GNI, we learned how to use new tools, set up digital advertising campaigns, and significantly improve our site. In seven months, we were able to grow our advertising revenue, improve our site speed, better the user experience, and motivate and energize our team,” says Jose Zelaya, Editor-in-Chief of Miami-based Noti Bomba.

Other publishers experienced similar growth. In their own words:

We look forward to sharing the insights we’ve learned with a new group of publishers next year. The application for the 2022 Ad Transformation Lab is now live. The application window will close on Monday, November 29 at 11:59 p.m. EST. We encourage news organizations and publishers who serve diverse and underrepresented communities in the United States and Canada to apply.

The GNI remains dedicated to sharing best practices with the broader community of news organizations and will continue to incorporate resources into our ongoing Digital Growth Program, available to all publishers around the world for free online.

From the COVID-19 pandemic to the climate crisis, we’ve seen how misinformation can have catastrophic consequences. Misleading information can spread among family and friends, impacting not only the way people see the world and relate to each other, but the decisions they make for their health, and for their loved ones and communities.

Separating fact from fiction online has gotten more difficult, and no generation is immune: A 2019 Pew Research study found that only 26% of U.S. adults could identify a factual statement from an opinion. A Stanford University study from the same year found that two-thirds of high school students surveyed couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and sponsored content.

Communities need to be able to spot a fake story when they see it and stop it in its tracks. That’s why today, the Google News Initiative (GNI) is building on our commitment to strengthen media literacy in the U.S. through partnerships with PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs, the News Literacy Project, and Poynter’s MediaWise program.

Bridging generations with PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs

Started in 2009, PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL) is a leader in the youth media landscape, currently operating in more than 160 classrooms and after-school programs across the U.S. Thousands of teachers have used SRL’s journalism, civic engagement and video production resources, which train students on the ins and outs of producing reliable news, learning journalism ethics, fact checking and engaging with their communities.

As part of our partnership, Student Reporting Labs will build educational resources to help teach young people how to have conversations about misinformation with older family members and friends. The hope is that new audiences, and those already familiar with PBS NewsHour and local public media station partners, will come together to help tackle misinformation.

“Through storytelling and co-production with students, we’ll explore the media literacy needs of different communities and generations, and how they can connect with each other to find solutions,” says SRL Founder Leah Clapman.

Expanding to rural communities with News Literacy Project

Through online classes, events and in-person visits to schools, the News Literacy Project (NLP) provides media literacy education to students, educators and the public. More than 300,000 students have completed lessons on NLP’s virtual classroom platform, Checkology, since its launch in 2016.

The Google News Initiative’s partnership will help the NLP bring their Newsroom to Classroom program to even more journalists and educators. NLP is now expanding into rural areas of California, Colorado, Texas, Iowa and Nebraska — places hit particularly hard by the decline in local news.

“News literacy is an essential skill for everyone everywhere in a healthy democracy,” Claudia Borgelt, Vice President of Development at NLP says. “Access to news literacy education should not be limited by a community’s zip code.”

Expanding Spanish-language resources with Poynter’s MediaWise

Our efforts extend beyond students and educators. The GNI was the original supporter of Poynter’s MediaWise project, which was initially focused on students and has since expanded to seniors. Launched in 2020, the MediaWise for Seniors program has trained more than half a million Americans to date.

We’re joining forces with the team again to translate their “How to Spot Misinformation Online” course into Spanish, and create a text-based version of the course that will be delivered via SMS, which is how many seniors find and share news.

“More than 41 million people in the U.S. speak Spanish at home,” says MediaWise Director Katy Byron. “Research shows that health and vaccine-related falsehoods and conspiracy theories are some of the most pervasive forms of misinformation targeting Hispanic communities. Making these Spanish-language educational resources available in multiple formats, on platforms popular with the 50+ Hispanic population, will help combat the Spanish language misinformation gap.”

These partnerships build on Google’s other media literacy efforts around the world, including a €25 million contribution to the European Media and Information Fund. Along with products like Fact Check Explorer and the “about this result” feature in Search, Google is committed to equipping people with the skills they need to stop the spread of misinformation and sort fact from fiction online.

The past two years have seen a rapid rise in the use of educational tools by teachers and students everywhere – driven primarily by the need for distance learning. Now that educators and schools have experienced the benefits of these tools, their use continues to grow, even as many schools return to in-person and hybrid learning.

While this industry-wide shift to more hours online can be an opportunity for many, it can also be a challenge for some teachers and students, especially in places where communities rely heavily on mobile phones or because of limited internet connectivity.

Google Classroom and other Google Workspace for Education tools are designed to be used anytime, anywhere and on any device. In many countries around the world, the investments we’ve made in our mobile apps have already helped tens of millions of students keep learning remotely by using personal or shared phones.

With this in mind, we’ve launched three new features to improve access to Classroom in mobile-first and limited internet conditions.

Use Classroom when you’re offline

With the Classroom Android app, students can now continue to work and learn, even when offline or when faced with spotty internet connections. Now students have the option – when they are online – to download assignment attachments to their phone for viewing and editing later when they are offline.

Although the ability to submit and download assignments, or pose questions and get answers, still requires an internet connection, offline mode gives students the flexibility to take schoolwork anywhere and keep learning on the go.

Scan and upload multiple pictures with ease

Many more students today are taking and submitting photos of assignments that are easier and more ideal to complete by hand — like math or science homework.

The Classroom Android app now has a handy scan feature, which students can use to capture and combine multiple pictures into a single file. The upload action in the app now allows for easy selection and submission of multiple different types of files in a single step.

These improvements will help students submit their assignments more efficiently, even if they’re in a rush to meet a deadline.

Easier grading on mobile for teachers

For teachers who are primarily using a phone, we’ve made big updates to the experience of viewing and grading assignments on the Classroom Android app.

Teachers can now seamlessly swipe between students and assignments and add grades on the app. Teachers can also give feedback to students by enabling comments on individual files, even if there are multiple files in an assignment. They can comment on a file or highlight specific passages to leave more targeted feedback pinpointing improvement areas for students.

The vast majority of people who are new to the internet today use phones rather than computers. With these new Classroom Android app features, we’re providing students and teachers everywhere with a better mobile experience.

We are fully committed to investing in helping educators and schools spark learning and close equity gaps with more supportive, inclusive, and productive educational tools

The third North America Innovation Challenge has selected 25 projects out of 190 from Canada and the U.S. to receive a share of more than $3.2 million USD to help build their ideas that address the need for research in local news.

This latest Challenge, part of a program designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas focused on the news industry, was launched in June to support news innovators looking to research how they could better understand the local communities they serve. The selection process involves a rigorous review, a round of interviews and a final jury selection effort.

Among the successful applicants are:

• Documented, a non-profit newsroom from the Brooklyn Community Foundation, which provides local news for and about New York City’s 3.1 million immigrants. They will use research to define, test and pilot a product and messaging strategy to expand their reach to Chinese and Caribbean immigrant communities.
• Metroland, the community news media branch of Canadian national publisher Torstar brings Metroland Indigenous: Truth Through Storytelling — a dedicated effort to address a deficiency in news coverage of and for Indigenous peoples in Ontario.
• A group of nonprofit and for-profit organizations based in Georgia coordinated by the women-led local publisher The Current is building a framework for organizers to collaborate on online local news delivery in the interest of better serving their community.
• Minnesota-based news startup Sahan Journal is collaborating with three community media outlets to launch Citizen Lab, a series of public editorial meetings to check in with the communities they collectively serve and produce news in Somali, Hmong and Spanish.
• La Converse in Quebec will be testing new approaches in order to broaden their French language offering in terms of stories and formats — for example, they’re testing things like text-based news service and audio formats.
• Wick Communications, a family-owned local news company, will partner with ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication to research new products and strategies to facilitate healthy online discourse in small Arizonan communities.

Read the full list of the successful recipients at newsinitiative.withgoogle.com. We extend our sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to apply .

Trends and learnings

Today’s North American winners brings our total of Innovation Challenges to nine running across 93 countries over the past three years. The program initially launched in Asia Pacific with a call for applications looking at new ideas to generate reader revenue. Across all these challenges, we’ve received over 2,500 project applications, creating 227 projects covering Latin America, the Middle East, Turkey and Africa and North America and resulting in over $30 million USD in funding. While there’s been much to learn along the way, the selected news organizations have reported results beyond expectations, with 75% of projects bringing a measurable increase in audience growth and engagement and more than 50% of the recipients already seeing a measurable increase in monetization.

Over 50% (1,301) of the applications we received across all Innovation Challenges were focused on audience engagement and monetization. Many North American local or regional publishers recognized the need for direct reader revenue, and over time their focus has shifted to optimization and retaining subscribers .

North American online-only publishers, and local or regional publishers from other areas such as Africa, Asia and Latin America, are still focused on scale, but they are also beginning to experiment with reader revenue and understand the need for improved engagement.

We’re also seeing a need for cultural change, in newsrooms and in coverage, becoming an area of focus for these Innovation Challenges. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) have been necessary elements for applicants’ projects since early 2020. As a result it drove 1,000 applications, 223 interviews and over $13 million in funding. Over 60% of applicants reported that DEI was of strong importance to their organization.

You can read more about the successful recipients around the globe. The Innovation Challenges program will continue in 2022, with application dates to be announced on the Keyword blog and through the GNI Newsletter.

And over the next week, we’ll be highlighting a series of stories from news innovators who have launched projects in France, Indonesia, India, the U.S. and Chile — stay tuned to this space for more.

When we launched the Google News Initiative in 2018 with a mission of helping to create a sustainable landscape for journalism, the news industry and the world were in very different places. Now, more than three years later, we are reflecting back on what we’ve accomplished together with news organizations, nonprofits and journalists at the same time as we deepen our commitment to these challenges.

Publishers have shared with us that adapting their business models to digital is immensely difficult. So together with industry associations and thought leaders worldwide we introduced the Digital Growth Program to help news organizations accelerate growth in advertising and consumer revenue and strengthen their core foundations in audience development, product and data. The feedback we received from partners also encouraged us to grow our investment in our audience insight tools, including our flagship experience, News Consumer Insights, and build resources for aspiring news entrepreneurs like our Startups Labs and Boot Camps.

Reporters and editors have told us that building digital journalism skills using technology to advance the practice of journalism and combating misinformation are critical priorities. That’s why we’ve expanded our News Lab trainings and made commitments to efforts like the European Media and Information Fund and supporting the fact check community

The increasing pressure the pandemic has put on the business of journalism cannot be overlooked given the knock on effect on newsrooms and their ability to cover the news. That led us to create the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund, putting much-needed funding of nearly $40 million into the hands of over 5,600 local newsrooms. Covid was also the impetus for the Support Local News campaign in the U.S. and Canada to encourage people to support their local paper.

Throughout, we strive to ensure our work touches a diverse group of publishers and audiences — from ourInnovation Challenges which have supported over 200 news organizations around the world, to our first Ad Transformation Lab with 28 Black- and Latino-owned publications in the U.S.

This is just a snapshot of our work. Over the last three years we’ve accomplished a lot, but there’s much more to do. Achieving a healthy, sustainable and diverse news industry isn’t something Google or any single entity can or should do alone. This is a shared responsibility across publishers, companies, governments, civic society and more. Today we remain as committed as we’ve always been to playing our role in adeep and meaningful way.

You can read more about our work in this year’s GNI Impact Report, but below we wanted to highlight some publishers and partners we have worked with along the way.

Quality journalism

Quality journalism plays a central role in connecting people and communities. Across our products we work to provide people with access to essential reporting. We partner with organizations to help people grow their media literacy skills to sort fact from fiction online, and we provide tools and training to help newsrooms in their work. One of our partners is DataLEADS, who we worked with to provide verification training for thousands of reporters across India.

Sustainability and business models

The business of news is changing rapidly. We’ve developed products and programs to support publishers of all sizes in their ongoing journey to sustainability, such as Startups Labs and Bootcamps focused on a community of aspiring news entrepreneurs. That includes Alma Preta, which has grown from a small collective to a fully fledged operation to address the lack of Black representation in Brazilian media.

Community

Collaboration is at the heart of everything we strive to do with the GNI. It’s essential to bring everyone together to tackle the most pressing issues facing journalism and to hear directly from you on how we can solve these challenges together. It’s key we ensure we include a wide range of voices and range of ideas and opinions to build this community and support diversity in as many corners of the news ecosystem as possible. That approach underpins the GNI’s support forFood for Mzansi’s Sinelizwi citizen journalism project focused on training people to tell the untold stories of rural communities in South Africa.

With November well under way, we candycane’t help but get excited for the holidays! Whether you’ve been naughty or nice this year, Google Maps has your back. We’ve compiled nine of our favorite tips — no matter what your holiday persona is — so you can sleigh your plans and to-do list this season.

For the person who already made their list and checked it twice:

1. Figure out the best time to leave: Holiday traffic can be unpredictable. To make sure you’re on time, get driving directions on Google Maps and tap the three dots on the right side of your screen. Set the time you’d like to arrive by to see how long it’ll take you to get to your destination.

2. Save money on gas: With eco-friendly routing, you can now choose the most fuel-efficient route to your destination. A quick search for “gas prices” shows you prices for nearby stations so you can pick the cheapest one.

3. Save time grocery shopping: Whether you’re grabbing a missing ingredient or stocking up before your in-laws arrive, pickup with Google Maps is the new grocery pickup experience that can get you in and out of the parking lot in less than five minutes. Simply place an online order from a participating Kroger Family store, then add it to Maps from your order confirmation page. This is currently available in the US only.

For the spontaneous shopper:

4. Search along your route: Forget a hostess gift? If you’re on the road, use Google Maps to search for malls, grocery stores and other places along your drive so you can tackle your tasks without going out of your way.

5. Tap and go with contactless payments: Avoid pulling out your wallet or touching a parking meter by paying for street parking or public transit right from Google Maps. When you’re out and about, just type in your meter number, hit pay and refill. If you’re taking public transit, you’ll see an option to pay as soon as you arrive at the station.

6. Find your way around malls, airports and transit stations fast: With the new Directory tab, you can easily see where all of the places are within a large building — like where the jewelry store is inside your local mall. With just a few taps, get helpful information about the place — such as if it’s open now, what floor it’s on, and how highly it’s rated — so you can get in and out in no time.

For the holiday party hopper:

7. Find people and places with ease: If you’re strolling through a new neighborhood, let Live View guide your way with augmented reality arrows and directions overlaid right on top of your world. Meeting up with a friend who shared their location with you? Just tap on their icon and then on Live View to see where and how far away they are — and quickly follow the arrows to find them.

8. Share your ETA: ‘Tis the season to run between Friendsgiving meals and holiday parties. You can use Google Maps to let friends and family know exactly when they can expect you to arrive with just a few taps.

9. Find the fun (or hibernate far away from it) with live busyness information: Before you head out, search for a place on Google Maps and scroll down to see how busy it is right now so you can plan your social life accordingly. This holiday season, we’re also launching Area Busyness, a new tool stemming from the existing busyness feature, that shows you when parts of town are busier than usual, so you can know how to avoid those packed streets near hot brunch spots or see which neighborhoods are bustling with activity.