Google has announced a new investment of $25 million meant to extend the search giant’s Google News Initiative (GNI) efforts to its online video platform, YouTube. As part of the new initiative, Google will set up a group comprised of a range of news organizations from across the world in a move to enhance the overall news experience on the online video platform. YouTube will also use the money to offer grants for building up operations and capabilities across 20 markets worldwide. The goal is to provide support for online video operations, develop new online video formats, and improve video production facilities. The investment is also meant to provide training, audience development, platform operations, and technical integration support to news publishers worldwide.
The GNI program was launched in March this year in an effort to improve quality journalism by giving news outlets the tools they need to succeed in the digital world and provide users with news that is both informative and accurate with higher quality. The initiative’s goal is to make journalism more easily recognizable to the readers, help news outlets grow and sustain that growth, and provide innovative new technology news organizations to enable them to push out quality content. In line with that goal, Google has introduced a range of fresh features designed to put reliable news sources at the top of the users’ view when visiting YouTube. In the United States, in particular, YouTube will start displaying links to news articles in search when a breaking news comes out at any given moment in order to more quickly deliver news to users as soon as possible. YouTube also plans to add a new “Breaking News” section to the website’s home page and the “Top News” area as part of the search results. The Top News shelf will surface video content from authoritative news sources. Additionally, YouTube said more users across the United States will now gain access to local news.
As part of its efforts to help curb the spread of fake news across the internet, YouTube will also launch a new feature that will attach links to video search results of any topic, with the links redirecting users to reliable sources of information such as Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. The objective of that feature is to allow users to extract contextual insights into the information they are seeing on the video sharing platform.