Google launches cloud to help journalism thrive in digital age
Google’s new initiative aims to help local, small, and medium-sized news organisations from around the world unlock imaginative solutions to business and storytelling using analytics.
The advent of technology has led to a major shift in the news industry. Recognising this, Google earlier this year launched the Google News Initiative (GNI), the tech giant’s effort to help journalism thrive in the digital age. The Google News Initiative focuses on “elevating quality journalism, enabling new business models, and empowering news organisations to innovate through technology”.
A couple of months down the line, even as publishers rethink how they collaborate, improve reader engagement, and grow their bottom line via data and insights, Google offers a solution – the Cloud - as “an opportunity to manage this transition in a smart and meaningful way”.
Google gives the example of Nielsen, which supports 45,000 employees in 100 countries with real-time collaboration and cost-effective video conferencing via G Suite. The New York Times uses Google Cloud to encode and preserve their entire photo archive of millions of photos—putting a powerful resource in the hands of their reporters. The Google News Initiative Cloud Programme, which was launched this week, aims at supporting local, small, and medium-sized news organisations from around the world and helping them unlock their own imaginative solutions to business and storytelling using analytics.
Intelligent productivity suite
Google is offering 200,000 free G Suite licences for up to two years for news organisations with fewer than 500 employees. News organisations can apply for up to 500 licences and use Google’s cloud-based intelligent productivity suite designed to help teams securely collaborate, iterate, and innovate together in real time.
The teams can use a suite of popular applications such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Hangouts and Calendar. These products are designed to keep newsroom data secure, and enable editors in the office and reporters in the field to collaborate and edit copy on a story in real time.
Additionally, applications will soon be open for Google Cloud Platform credits towards a variety of Google Cloud Platform products. News organisations will be able to use the Cloud credits to modernise their business in a variety of areas, from app development to data analytics and machine learning.
According to the IBEF, the Indian media and entertainment (M&E) industry grew at a CAGR of 18.55 percent from 2011-2017, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.9 percent to touch $37.55 billion by 2021 (from US$ 22.75 billion in 2017).
The next five years will see digital technologies increase their influence across the industry, leading to a sea change in consumer behaviour across all segments. The entertainment industry is projected to cross $62.2 billion by FY25.
This is what Google aims to cash in on. What’s not too far? AWS following up with something similar, soon!