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Posted: 2018-03-20 15:00:00

Launch partners for this subscriber platform include Fairfax Media, owner of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, Mainichi in Japan, The New York Times and The Financial Times. All publishers are able to join.

Fairfax Media announced a global first advertising partnership with Google in December.

Publishers will have access to artificial intelligence models, which will show publishers when and why readers are likely to pay to subscribe for content. This is in testing with the Washington Post, Espresso and Hearst Newspapers.

Google vice president of news Richard Gingras.

Google vice president of news Richard Gingras.

Photo: Daniel Munoz

Among the swathe of promises to news publishers is the launch of a ‘disinformation’ lab, with partner First Draft, to monitor issues during elections and help with fact checking claims.

Google vice president of news Richard Gingras said “bad actors” are often attracted when there is breaking news, but the clear intention was to complement the traditional news room and not replace current checks and balances.

"When there is talk about misinformation, it is important to remember [Google] is a search tool, it is not an oracle of truth,” Mr Gingras said at a media briefing on Tuesday.

The search giant intends to be involved in helping publishers with the next Australian election, though he said discussions were ongoing about what assistance publishers wanted.

“We recognise we are playing a role in the ecosystem and we take it seriously,” Mr Gingras said.

“All these efforts are driven by ... deep collaboration.”

The motivator behind these changes is to create “an ecosystem we all want and believe our societies deserve”.

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Unlike other tech giants, such as Facebook, which are their own platforms, he said Google’s platform was the open web making it “dependent” on the success of a rich knowledge environment that was “good for citizens and good for Google as well”.

Traditional media publishers such as News Corp have been outspoken critics of the digital giants and their impact on revenues for publishers.

In January, Rupert Murdoch described Facebook and Google’s algorithms as “inherently unreliable” and slammed the measures the companies had so far proposed as “inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically”. He called for a carriage fee from the digital giants for carrying publishers’ news content.

Mr Gingras said Google was in regular contact with almost all media organisations, including News Corp, and gave “vast amounts of traffic every day” to publishers. He also pointed to the revenue-share model on its advertising platform.

The initiatives also involve dabbling in citizen journalism for local newspapers and news sites, with a pilot of new micropublishing tool ‘Bulletin’ in US cities Nashville and Oakland.

Locals are able to write about news and events in their area, with the content then available for community titles to use.

This may be rolled out more broadly after the trial.

Small and medium sized news organisations will be given access to Google’s G Suite for free under the changes and in Australia and New Zealand, Google intends to search for a new lead for its News Lab to push editorial training and partnerships.

Jennifer Duke

Jennifer Duke writes about media and telecommunications.

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