Google launches new programme to help small news publishers

San Francisco, Sep 17 Google on Thursday announced a global programme to help small and mid-sized news publishers navigate the complexity of digital transformation in the Covid times.

The Google News Initiative (GNI) Digital Growth Programme is free, aimed at helping news publishers around the world develop the capabilities required to accelerate the growth of their businesses online, the company said in a blog post.

"The GNI Digital Growth Programme will initially focus on five topic areas: Reader Revenue, Audience Development, Advertising Revenue, Data and Product," said Ben Monnie, Director of Global Partnerships Solutions, News.

The curriculum includes playbooks full of real-world examples, interactive exercises to help solve business problems, workshops to bring these lessons to life and Labs to provide hands-on advisory support.

"At first, we're focusing on our Reader Revenue pillar, with other topic areas coming over the next few months," Monnie said.

Participating publishers can anticipate access to a comprehensive playbook that offers publishers strategies and real-world examples to help with building and optimizing a reader revenue model.

They will also go through interactive exercises, including an 'Opportunity Sizing' exercise to help estimate their potential reader revenue opportunity, a 'User Funnel' diagnostic to identify areas for improvement across key reader revenue performance metrics and a 'Goal Setting' exercise to build a plan for long-term reader revenue growth

They will also attend online workshops led by top industry experts offering business recommendations.

"This programme builds on our recently launched edition in Europe. We've now expanded to ten languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, German, Korean, Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia," Google said.

( With inputs from IANS )