Google has just signed an agreement with eight Canadian news organizations for access to select paywalled content as part of the new licensing deals. The Canadian publishers are Black Press Media, Glacier Media, The Globe and Mail, Metro Media, Narcity Media, SaltWire Network, Village Media and the Winnipeg Free Press. They represent more than 70 national, regional and community news organizations in French and English.
The tech giant – which did not reveal the value of the eight licensing deals in Canada – said the agreements are part of a broader $1 billion global commitment to news publishers and journalism announced last year. Google News Showcase will provide customizable space for newsrooms to produce, distribute and explain essential information to readers, giving Canadians access to a wide range of news content and potentially driving subscriptions for the media outlets.
So what exactly is Google News Showcase? Essentially, it is a pop-out box or widget style product that showcases the best news stories of the day from participating publishers. You’ll can already see it in the Google News app, and it will apparently appear on the News tab of your Google search on all devices. Google pays publishers to remove the Paywall for these articles, making them free to read. Each news outlet gets to choose the stories that appear in the Showcase box each day – Google doesn’t pick them, and the stories won’t necessarily be relating to what the user was searching. It’s simply showing what the news site considers it’s best work for the day.
Google News Showcase on the web is currently available in eight countries: UK, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Czechia, and India. It’s already live in Google Discover and the News mobile apps. It will be launching in Canada, once all of the publishers have been trained with the new technology and how to submit their stories. It should be live sometime in the next few months.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
