Google’s News Partnerships APAC head: Nobody has yet cracked challenge of getting people to read what they need to know

“Google works best with the news industry when we are genuinely partnered on common goals,” Kate Beddoe, director of Google’s News Partnerships in APAC, said, adding that “it is harder to do that when there is a third party in the mix”.
Beddoe, who “worked very closely on the news media bargaining code where the government did get into the middle” in Australia, said Google learned some “very valuable lessons as to why you want to be lening and why we need to be a good partner, responding to the needs of the industry”. The mandatory Australian code aimed at helping “sustainability of public interest journalism” enabled eligible news businesses to bargain individually or collectively with digital platforms like Google and Facebook over payment for the inclusion of news on the platforms and services.

As a result of the experience in Australia, she said, the launch of Showcase — a Google News product that gives more control to the publishers on what they want to show readers — in India happened very quickly, “because we had learnt the lesson that we need to show up and we need to be lening”. Google has over 90 publishers on Showcase at the moment.
“Others have very different needs. And so, we are committed to responding to the needs of Indian publishers in India in a way that works. I think when you have government involved, it becomes more challenging to recognise and respond to those nuances.”
Beddoe, a former journal herself, said the thing most important to her was, “to find the right balance of how can I help quality news reach an audience in a meaningful way. But in order to do that, how do we find the business models that will allow that quality content to ex and reach audiences”. The North Star goal for Google, she said, was this balance in the relationship between users, technology and news organisations, and finding a workable equilibrium on those three factors.
But there is a combination of things that Google needs to balance, Beddoe clarified. “On one hand there is the response to users and you know, what is it that they’re looking for, and how do we serve the needs they have. We have increasingly found that people are looking for very local-based news which is becoming increasingly important,” she said, of a trend that became more prominent during the pandemic months.
On what she termed as the “interesting challenge” of balancing between what publishers think readers should be reading and what they actually want to read, Beddoe said: “I don’t think that anybody has yet cracked the challenge of getting people to read what they need to know, against what they want to know or what entertains them.”