In a Google Blog post today, Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler announced the launch of the Google News Initiative (GNI).

Schindler said (my paraphrase) the GNI is focused on 3 objectives:

• Elevating and strengthening quality journalism
• Evolving business models for sustainable growth
• Using technology to empower news organizations

Actions Google is taking:

• Improving Google platforms better to screen out inaccurate content
• Launching Disinfo Lab to combat fake news during elections and breaking-news moments
• Launching (wth media partners) a MediaWise project to smarten up young consumers
• Launching Subscribe with Google to facilitate subscribing (paid) to legitimate news outlets
• Using machine learning to identify potential subscribers to publishers
• Building a News Consumer Insights dashboard on top of Google Analytics to enable publishers to segment audiences.
• Launching Outline - an open-source tool that enables news organizations easily to set up secure VPNs on their own private servers.

Schindler said Google is dedicating $300M over the next 3 years toward meeting the stated goals.

If through its efforts Google is able to significantly increase sales of news subscriptions, that will give them yet another income stream in addition to advertising sales.

Take that, Facebook and Amazon!