My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on news influencers, and we start with Carlos d’Andréa. His focus is on the Google News Initiative and its impact on shaping journalism in Brazil. Such initiatives promote specific ideas of journalism and innovation; GNI started in 2018 and serves in a sense as a media patron that promotes particular journalistic norms and practices.
GNI emerged in the context of demands that digital tech giants should reimburse news publishers for their content, and Brazil hosts some 22% of projects funded by GNI grants between 2018 and 2022. Such projects build epistemic infrastructure, then: they establish particular knowledge production processes which privilege some forms of knowledge over others, and do so by promoting startup culture principles and approaches. In this, the GNI is similar to Google’s broader Google for Startups initiative.
In 2021-24, some 56 Brazilian initiatives were supported, alongside projects in other parts of the Majority World. This project explores them through technography, analysing the relations between technologies, organisations, data, discourses, and ideological arrangements and systematising the data on these aspects.
Overall, GNI funding for such projects is limited – $20k in 2021 and 2022, but only $3-5k in subsequent editions. There was also a growing focus on local and niche journalism. Most startups supported by the GNI were located in the northeast and (increasingly) southeast of Brazil; other regions received much less support, but more so in 2023 and 2024.
Key themes of such projects were audience understandings, products, business models, and growth; later on, themes like community building (2022) and multimedia content (2023) also emerged. Also, of course, during the pandemic activities were fully online, but in 2022/23 workshops, Pitch Day events, and mentoring sessions were also featured. This reveals a particular understanding of journalism’s needs and interests.
Business model development is a central aspect in these programmes; this positions Google not as a funder, but as a partner for these projects. Journalistic organisations are encouraged to adopt a startup culture approach to their work, aligned with Google’s own self-described corporate values; and news startups are seen as laboratories for experimenting with tools, methods, and conceptions of journalism that are aligned with infrastructural platform logics.
This, then, contributes to an epistemic infrastructure that privilege entrepreneurship, product-oriented projects, and niche journalism; if not to an economic dependence, it may lead to an epistemic dependence on Google and its ways of working.
