Announcing the AI Skills Academy: Powering India's newsrooms with AI
Continuing our commitment to collaborate with news organizations across India and bring them Google’s best-in-class technology, we're excited to announce the launch of the Google News Initiative AI Skills Academy in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Department of New Media.
AI presents immense opportunities for newsrooms across news gathering and publishing. This 10-week, hybrid training series is designed to equip newsrooms and media educators with foundational AI understanding and practical skills. Participants will learn to leverage Google’s AI tools like NotebookLM, Gemini, AI Studio and Pinpoint to streamline workflows, boost efficiency and free up valuable time for deeper and more creative research and in-depth, diverse story-telling.
Launched by Google in academic partnership with IIMC and with training support from How India Lives, this hybrid program will empower participants to apply AI tools across a range of relevant use-cases. We're also proud to support IIMC in training media educators and students across its campuses in six cities in India, enabling a new generation of journalists equipped with cutting-edge tools and practical AI understanding.
AI in the newsroom: Enhancing journalism
With weekly deep dives, practical exercises, dedicated mentoring, and problem-solving sessions, this program has been curated to provide participants with support to leverage AI to perform newsroom tasks more efficiently. This includes transcribing long interviews and videos, extracting and analyzing data from multiple formats and files, summarizing and interacting with voluminous reports to uncover compelling stories, and offering content in multiple formats and languages tailored to their audience.
Join the AI Skills Academy
Applications for the Google News Initiative AI Skills Academy are open starting today until August 14, 2025. You can find more details on the program and eligibility criteria here, and register your interest, by visiting the sign-up page.
This Skills Academy builds on Google’s on-going initiatives to help newsrooms explore how AI can assist their work, such as the GNI Data Journalism Lab.
We look forward to continued collaboration, collectively shaping the dynamic future of news with AI.
