At least 40 people have been let go from Google’s news division reports CNBC. Although an official confirmation and exact numbers are yet to come, it appears that 40 to 50 jobs have been axed at Google News, which offers links to popular and quality news articles on the basis of the interests of the readers and the region they belong to.
The layoffs are a part of a series of changes taking place internally with an aim to streamline processes. Google is of course lending support to the impacted employees through this transition, offering outplacement assistance as well a severance package. They are also allowed to look for opportunities elsewhere within Google if they wish.
Earlier this year, in July, Madhav Chinnappa, director, News Ecosystem Development, Google News, had been laid off after a significant 13-year long tenure with the news aggregation app. During his tenure, he led the Digital News Initiative and the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund – to provide much-needed support at a time when the industry was in the midst of crisis.
In August, Google News introduced two additional Indian languages, Gujarati and Punjabi, taking the total number of languages to ten in India. That means, now Indian users can access news, in Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu, irrespective of the part of the world they are in.
