At Google I/O today, Google debuted its revamped Google News program that attempts to highlight "the best of what journalism has to offer." The new program, redesigned using Google's Material Design, tackles three goals: helping users keep up with stories they care about, helping those users understand stories fully, and making it easier for users to support news organizations they trust.

The company demoed the new Google News during the I/O keynote, showing off many features in mobile-app form. A general briefing sits at the top of the mobile app, highlighting five of the biggest stories happening now that users should know about. Google News uses AI to populate the rest of the news feed, picking out news stories from across the Web that appeal to you and your interests. It will also feature local stories and events based on your location.

Unlike other news aggregation services, Google News doesn't make you pick out your interests from a long list of topics. Rather, the program uses reinforcement learning to know more about you the more you use it. We suspect that Google News will also use your Google account and all the information associated with it to find out more about you, your interests, and the stories you may like.

While you don't have to select your interests in the new Google News, you can choose to follow news sources like CNN, The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and others. Google's old Newsstand program will now appear in the Google News app as well, allowing users to easily subscribe to news sources they want to support. Using the Subscribed with Google platform, you can quickly subscribe to news sources and access paywalled content within Google News and anywhere else you're logged in with your Google account.

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Google

Google

Google

Google

Users will see all kinds of media populating their Google News feeds, including text, photos, videos, tweets, and more. The service's Newscasts feature aggregates articles, videos, photos, and more about one story into one place, allowing users to see all types of reporting and conversations surrounding that one event. More often than not now, news comes in many forms, and Newscasts brings together all the different types of media through which stories get told.

Another new feature called Full Coverage attempts to give users many different sources for one news story. Full Coverage appears to offer a deep-dive into a story, providing numerous sources for the user to sift through as well as key facts, a timeline of events, video coverage, and more. A key aspect of Full Coverage is that it will show the same news sources to all users rather than bringing AI personalization into the mix.

Google and other companies like Facebook have been criticized for promoting fake news and for personalizing content to such a degree that users can live within their own echo chambers and info-bubbles. With Full Coverage, it appears Google is trying to remedy some of its earlier issues by standardizing the information that all users see surrounding specific news events. Full Coverage stories will look the same for all users, no matter how the rest of their Google News feeds are personalized.

Google News will roll out across the Web, Android, and iOS in 127 countries starting today.