The Wall Street Journal has reported that Shailesh Prakash, the general manager and vice president of Google News and central to the company’s relationship with media outlets, has quit after only two years.
Prakash’s role included running Google News and liaising with media outlets relative to Google’s increasing use of AI. His resignation comes amid rising tensions between Google and news publications accusing the tech giant of taking their ad revenue.
Shailesh Prakash career
The now ex-vice president and manager of Google News, Shailesh Prakash, joined the tech giant in November 2022.
Before Google, Prakash worked for the Washington Post for over a decade as its chief product and technology officer and was the driving force behind creating the company’s in-house technology and steering the media outlets’ digital strategies.
During his time at the Washington Post, Prakash worked alongside Amazon Billionaire Jeff Bezos after he bought the newspaper in 2013.
Shailesh Prakash’s career and experience are extensive, including senior positions at leading tech companies like Microsoft, Netscape, Sears Holdings, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems.
Google’s growing riff with news publications
Google’s problems with publishers began soon after it launched AI Overviews in May to generate Search Snippet summaries for search queries.
The problem for media outlets is that AI summaries appear above organic results, pushing their news listings and traditional links down the rankings.
Google’s justification for placing AI Overview summaries above organic listings is to provide relative and accurate information to users.
Ever since, however, publishers have accused Google of severely impacting their organic traffic and decreasing their essential advertising revenue.
The New York Post said in its recent report:
- “Google rankled online publishers last May after it introduced a feature called ‘AI Overviews’—which places an auto-generated summary at the top of its search results while burying links to other sites.”
CEO of the News/Media Alliance that represents over 2,200 publishers, Danielle Coffey, told CNN that:
- “The feature would be catastrophic to our traffic and has called on the feds to intervene.”
She also said Google’s approach is a “perverse twist on ‘innovation.”
Besides the ranking riff, publishers accuse Google of breaking copyright laws by using their content to train its AI Overviews without permission or attribution.
Why did Shailesh Prakash resign?
Numerous reports say Prakash resigned because of the escalating problems between Google and publishers.
According to The Wall Street Journal:
- “The departure comes amid an ongoing rift between Google and news outlets over how the search engine drives traffic and uses their content.”
However, Google has not commented on why Prakash quit; for now, the official reason remains unknown.
