Google has long had a frenemy position with the world of news: it can direct a lot of traffic to online publishers, but that’s only if people bother to click on links after getting the gist of the story from Google itself (and that’s before considering the AMP approach on mobile that keeps users on Google URLs after they click). Publications built around advertising have felt beholden to the search and ad giant, leading some of them to try to forge alternative revenue models, around paid content, events, and more to offset that dependency. Now Google is offering another, complementary, option to them. Today the company unveiled its latest effort to claw back more credibility in the news publishing world, with the announcement of Google News Showcase. Sundar Pichai, CEO of the search giant, said in a blog post that it would collectively pay some $1 billion to news publishers “to create and curate high-quality content” for new story panels that will appear on Google News — initially