Google News Executive Shailesh Prakash Resigns Amid Ongoing Rift Between Company and Media Outlets
- The Indian American joined the tech giant in late 2022 after almost 11 years at The Washington Post, where he worked on the company's digital transformation efforts, including its in-house ad technology.
Shailesh Prakash, vice president and general manager for Google News, is departing, the Wall Street Journal reported. His role had included managing Google News and also communicating with publishers about Google’s increasing emphasis on AI in search. The Indian American had joined the tech giant in late 2022 after almost 11 years at The Washington Post, where he worked on the company’s digital transformation efforts, including its in-house ad technology. The circumstances behind Prakash’s resignation were not immediately clear.
According to The Wall Street Journal, which first broke the news, “the departure comes amid an ongoing rift between Google and news outlets over how the search engine drives traffic and uses their content.” The New York Post notes that 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.” The daily cited News Media Alliance, a nonprofit that represents more than 2,200 publishers, including The Post, saying that “the feature would be “catastrophic to our traffic,” and has “called on the feds to intervene.” In addition, the company was also alleged to have used publishers’ copyrighted content to train its AI tools without attribution, the report said.
At The Washing ton Post, Prakash was credited with guiding the newspaper’s shift toward digital content during that period, including its creation of an in-house advertising technology business, the Journal said.
He reportedly worked closely with billionaire Jeff Bezos after the Amazon founder bought the Washington Post for $500 million in 2013.
Prakash’s career spans several tech companies, including Sun Microsystems, Motorola, Netscape, Microsoft, and Sears Holdings. An IIT Mumbai alumni, he has an MBA from Georgia State University’s J. Mark Robinson College of Business, and a Master’s in Computer Science from Clemson University.