Two years ago, Google launched the Digital News Initiative (DNI), a partnership between Google and publishers in Europe to support high-quality journalism through technology and innovation. In addition to investing in product development, research and training, Google launched the DNI Innovation Fund, committing €150 million to innovation projects across the European news industry. Today, the recipients of the third round of funding are announced, which will provide a total of €21,968,154 to 107 projects in 27 countries.
For this round, Google received over 988 applications from 27 countries. Of the 107 projects funded today, 49 are prototypes (early-stage projects requiring up to €50,000 in funding), 31 are medium-sized projects (requiring up to €300,000 in funding), and 27 are large-scale projects (requiring up to €1 million in funding).
Google Digital News Initiative: What has changed in this funding round?
First and foremost, there is a growing interest in fact-checking experiments, with 29% more applications in this area than in the previous round. There is also an increase in projects involving artificial intelligence (+23% more applications than in the previous round), investigative journalism (+20%), and virtual and augmented reality approaches (+20%). Finally, this round was also about cross-border collaboration between organizations, with 47% of all applications selected for funding having this collaborative dimension. Here is a representative sample of some of the projects funded in this round:
[Original Project] The Open State Foundation - Netherlands
The Open State Foundation promotes transparency through the use of open data and innovative and creative applications. It will receive 50,000 euros to create a real-time database of what politicians say and do, drawn from a wide range of sources. The aim is to increase transparency and give journalists better access to political information, in particular on specialized issues, local policies, individual MPs and alternative local parties.
[Big Project]- WikiTribune- Great Britain
WikiTribune is a news platform created by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and awarded €385,000. It seeks to solve the problem of low-quality, clickbait journalism by bringing community members into a virtual newsroom to collaborate with paid professional journalists. The latter will research and present news stories alongside volunteers who will edit articles by participating in corrections, fact-checking, suggesting changes, and adding sources for stories that matter.
Google Digital News Initiative: Two projects are being funded in Greece.
One was developed by the Department of Journalism and Media of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the second by the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos" and the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (Knowledge Technology and Software Laboratory). Both were funded with a total of €98,000.
Department of Journalism and Media – Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
The aim of the proposed project is to respond to the changes that will arise in the news ecosystem and the new digital environment with the addition of cars. As our experiences are interconnected, it is very important to make the necessary changes in order to promote the way users consume news in this new interconnected environment. These developments will create new digital revenue streams, especially for the automotive and news industries. The broader impact of the proposed project is to examine the current audience uses, needs and expectations, as well as what is needed from news organizations to respond to this evolving landscape.
The project will receive €48,000.
National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos", Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, Knowledge Technology and Software Laboratory
The project answers the heart of the issue of post-truth and the declining trust in traditional media. OpJ (open journalism) as the developing application is called, creates stories based on evidence, tangible data, which readers can cross-check and examine the original sources. OpJ interconnects financial data from reliable sources to compose an information environment, in which the journalist and the user can browse thematically and search for relevant information.
The project will receive €50,000.
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Since February 2016, Google has reviewed more than 3,000 applications, conducted 748 interviews with project leaders, and awarded a total of €73 million to 359 recipients in 29 countries. To mark the occasion, Google is hosting its first Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund event in Amsterdam, where 24 project teams that received funding in Round 1 or 2 will share details of their work and results to date.
Google is also publishing its first annual report, summarizing the initial impact of the projects funded so far. From startups to large journalism groups, at national or local level, projects funded by the Digital News Initiative have applied the capabilities of big data, blockchain technology and machine learning, evolving and discovering everything from subscriptions and fact-checking to video production and reader engagement. These projects are already helping to shape the future of high-quality journalism – and some of them are directly benefiting European audiences today.
Finally, Google is announcing the fourth round of applications for the Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund, which will begin in early September and will be open for 30 days. Based on feedback from the third round, Google will be implementing some changes to the application process, details of which will be announced on digitalnewsinitiative.com in the coming weeks.
