Google spurs innovation in journalism in Europe
Google is investing 27 million euros in European companies to boost innovation in digital journalism. This is only part of a 150 million euros fund.
Digital News Initiative is Google's new project. It will invest 150 million euros to promote innovation digital journalism in European companies. It has started by investing 27 million in a large number of companies with different profiles.
One of the challenges that Google aims to overcome with this project is improving its relations with the European press, specifically with Spain, following the tense situation caused by the conflict with Google News in 2014.
This initiative is a partnership between Google and European publishing companies to promote a sustainable news ecosystem by using technology and innovation.This initiative is a partnership between Google and European publishing companies to promote a sustainable news ecosystem by using technology and innovation.
This capital will be used to fund projects in three different categories:
- Prototypes that need a capital of 50,000 euros.
- SME projects that require 300,000 euros.
- Large companies that need more capital because their goals are very ambitious.
Of the 128 projects that have registered for the Digital News Initiative –DNI–, Google's favorite is the Spanish setup El Diario, which proposes a business model based on based on micro-segmenting the audience so it can fund the stories it is most interested in. El Diario published news from New York in Spanish.
Another interesting project in this area is the German startup Spectrm, which wants to use these funds to build an artificial intelligence engine. In this way, the editors will be able to communicate their news directly to the readers through instant messaging tools such as Whatsapp or Messenger.
The News Digital Initiative includes the open source service AMP, which improves the performance of the mobile website, enabling users to view news four times faster than with the traditional HTML. This project has become a reality thanks to several conversations among the partners of DNI in Europe and technology companies and editors from around the world.
Project Shield is another service included in News Digital that uses Google's technology news websites against DDoS attacks.