In April of this year, we launched the Digital News Initiative with 11 news industry partners. Today, we have more than 100 publishers and organisations participating in the DNI, and we’ve had almost 1,500 expressions of interest from all over Europe. We’re making good progress in all of the three pillars of the Initiative:
Product development
We’ve begun funding the The Trust Project: an effort to increase trust in online journalism, working with publishers including La Stampa, the BBC, and Zeit Online. Project Shield, an anti-censorship platform that uses Google’s infrastructure to protect independent news sites from being silenced by denial-of-service attacks, continues to make fast progress. So far, Google’s technology has offered protection to 250 news and human rights websites from attacks on their servers, keeping them online and uncensored. Over the summer, automation efforts have enabled the service to extend to even more sites, and soon the service will be offered free to all small- and medium-sized independent publishers in Europe. If you’re interested, you can find out more and apply here.
The product development working group, consisting of our founding partner news publishers and Google engineers, have been working on proposals to increase revenue, traffic and audience engagement. In order to open up the dialogue to more participants, we’ll be sharing further details at an event later this year – watch out for a save-the-date invitation later this month (and apologies in advance if spaces have to be limited due to demand).
Research and Training
The Google News Lab has been providing training in Search, Maps, Trends and more at events across Europe. In Germany, we partnered with Hacks/Hackers to bring 80+ developers, journalists and enthusiasts together for a weekend hackathon. In London, the News Lab joined the European Journalism Centre in welcoming over 200 journalists to workshops and presentations at the ‘News Impact Summit’. We’ll be taking this summit on the road over the coming months (we’ve just finished one in Warsaw) – journalists, editors, newsroom managers, journalism trainers, and students can register to attend these free events in Amsterdam now (Stockholm and Dublin coming soon).
Since launching g.co/newslab, there have been over 195k pageviews and 45k unique visitors. The site is designed specifically to support individual journalists, with text and video tutorials for a host of Google products and tools, as well as case studies that highlight best practice from news organisations around the world.
On the Research front, we have agreed on a new grant for the Reuters Institute Digital News report. As detailed on the Reuters Institute website, this unique report is based on the largest international comparative survey of the major trends in digital news consumption. The report already includes 12 countries, and with our increased funding over the next 3 years, will expand to cover 20 countries in 2016 and 30 in 2017/18. Please look out for new research in October for the new 2015 countries of: Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Turkey.
Innovation
And finally, we are close to launching the DNI Innovation Fund, which will make €150m available over 3 years for projects that demonstrate new thinking in the practice of digital journalism. We are will announce full details, including selection criteria and the submission process, at end of September / beginning of October.
You may be wondering “how do I get ready to apply in the first round?” Here’s some things to think about:
We’re looking for a variety of projects of all sizes (large and small). Your proposal should focus on a particular project rather than a broad digital agenda. The projects should show innovation and impact through new thinking in the practice of digital journalism and/or help to sustain the news business with a strong innovation component.
The Fund will be open to the broad European news ecosystem (eligibility is limited to news organisations registered in a member state country of either the European Union OR the European Free Trade Agreement). All eligible news organisation, including startups, that have original journalistic content will be eligible to apply.
Here are some things you can do NOW and be prepared for when the application window opens:
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think about an innovative project in the context of your news activity today
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imagine the range of the funding you need to break new ground
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start drafting your idea to apply online when the application window opens
We hope that gives you enough to start thinking about innovation in the European journalism space!
Kind regards,
The DNI team
Digital News Initiative
