The search giant will fund the projects as part of a campaign to support innovation in the newspaper industry.
Google is trying to heal its image with press publishers after having maintained sometimes stormy relations with the community.
Google wants to improve its relations with press publishers
In 2018, the firm launched the “innovation challenges”, a campaign which aims to finance projects developed by small newsrooms of up to fifty journalists.
The objective for Google is probably to pacify its relations with press publishers around the world. The American giant has been regularly accused of capturing most of the advertising revenue generated by articles and other content produced by online newspapers.
Last April, Google therefore opened its call for projects in Europe and received nearly 600 applications from all the countries of the Old Continent to finally retain 47 across 21 countries. France is the most represented territory with no less than eight winners.
The selected newsrooms will thus receive from the American company a sum of up to 150,000 euros in order to carry out their projects.
Eight French winners will receive up to 150,000 euros to develop their projects
Among the lucky ones, the news site Daysspecializing in media analysis, who wondered ” how to enrich the investigation » with visualizations and maps of influence groups. This is explained by Ludovic Blecher, innovation director of Google News Initiative.
Other winners include online media Konbiniwhich will use this money to diversify the gamification actions of its content in order to attract a younger audience, or even Humanitythe famous daily which presented a project relating to web3 with the creation of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) which will use the blockchain.
The publisher So Press (So Foot, So Film, Society, etc.), the website Futura or Africa Business+ and the newsletter Vox will also receive an endowment from Google after having succeeded in convincing the teams of the American company.
Source : 20 minutes
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