Some 18 UK digital news projects will benefit from Google’s €24m fund to support innovation across the sector.
The tech giant will be funding 124 projects through its Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund, which will see news firms from across 25 European countries benefit from the funding.
The funding is part of Google’s €150m initiative to support European news organisations.
Ludovic Blecher, head of the Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund at Google, commented: “In October 2015, we issued the first call for applications to the Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund.
“Since that time our team has had the opportunity to speak to thousands of ambitious European newsrooms, individuals, traditional publishing houses, startups and academics and to discover the stunning amount of research and development going on across the news sector here,” he added.
The criteria for selection, Blecher added, focused around “impact, innovation and project feasability”, as well as collaboration.
“The projects that stood out prioritise collaborative approaches between publishers, academics, designers and entrepreneurs, both within a single country and across Europe,” he explained.
The 18 UK companies to benefit from the fund include:
- True 212 Limited – a firm creating a product which uses machine learning to analyse a site’s content, and provide concept and asset recommendations to site editors, bloggers and journalists.
- The Financial Times Limited – the FT’s project aims to increase its content engagement by creating intelligence about the quality of metadata tagging and making it available to the newsroom.
- Stuart Goulden – a firm experimenting with beacon technology to deliver next generation local news experiences through immersive storytelling.