Google Digital News Initiative Awards 24 Million Euros for Innovations

Google has announced grants totaling €24 million ($25.6 million) to European news organizations to support experimentation and innovation in the digital space.

The second round of funding from the Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund, a €150 million ($159.8 million) commitment announced by the tech giant in October 2015, will support a hundred and twenty-four projects in twenty-five countries. Selected from more than eight hundred and fifty submissions, the recipients include large, medium, and prototype projects, with forty-three involving collaboration and partnership — an additional selection criterion in this  round of funding.

Recipients include Spiegel Online (Germany), in collaboration with Institut für Spielanalyse & TU München, which was awarded €689,116 ($734,117) to use data analytics and player analysis to provide new ways for readers and journalists to experience and analyze soccer games; Corriere della Sera (Italy), which will receive €300,000 ($319,692) to design a Vocal Bot, a digital assistant that can answer users’ news-related questions on a variety of devices; and Le Temps (Switzerland), which was awarded €45,000 ($47,941) to develop a tool that can be sued to republish the best “evergreen” articles that are relevant to current events.

For a complete list of  recipients, see the Digital News Initiative site.