Who won Google’s Digital News Initiative?
A little online-research on the first round of DNI
As Google still hasn’t come across with a list of companies they are actually supporting with their DNI initiative, I decided to do a little digging. For once I’m simply curious about who’s doing what with the support of Google. Secondly, I’m part of @DW_Innovation, Deutsche Welle’s Innovation Project Team, and we also applied for it (and won support for our joint-project with the Athens Technology Center, ATC).
So, what did I do? Well, assuming that people are as proud of winning a grant from Google as we are, I was expecting applicants to go and show it, by posting a tweet or publishing an announcement on the web.
Search on Twitter & Google
Assuming that many of the projects and applicants would use Twitter, I set up the following search parameters to find them:
But as the list is quite finit, I also did a simple google search, using a similar set of parameters:
Google AND (DNI OR “Digital News Initiative”) AND (we OR us OR wir OR unser OR nous)
And in some cases I also just googled the name of a partner plus the keywords “DNI Google”.
Here’s the list of projects I could find
I did not sort this, so there is still a great mixture of countries, project sizes and focus.
- Project: “Machine augmented financial journalism” — a sort of robot journalism for financial news. (more info in the press release)
Partners: Streamr and Alma Media — from Finland - Project: SensorJournalism — How to use sensor-data to build the perfect newsstream? The right news at the right time at the right place.
Partner: OpenDataCity — from Germany - Project: NewsGenie — A new collaborative and curated Mobile News and Content Service, specifically designed to help independent publishers reach millennial consumers.
Partner: NIMEH & Partners — from Austria - Project: “Stadtgespräch” — A web-application that allows users to be part of the journalistic process from the beginning by suggesting ideas, asking questions or vote for topics.
Partner: Tageswoche — from Switzerland - Project: Spectrm (Batch I) — An artificial intelligence engine to help publishers communicate directly with readers–and distribute content–on a 1:1 basis through instant messaging apps.
Partner: NextMediaAccelerator — from Germany - Project: Children’s News Service — Make news accessible for young readers by semiautomatically convert content from ANP to versions with simpler reading levels.
Partners: ANP and WizeNoze — from the Netherlands - Project: Virtual Reality Journalism — Apparently a 360 video project
Partner: Euronews — from Europe ;-) - Project: Fader — A technical solution that will allow newsrooms to create and publish VR stories in an easy-to-handle way.
Partner: VRagments — from Germany - Project: Unknown — they just announced that they won.
Partner: Bambuser — from Sweden - Project: IRIS — A platform where citizens’ concerns can be collected and rated on a municipal level so that journalists can write about them.
Partners: AZ Medien and Edenspiekermann — from Switzerland - Project: POST — A new post-publishing tool for journalists that will suggest the right action at the right moment.
Partner: Edenspiekermann — from Germany (Berlin Office) The Netherlands - Project: Real-time Sports Action Visualiser — The project aims to build an AI that ingests live sports data, statistics and trends and spits out graphics.
Partner: The Telegraph — from the UK - Project: FreeJourn — A collaborative platform that reinvents the role of journalists and freelance photo-/video-reporters, helping them making their work more visible and economically satisfying.
Partner: Lettera43 — from Italia - Project: Local News Engine — A tool to mine local public data for leads for local news stories and produce reports customised to fit in with a journalists workflow.
Partner: TalkAboutLocal — from the UK - Project: Supply Chain Project — A tool to map the supply chain for products and make data transparent to consumers.
Partner: DanWatch — from Denmark - Project: Tagesspiegel Causa — Further development of the web portal
Partner: Tagesspiegel — from Germany - Project: CLICKBAIT — Clickbait Language Investigation in Communication is Key to Build Automatic Identification Technology (basic and applied research and development into technology for clickbait analytics)
Partner: Bauhaus University, Weimar — from Germany - Project: editorial.supply — A platform to outsource your editorial work and get highly specialised articles for publication on your website.
Partner: NewAtoms — from The Netherlands - Project: Media Management Accelerator — Create an open, comprehensive, online and in-person learning platform to promote the development of new business models, train top talent in media companies, and accelerate their transformation in today’s ever-changing news ecosystem.
Partner: Wan-Ifra — from France - Project: NZZ Companion — A new app with more personalisation options in order to make the reading experience better for the user.
Partner: NZZ — from Switzerland - Project: WirtschaftsWochePro — An intelligent software solution, automatically delivering industry specific curated news from selected sources.
Partner: Wirtschaftswoche — from Germany - Project: Live Coverage Ecosystem — Allows syndication of resources between news agencies and their clients and will lower the entry barrier for smaller publishers (and a larger number of them).
Partner: Sourcefabric — from the Czech Republic - Project: AFP Interactive — A multilingual platform to distribute interactive graphics from AFP to its clients via web and mobile.
Partner: AFP — from France - Project: BlastingNews — First global platform for social journalism
Partner: Blasting News — from Switzerland - Project: Perspecs — A news app that presents three sides to a news story, allowing users to switch between different news sources presenting differing views.
Partner: Trinity Mirror — from the UK - Project: Local Journalism Project — Ensure better transparency and accountability in the way taxpayers’ money is spent locally through a network of key local journalists interested in exploring how coding and computing technology can produce original and hard-hitting stories.
Partner: The Bureau — from the UK - Project: Parlameter — A parliament tracker to visualise data on the work of the National Assembly with analyses of voting records and transcripts.
Partner: Danes je now dan — from Slovenia - Project: P24 Public Project — A digital platform for personalised services, allowing users to receive summaries of the information missed throughout the day.
Partner: Público — from Portugal
According to the article there are more projects from Portugal (e.g. by JN projects, Observer, Lusa and Jornal de Negócios) - Project: Human Robo Journalism — Leaving the routine jobs in journalism to robots to journalists have time for more in depth work.
Partners: HEADLINE24 — from Germany - Project: Digital Reader Engagement — Improve the daily publications by integrating daily editorial insights in the newspaper production process using advanced machine learning to measure and predict reader engagement.
Partners: Twipe and Mediahuis — from Belgium - Project: Not too long, did read — Analyse articles lincuistially paragraph by paragraph to offer readers information bit by bit, as far as they want to go.
Partner: Golem.de — from Germany - Project: New online-article Format— This new format is focusing on the readers, allowing them to combine content according to personal interest, available time and need and then share it with others.
Partners: Scitec Media and Interactive Things — From Switzerland - Project: Verify.Media (we’re not online yet) — A tool to support verification of User Generated Content.
Partner: Deutsche Welle’s Innovation Projects Team — from Germany & ATC — from Greece. (That’s us) - Project: A new journalism funding system that will identify niche groups of audiences and invite them to fund a specific story or top up the financial gap in an important area of coverage, building on a traditional crowd-funding model. (mentioned during the google DNI announcement in Paris).
Partner: El Diario — from Spain - Project: A platform with which FT will analyse the popularity of topics and themes outside its own news ecosystem (towards the end of the article).
Partner: The Financial Times — from the UK - Project: Hoaxbuster — Probably an application to automatically fact check/verify images, texts or URLs (not verified yet).
Partner: Le Monde (‘the Decoders’) — from France - Project: Data and Computer Graphics — Possibly a tool to make ease the process of creating data and computer graphics for the news.
Partner: The Conversation — from France - Project: De-Escalation-Bot — Development of an AI-driven bot to improve comment management in chats, improving quality of chats and reduce management efforts.
Partner: derStandard.at and OFAI— from Austria - Project: Infotelligence — A sort of personalised news system based on the publishers in the JFB and certain criteria the users can choose.
Partner: JFB — from Belgium - Project: NewsMonkey — An algorithm to predict virality of media items to help journalists make better decisions on what to publish.
Partners: VRT, iMinds and NewsMonkey — from Belgium - Project: Unknown (they are just mentioned in this article and in this one as well, stated that they don’t want to talk about their idea just yet.)
Partner: Mediafin , publisher of de Tijd — from Belgium - Project: Digital News Rack platform to distribute digital publications in public locations (as per the twipe-list and the linked article)
Partner: De Persgroep — from the Netherlands - Project: Some sort of algorithm to automatically create categories from articles for the user to choose from (details unknown)
Partner: Roularta Media(Knack, Trends) — from Belgium - Project: Personalised News (details unknown)
Partner: Rossel (Le Soir), IPM (La Libre Belgique) and L’Avenir — from Belgium - Project: El Pais HD — Aims to improve the production and distribution of audiovisual content, by helping the journalists to detect viral audiovisual content in real time.
Partner: El Pais — from Spain - Project: HERTZ — wants to solve the problem of finding Spanish audio content online, by applying big data technologies, natural language processing, biometrics, semantization and labeling.
Partner: Prisa Radio — from Spain - Project: Lusa Portal — News portal to improve the distribution of news in Portuguese in Portugal and to the world.
Partner: Lusa — from Portugal - Project: The Press Match — A matchmaker portal for Journalists and distributors of press releases: Matching the right people with the right messenges.
Partner: Viz &Chips — from Italy - Project: Overexpose Politicians — Making actions and initiatives of politicians in the parliament and local governments more transparent for the people.
Partners: Gazeta Wyborcza & BIQdata.pl — from Poland - Project: Microphone TOK FM — Online platform and application allowing listeners to co-broadcast, by sending in UGC (audio).
Partner: Agora Radio Group — from Poland - Project: NaTemat Portal (possibly ‘Glob360’)— Online service providing basic of knowledge of main themes of Polish political and social discussion.
Partner: naTemat.pl — from Poland - Project: Project digital Politik — details yet unknown.
Partner: Polityka — from Poland - Project: Project focusing on personalised news for subscribers, based on an intelligent software, curating content for smartphone, tablet and PC.
Partner: FAZ — from Germany - Project: App connecting personal social media messages and mails with local news. (more info in these tweets).
Partner: Rhein-Zeitung — from Germany
Conclusion
This is only a small number of the 128 projects, google has granted money. I guess we’ll have to wait until Google publishes the full list (or search in other languages and translate more articles like this one in order to list more projects), but from these ̶2̶9̶ ̶3̶3̶ 4̶6̶ 5̶2̶ 54 items you can already see how diverse (or not) the works are. It’s definitely going to be interesting.
For everyone wondering why Google hasn’t published the list yet, I found this interesting paragraph in one of the polish articles about DNI (Google Translate):
In an interview with service Wirtualnemedia.pl representatives of the Polish branch of Google emphasized that the full list of Polish projects to be funded from the pool DNI is not yet known [for] formal reasons — each with the potential beneficiaries have to confirm that you want to take advantage of the program, and for the publication of this text not all players have done so.
— — — — — — — —
Add-on: I found another list of projects, set up by Twipe, m̶o̶s̶t̶ all of them are already in here. I̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶m̶i̶t̶s̶.̶
Update:
2016–03–02 9:30 I corrected our team’s name to reflect the offical naming as well as some typos. I also added links to partners where missing as well as two+one more projects (thanks to Google search & @nick_luethi) bringing the overall number to 33 (now including our own).
2016–03–02 22:22 I cross-checked my results with the lists by twipe and another article and added all the projects I could find. So it’s now 44 Projects — with varying levels details. I also added two more projects from Spain, thanks to Jorge Tomé.
2016–03–07 23:24 Project 11 is assigned to Germany (its being coordinated from the Berlin Office of Edenspiekermann; thx @ChristianHanke), Project 28 is officially called “P24" and I added information on Project Lusa from Portugal (thx João Pedro Pereira). Also added Project “The Press Match” (thx Martino Galliolo) and four (out of seven) projects from Poland (thanks to Googel search and @ukaszdulniak).
2016–03–08 22:00 I added two more German projects, one from FAZ and one from the Rhein-Zeitung.
