Newsquest Community News Project gets Google backing
Newsquest, the local media and digital marketing group, has been awarded €398,000 from the Google DNI fund for a new pioneering community news project.
The funding will support the development of a set of user-friendly publishing tools that will enable members of local communities to submit content ‘ready-for-publication’ by local newsrooms.
The service will give the public an opportunity to harness the trusted environment and wide reach of their local news brand to share their news and their content with their communities, but it will also provide efficiency for newsrooms — time saved repurposing and repackaging hyperlocal community content will be reallocated to more in-depth reporting from professional journalists.
Newsquest already runs a hugely successful Camera Club which has over 30,000 members of the public submitting thousands of photos to its news brands every week.
Henry Faure Walker, CEO of Newsquest Media Group, said: “We’re really pleased that we have secured Google’s backing for our community content project. It’s a service that will enable and encourage local people to share and publish their community news on our platforms — and in so doing free up our valuable journalists’ time to focus on the sort of high impact, in-depth reporting that remains central to the strength and trust of our brands.”
The Digital News Innovation Fund (DNI Fund) is a European programme that’s part of the Google News Initiative, an effort to help journalism thrive in the digital age.
