Announcing our Google-backed project to save journalism

It’s an exciting start to the year for us at Explaain.

Today marks the launch of our first product: a plugin for news sites that transforms normal articles into interactive experiences. We’re bringing content to life with interactive fact boxes that help readers learn about entire topics without leaving the page.

For audiences, this means you get a personalised learning experience when reading the news — keeping up with current affairs is not always an easy task and we believe the UX of journalism needs the sort of bold transformation seen in other industries like travel or banking.

For publishers, we think this is a crucial step towards figuring out how to keep journalism alive and profitable. Not only do we significantly increase engagement and retention rates, but we also help make the writing process more efficient without compromising on quality or accuracy.

With a little help from our friends

What makes this launch even more exciting for us is that it’s backed by Google.

Their Digital News Initiative has generously awarded Explaain a Prototype Fund, which will support us as we test our product with publishers and iterate based on their feedback.

The Google DNI has supported dozens of other important and worthy journalism projects, so we’re very flattered to be among such a cool crowd.

Be part of our journey

During the next few months we’ll be launching Explaain in private beta. We’re still actively looking for more publishers to be involved and get first access to the tool.

I think it’s fair to say there has never been a more urgent need to save journalism, and that means evolving it into something even more capable of informing and engaging citizens, sustaining news organisations and ultimately earning the public’s trust.

So if you’re as passionate as we are about ways to transform journalism for the better in 2017, then please do get in touch!