The third round of Google's Digital News Initiative (DNI) has seen a growing interest in: fact-checking experiments; AI projects; investigative reporting; and immersive approaches such as virtual and augmented reality. A total of 107 projects have received funding; 47% of them are collaborative projects involving partnerships between organisations and across different countries. Almost 1000 projects enterered the process.
German-based projects received the most funding (€3.6m), followed by the UK (€2.5m), Spain (€1.9m), France (€1.5m), Portugal (€1.2m) and Poland (€1.1m).
Examples of projects funded in this round include: The Open State Foundation (Netherlands), which aims to increase transparency by creating a real-time database of what politicians say and do ; Newsroom Democracy Radar (Romania); and Verifeye Media (UK) , which is working to develop mobile apps and a verification engine to help journalists verify user-generated content.
The full list of funding recipients can be found here.
You can read about the progress of projects funded in rounds one and two of DNI here.
Round four is scheduled to open in September 2017.
Sources: Digital News Initiative; Journalism.co.uk