Google offers EUR 850,000 to three investigation journalism projects in Romania

Google has selected three journalistic projects in Romania that will get EUR 850,000 total financing in the second round of the group’s Digital News Initiative (DNI). All three projects focus on investigation journalism. The Romanian Center for Investigation Journalism (CRJI) will get EUR 400,000 from Google to develop, prototype, and test an open source digital toolkit to facilitate investigative collaborations. “When fully developed, the kit will allow for distributed, non-hierarchical data analysis, sharing, information exchange and annotation, while giving network members distributed and granular control over data management,” reads the project’s presentation. The goal is to provide investigative journalists with a secure and integrated environment to enable distributed, liquid collaboration on journalistic projects. The Journalism Development Network will also get EUR 400,000 for its Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. “Our project will create a research platform designed as a turnkey solution for small media or small investigative teams within large media, to accelerate and simplify the work of investigative reporters and save on major costs,” reads the project’s description. The investigation journalism platform Rise Project also got a EUR 50,000 financing for a prototype project called CPR-Breathing New Life Into Investigative Reporting. “We believe that crime and corruption are commodities that are traded and reused across geographies. CPR will collect local corruption patterns, will turn them into code/search queries and will make them reusable to identify new corruption instances in other places,” reads the description. On November 17, Google has announced 124 journalism projects all over Europe that will get EUR 24 million worth of financing in the second round of the group’s Digital News Initiative. Romania is in the top 10 grants this time. In the first financing round, only two projects in Romania got funding worth EUR 100,000 in total. Google financed 128 projects with a total of EUR 27.3 million in that round. Google has pledged to grant EUR 150 million financing in three years to support the media sector in Europe. Find more information about Google's initiative and the projects financed so far here. editor@romania-insider.com