First Swiss partner of Google News initiative

The Digital News Initiative (DNI) aims to "promote high-quality journalism in Europe through technology and innovation", writes Google. On Tuesday, the company announced that it would support the DNI with 150 million euros over the coming years (Werbewoche.ch reported).

According to Managing Director Steven Neubauer, the NZZ is in constant contact with technology companies and other publishers in order to further accelerate learning and innovation processes. For this reason, the DNI is of interest to the NZZ. NZZ has set itself the goal of launching a new product on the market every quarter. For this to succeed, the technology must also become more agile and faster. The participation is also an issue at Ringier-Verlag, as spokesman Edi Estermann said on request. It is being discussed with the editorial teams, but nothing has been decided yet.

Dispute over news hits in Google search

According to Google, the eight publishing houses from Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands that are among the DNI founding partners have already been joined by others. Industry associations are also included.

The DNI intends to gradually expand the program. It is "still open to anyone in Europe who is involved in the news industry". The aim is to promote innovation in the field of digital journalism through long-term collaboration and exchange between media companies, journalists and information technology providers, as Google writes. The company wants to help newspaper publishers to develop "sustainable news models".

Observers see the news initiative as an attempt by the US company to improve its strained relationship with publishers in Europe. There is a dispute in several European countries over the question of whether Google has to pay publishers money when small fragments of their articles are displayed in the news search engine Google News and in general Google searches. (SDA)