Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has just announced yesterday, at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, the projects selected to take part of the Digital News Initiative (DNI). The initiative, launched last October for publishers of all Europe, aims to reward the most original projects - the ones potentially able tocreate new horizons on digital journalism through innovation and technology. Google’s initiative wasn’t just about words or recognition. The internet giant has provided DNI with 150 million dollars for the development of the selected projects.
Out of all the projects selected and fund by Google Innovation Fund, stands out Blasting News, the first global platform for social journalism, founded by the Italianentrepreneur Andrea Manfredi. Blasting News has impressed with a project designed for the publishing industry and for Europe:Blasting News for Europe. “Our objective with this project – said Manfredi –is to give all European editors the power of crowd-sourcing, leveraging the extraordinary network and the innovative technology that Blasting News has developed over these years. It’s the contribution that Blasting News wants to give to the industry”.
Blasting News for Europe was born to solve a problem: there was no European platform, easily accessible for all freelance journalists.
Nowadays a small local editor that is developing something on mobile technology will hardly be able to contact, with reasonable time and costs, a Norwegian freelancer specialized in that kind of product. Thus, the idea to create the first European crowd-sourced marketplace for curated news was born, usable and conveyable by any publisher, local or national, harnessing the power of the crowd.
The first phase will be to listen to publishers. “We developed the idea for a marketplace – explained Manfredi – but only by meeting with end-users we’ll be able to identify the most important features for them. This tool serves all the European journalism industry, in line with the spirit of DNI’s initiative. Therefore, we will now form a panel of editors that will guide us along the way.
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The project will have an impact not only on the publishers’ side, but also on freelance journalists: they will have a new opportunity to write news with their own independent interpretation of the facts. “The results – wraps up Manfredi – are quality news content at an inferior cost, considering the location and specialization of the reporter, as well as a new revenue opportunity for the European freelancer.”
Blasting News, founded in 2013 by Andrea Manfredi has an ambitious goal: make the world a better place, giving to everyone the possibility to become a reporter and share ideas with a global audience and enjoy a truly independent information. Blasting News, in little more than 2 years, reached an audience of 50million unique readers per month on its own website (source: Google Analytics), publishing 15.000 unique and original news each month, in 34 countries and 24 different languages, thanks to a community of more than650.000 Blasters.
Blasting News is a platform based on proprietary technology, including patent pending software. Blasting News entered a Swiss application to Google DNI Innovation Fund.
Blasting News entered a Swiss application to the Google DNI Innovation Fund.
