Calling all Data Journalists!

Data journalists from all over the world have until midnight BST tomorrow (10 April) to submit their work to the Data Journalism Awards: the largest international competition recognising excellence in the field. The competition is organised by the Global Editors Network: a cross-platform community of editors-in-chief and media innovators committed to high-quality journalism.

Supported by Google and Knight Foundation, the Data Journalism Awards are a fantastic opportunity for media innovators to showcase their work, and the prizes are worth €1,500 each. Previous winners include The New York Times, La Nacion, Kiln and Detective.io, as well as individuals such as Chad Skelton:

The #DJA2015 awards will recognise the best work in 10 categories:

• Data visualisation of the year
• Investigation of the year
• News data app of the year
• Data journalism website of the year
• Best individual portfolio
• Best use of data in a breaking news story
• Open data award
• Best entry from a small newsroom
• General excellence (jurors’ choice and public choice).

It’s easy to enter on the GEN Community website, where can explore last year’s winners and short-listed projects, as well as this year’s entrants

The winners will be announced during a gala dinner at the Global Editors Network Summit in Barcelona on June 18. Good luck!

Posted by Simon Rogers, Data Editor, News Lab at Google and Director of the Data Journalism Awards

TechRaking London: muckrakers tackle climate change

A free and robust press is a fundamental pillar of an open and democratic society. Ever since the earliest newspapers, journalists have worked hard to give the public the information they need to bring about better communities. In today’s world, new technologies offer new opportunities for great journalism focused on the public good.

In that spirit, the News Lab at Google is teaming up with The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2015 for a series of events that will connect journalists, technologists and designers and develop transformative solutions to some of the challenges faced by communities around the world.

The name of the series is TechRaking - a modern twist on an early twentieth century term for investigative journalism, “muckraking” - and our first event will be in London on March 25th.

Each TechRaking event will focus on a specific design challenge. The focus of TechRaking London will be climate change. Participants will be asked to design a product or service that engages audiences and inspires them to tackle climate change, while also revealing the scale of the issue in new and insightful ways. Additional TechRaking events, on other themes, will follow in Berlin and Paris, as well as in the US and Canada.

The best ideas from TechRaking, as judged by an independent panel, will come to life as services, products and practices in journalism, thanks to our partnership with TWG, who will be providing design and development time to turn top ideas into working prototypes. We hope these collaborations will result in new public tools to help us all ensure journalism, through technology, ensures access to critical information for everyone.

Posted by Ryan Bruno, Manager, News Lab

News Impact Summit on tour in Europe

From the carved stone tablet to today’s touchscreen devices, the ways in which people consume journalism have evolved as technology has advanced. So too have the ways in which journalists practice their craft - a mobile device can be used to conduct interviews, record video, write and file copy. There are myriad exciting ways for reporters to get the story, and enrich it for readers with deep research and interactive tools.

To further empower journalists and grow their digital skills, the News Lab at Google has partnered with the non-profit European Journalism Centre (EJC) to produce a series of eight News Impact Summits across Europe in 2015. The daylong events are free and will feature local practitioners, debates, insights into how stories are produced and hands-on workshops to train on a variety of tools and techniques. Our hope is to equip journalists with new digital skills and to inspire by featuring excellence in journalism from within the community.

The first summit is on February 24 in Brussels and features speakers from the worlds of media and technology including Datawrapper, L’Echo, De Tijd, International Consortium for Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), JournalismFund.eu, Euractiv, the Dutch-Flemish Association for Investigative Journalism (VVOJ), Storycode, the Association of European Journalists, The Financial Times, the PressClub Brussels-Europe and Gruppo L’Espresso.

The Brussels event will have a decidedly EU flavor but others will be centered around the host country. Future summits include March 31 in Hamburg and April 28 in Paris with additional ones to follow in Madrid, London, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Prague.

To register for any of the events, and for program details, please visit newsimpact.io.

Our mission at the News Lab at Google is to collaborate with journalists, entrepreneurs and publishers everywhere through product partnerships, digital tools training, and other initiatives that support the industry as a whole. We’re thrilled to work with the EJC, which fosters both quality journalism and a free press, to help create this opportunity.

Posted by Daniel Sieberg, Head of Media Outreach, the News Lab at Google

GEN 2014: challenging journalism’s status quo

The countdown has begun. The Global Editors Network has announced its shortlist of 75 finalists for the Data Journalism Awards, supported by Google and the Knight Foundation. Winners will be named at GEN’s upcoming summit in Barcelona on June 12.

The young field of data journalism--analyzing large datasets to unearth news stories and information--is growing tremendously. The 2014 Data Journalism Awards received a record 520 submissions, 200 more than last year. A total of 65 countries were represented. While some newsrooms around have installed dedicated specialists to focus on reporting based on data, Mirko Lorenz, Director of the 2014 Data Journalism Awards, said solo journalists accounted for the vast majority of submissions. “Journalists are taking it on themselves to use data for projects, for experimentation,” Lorenz said.

GEN champions journalistic innovation, demonstrating how the online world offers great opportunities for the future of journalism. Its summit this year in Barcelona is entitled “Mobile. Video. Data. Challenge the Status Quo.” Sessions and keynotes will revolve around the idea that these three things must be top-of-mind in the modern newsroom. Speakers range from the Guardian’s lead digital strategist Wolfgang Blau to Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersch.

This is GEN’s fourth annual summit - take a look below at highlights from last year’s event in Paris.



This year’s summit promises to be three days of hard work and learning - and also a treat. One of the featured speakers will be Ferran Adria, the famed Catalan chef and founder of the restaurant El Bulli. See you in Barcelona.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director, Communications, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Launching a MOOC for data journalism

Mass open online education courses - MOOCS - are transforming education. We’re working with the European Journalism Centre to bring journalism education online, offering a free web data journalism course ‘Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools.’

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More than 14,000 participants have signed up. The course will officially start on May 19, 2014. It is part of the European Journalism Centre’s Data Driven Journalism initiative, which aims to enable more journalists, editors, news developers and designers to make better use of data and incorporate it further into their work. Started in 2010, the initiative provides resources for journalists through DataDrivenJournalism.net, the School of Data Journalism, and the Data Journalism Handbook.

Participants in the new online course will learn the essential concepts and skills to work effectively with data and produce compelling stories under tight deadlines. The line-up of instructors and advisors hails from journalism schools and media outlets around the world. Listen to them introduce themselves below - and enroll in the course.

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Posted by Simon Morrison, Public Policy Manager

Awarding innovative work in data journalism

For the past two years, we have supported the Global Editors Network(GEN) Data Journalism Awards. The third edition is now open to submissions on the GEN website until April 4. Work may be submitted for any media platform, but must be published or broadcast between April 10, 2013 and April 4, 2014. A total of eight prizes, worth a total of EUR16,000, will be awarded.



As journalism makes the exciting, if sometimes difficult, transition from off to online, technology is opening up new avenues for journalism. The emerging field of data journalism analyses numerical data and databases to make inferences and discoveries which enable journalists to produce news in ways that were difficult or impossible before the invention of the Internet and powerful data-processing. Bertrand Pecquerie, the GEN CEO, believes the use of data will, in particular, revolutionize investigative reporting.

Entries will be judged by an all-star jury of journalists, including Wolfgang Blau of The Guardian, Simon Rogers of Twitter, and Giannina Segnini from La Nación. Paul Steiger, the former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, will serve as president.

Winning teams will be invited to present their work at the Global Editors Network Summit in Barcelona on June 12, 2014. Steiger and Jaume Giro, CEO of the bank la Caixa, will preside at the ceremony, which will be held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Posted by Simon Morrison, Public Policy manager, London

Injecting data into journalism

We’ve long believed that the vast amounts of information unearthed by the Internet can power innovations in journalism. That’s why we are supporting the European Journalism Centre’s new online data journalism course. Registration for Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools has just opened at http://www.datadrivenjournalism.net/course/.



This five-module introductory course will give participants the essential concepts, techniques and skills to effectively work with data to produce compelling and visual stories. It is open to anyone with an Internet connection and is due to start in early 2014.

The course features a stellar line-up of instructors and advisors from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, New York Times, ProPublica, Wired, Twitter, La Nacion Argentina, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Zeit Online, and others. “Whether you want to get over your fear of Excel, learn the language of your data geeks, or discover how to tell stories with data visualisations, this course will help journalists and newsrooms learn how to take advantage of these invaluable skills,” said Josh Hatch, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and member of the course’s Advisory Board

There is already plenty of evidence of the opportunities and insights to be had in data driven journalism. We hope a graduate of this new course will soon be producing similar ground-breaking journalism.

Posted by Peter Barron, Direct, Communications, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Moving journalism into the digital age

As the news business experiments with new ways of creating and delivering journalism in the digital age, we’re keen to offer support at the grassroots level. Over the past two years, the Google-funded IPI News Innovation Contest has awarded $2.7 million in grants to media projects throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

On September 13, we celebrated the fund’s 17 winners at the Guardian in London. The event included a Google+ Hangout on Air to allow contest winners who couldn’t make it to the event in person to participate - and to allow the public to watch.



Grants were given to both non-profit and for-profit organisations working on digital journalism initiatives, including open-source and mobile technology projects created by or for journalists and distributed in the public interest. Winners ranged from the Guardian’s own experiment with collaborative journalism to the World Wide Web Foundation’s Citizen Journalism project in Africa to Mediacenter Sarajevo’s data journalism program in Bosnia. You can find links to all the projects here.

In London, much of the discussion focused on making the winners’ innovations sustainable. IPI plans to host an ongoing online dialogue to keep track on progress. We’re delighted to be part of that conversation.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director, Communications, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Hacking the newsroom at the Global Editors Network summit

What's the least friendly US state to live in if you're gay? Can you calculate your social class based on your taste in music? Who are the best connected families in China? We supported two initiatives at the Global Editors Network summit held last week in Paris's magnificent Hotel de Ville aimed at helping journalists answer such questions by making more use of data.



GEN’s Data Journalism Awards, now in their second year, are the only international awards in this fast-growing field. The winning entries showed the power that data analysis and visualization can have in telling stories and engaging readers. You can see all the winning projects here, including the one the public voted best - the Art Market for Dummies.

In the next room - connected to the main event by Google+ Hangouts - journalists, developers and designers competed in the final of GEN’s Editors' Lab Hackathon.



The Editors' Lab has been running Google-supported hack events in newsrooms around the world over the last nine months, bringing journalists and coders closer together to explore new ways of creating and presenting the news. Eleven teams - the winners from each of the national events - came to Paris to fight it out for the top prize. Their challenge: to rebuild their news organisation’s home page in the context of user engagement.

The winner was the team from the Netherlands’ De Volkskrant. Judges commended for the way they were able to incorporate personalization, social and mobile trends into their homepage. Take a look at the finalists’ entries here - they offer a vision of how news websites may look in the future.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director, External Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa

The Internet and news: disruption or opportunity?

A great deal of debate has erupted about the Internet’s impact on news journalism - will it destroy quality journalism or will new business models emerge to save the industry? We long have argued that experimentation and innovation will help news thrive in the Internet era.

A report published this week by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows that consumers are increasingly engaging with news across a range of formats; and that the growth of tablet and mobile devices are having a positive effect on both news consumption and revenues. Google part funded the research.

The report surveyed consumption of news across nine countries. Points of interest include:

• The growth of devices. The number of people using tablets to access news has doubled in the last 10 months in the countries covered in both last year’s and this year’s report. As people acquire more devices, they are spending more total time consuming news and accessing news more often throughout the day.   

• Consumer willingness to pay. In most countries, willingness to pay for news is increasing. In the U.S., smartphone and tablet users are more likely to pay than other online news users. Across countries, 25–34 year olds are the most willing to pay for online news.

• The strength of trusted news brands. While behaviour is not uniform across countries, there is strong indication that in the online world, consumers are moving towards brands they trust.

• The rise of social media. For younger people, the survey found that social media had become the most prominent method of discovering news content.

The results provide welcome insight into the way access to and consumption of news is changing in the digital era. Google supports the industry’s efforts to experiment and innovate. Through products like Google Currents, Editors’ Picks, and our range of advertising tools, we are working with publishers to increase traffic, engagement and monetization on their sites. We look forward to doing even more to enable the digital transition.

Posted by Simon Morrison, Public Policy and Government Relations Manager, London

Honoring Czech and Slovak digital journalism

Throughout Europe, we’re working with journalists to encourage the transition from paper to digital distribution. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, we support the digital journalism awards to honor the best quality digital articles, and we’re encouraged to see how the digital news movement is gaining momentum.

A total of 351 entries were received in the Czech Republic and 685 in Slovakia, a jump of about 10 percent from the previous year. The public chose online the article that had the biggest social impact. More than 15,000 readers cast ballots. The results are visible here  Jindrich Ginter, editor of the daily Pravo, won for a series an article about financial fraud.

Winners of the Czech and Slovak digital journalism awards.

We also supported the special category - Google Digital Innovation Award for journalists who use online technologies to investigate social issues. The winners include:

Google Digital Innovation: Professional Journalism
Czech:  Hospodarske Noviny's online iHNED work on data journalism
Slovak: Daily SME's online video report titled "The Handbook of the Brain."

Google Digital Innovation: Citizen Journalism
Czech: Volunteer website Demagog's reports on politicians embellishing the truth.

Take a look above at photos of the award event. The journalism initiative was part of our Google For Czech Society campaign. Stay tuned for more activities.

Posted by Janka Zichova, Communications and Public Affairs Manager, Prague

Something’s starting in the Copenhagen media industry

Put 100 talented and enthusiastic people in a room for a weekend, and you’ve got the perfect ingredients for innovation, according to Startup Weekend. This was the principle behind a recent gathering in Copenhagen, which sought to inject fresh thinking to the media industry in Denmark, with closer integration between content, technology and business models.

The Copenhagen Media Startup Weekend was staged by a dedicated group of Danish entrepreneurs and journalists, with backing from a wide range of Danish universities from Århus, Aalborg and the Danish School of Media and Journalism. Google also provided sponsorship and outreach support, including a Google+ page with a live-stream from the event, allowing anyone to follow the great ideas taking shape.

On the opening Friday evening more than 40 ideas were pitched and narrowed down to 13 cross functional teams of both journalists, media entrepreneurs, coders and business people.



Photos thanks to Ernst Poulsen via Pinterest

Teams worked day and night until Sunday when a jury of established entrepreneurs selected the winning ideas. Among the winners were Edify which provides a student to student education, local platform GOKOKO re-connecting communities in hyperlocal contexts and Newsfix, a flat-rate subscription service for the news industry, like spotify for music or Netflix for movies. Read more about all 13 ideas here.

At Google we’re excited to see the outcomes of these amazing ideas. Well done to everyone who took part.

Posted by Christine Sørensen, Communications and Public Affairs Manager

Data journalism awards shortlist announced

Not long ago, reporters digging through data set to tell stories, probe trends, and even uncover scandals was a novelty. They are now moving into the mainstream - and changing the field of journalism. One sign of this increased popularity comes from the success of the Google-supported Data Journalism Awards.

This year’s contest received 300 applications from all over the world, about 10 percent more than the previous year. The 73 finalists come from 19 different countries, ranging from Argentina to Venezuela. Major media groups as well as small, regional newspapers and research groups are included. Click here to get a full list of the shortlisted projects.

An independent jury presided over by former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief and Pro-Publica founder Paul Steiger will award total of EUR15,000 to eight winning projects. For the first time, the public will chose a special “Public Choice Award.” Visit datajournalismawards.org and vote for your avourite data application or visualisation. Take a look below at last year's award ceremonies.


2012 Data Journalism Awards from Global Editors Network on Vimeo.

The winners will be announced during the Global Editors Network News Summit in Paris on June 20 at 6:15pm. All finalists are invited to attend the Data Journalism Awards ceremony.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director, External Relations

Helping journalists stay secure in Somalia

Journalists around the world face security risks. Journalists in the war-ravaged country of Somalia face particular danger. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists , last year was the deadliest year on record for a country with a long history of press killings: 12 journalists were killed in the line duty. The threat of violence has driven more journalists from Somalia into exile than from any other country in the past year.

Somali journalists protesting the death of one of their colleagues - Human Rights Watch iimage

In a bid to help improve Somali journalists’ personal safety, Google supported the Committee's project translating its Journalist Security Guide into Somali.

While the guide is designed for a global audience, a veteran Somali journalist reviewed the material for local relevance. It is our hope that many Somali journalists will find it useful in their day-to-day work. The entire Somali guide can be read, printed, and downloaded here. The Committee will also organize for tutorial sessions on the content in partnership with Somali journalist associations.

Just last week, the Committee reported that two gunmen waited near the home of a young Somali journalist, Rahmo Abdulkadir. The 25-year-old Rahmo had just left an Internet café in Mogadishu around 9:30 p.m. on March 24 with a friend when she was shot and killed. Her companion was not harmed.

Let’s hope that this deadly narrative can be stopped.

Posted by Ory Okolloh, Google Policy and Government Relations Manager, Sub-Saharan Africa

Training journalists to meet digital challenges

Much ink has been spilled about the challenges posed to the press by the digital age - but even more ought to be spilled about the opportunities of digital journalism. We are supporting Editors’ Lab Hackdays, a series of international workshops hosted by world-renowned newsrooms, to help fill this gap.

We recently hosted an Editors' Lab in Austria. German-language media groups from Austria, Germany and Switzerland were represented, including Zeit Online, Der Standard, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, ORF, Der Spiegel and Vorarlberg Online.



The theme of the Austrian Editors’ Lab was “Covering International Migration.” Participants were organised into teams and competed for a prize of EUR 5000 for the best new storytelling tools, applications and data journalism projects on international migration. “We want to encourage journalists, developers and designers to collaborate stories, even if they are all from different departments,” said Gerold Riedmann, CEO of Russmedia Digital and GEN Board Member.

Editors’ Lab Austria included presentations and classes. On the opening day, Simon Rogers, Data Blog Editor at the Guardian, gave a keynote address. Adam Thomas, Founder of Hack/Hackers Berlin and Head of Communications of SourceFabric, taught a course on data journalism.

After Austria, there will be further Editors’ Lab Hackdays in Cairo, New York City, New Delhi, and Amsterdam. All the winners receive an invitation to the final GEN News Hackathon at the GEN News Summit in Paris from June 19 to 21, 2013.

Posted by Wolfgang Fasching-Kapfenberger, Communications and Public Affairs Manager

Supporting Internet freedom in Madrid

Reporters Without Borders latest report on press freedom makes for frightening reading. More than ever, the group says governments around globe are silencing journalists, censoring their articles, or worse, jailing or even assassinating them.

Google has worked with Reporters Without Borders for several years now, supporting their activities in favour of keeping the Internet free and open. So it was natural that we would appear in Madrid at the Spanish presentation of their new report.



Photo credits: Quim Lienas

While most attention these days in Spain focuses on the country’s economic crisis, the Reporters Without Borders event demonstrated a strong attachment to freedom. Some 100 reporters attended and coverage emphasized how 2012 saw a major crackdown on the press around the globe. Panelists included Epiphanie Ndekerumukobwahe, the widow of an assassinated Rwandan journalist, and Nedim Senar, a Turkish journalist who was jailed for his exposés on the army’s plot to overthrow the government.

We were the only private company in attendance and spoke about how the open and free Internet has come under attack. Google’s products - from search and Blogger to YouTube and Docs - have been blocked in more than 30 of the 150 countries where we offer our services. At least 17 countries have cut off YouTube at one time or another and it remains off limits today in China, Iran, and more recently, Pakistan. And, of course, there is our experience in 2010 in China ­­ where a steady and measurable increase in censorship in every medium, including the Internet, ultimately led to our decision to stop providing a local search engine.

Our work with Reporters Without Borders continues in the coming weeks with the hosting of the “Netizen of the Year” award ceremony in Paris. We look forward to updating you on this exciting activity shortly.

Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Google creates €60m Digital Publishing Innovation Fund to support transformative French digital publishing initiatives

Cross-posted with the Official Google Blog

Google has worked with news publishers around the globe for years to help them make the most of the web. Our search engine generates billions of clicks each month, and our advertising solutions (in which we have invested billions of dollars) help them make money from that traffic. And last year, we launched Google Play, which offers new opportunities for publishers to make money—including through paid subscriptions. A healthy news industry is important for Google and our partners, and it is essential to a free society.

Today I announced with President Hollande of France two new initiatives to help stimulate innovation and increase revenues for French publishers. First, Google has agreed to create a €60 million Digital Publishing Innovation Fund to help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers. Second, Google will deepen our partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using our advertising technology.

This exciting announcement builds on the commitments we made in 2011 to increase our investment in France—including our Cultural Institute in Paris to help preserve amazing cultural treasures such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These agreements show that through business and technology partnerships we can help stimulate digital innovation for the benefit of consumers, our partners and the wider web.

Posted by Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman

Partnering with Le Monde to train journalism's next generation

For journalism to thrive in the Internet era, it needs people who can build on the important lessons from the world's great newspapers while embracing a new digital friendly form. Today, to help nurture this new generation of talent, we agreed to partner with one of the gold standards of French journalism - Le Monde with its Monde Académie.

 

Le Monde is opening up its newsrooms to 68 apprentice journalists aged 18 to 25. No journalism degree is required. Each day, the newspaper will publish one of their stories, or one of their photos, drawings or video. In France, Le Monde says journalism is “perceived as one of the professions most closed to young people.” Le Monde Académie aims to change that perception.

While at Le Monde, each trainee will be accompanied by a full time journalist or editor, but the trainees are allowed to pick the subjects for their stories they submit to the paper and online editions. Blogs follow the progression of the youngsters as they report and file their stories, as well as the difficulties they face and their attempts to become full-fledged professional journalists. At the end of the program this June, Le Monde will hire three of the youngsters.

Google is partnering in the entire process. The trainees will visit our Paris headquarters for courses in digital literacy. Specialists will demonstrate how journalists may benefit from Google products ranging from Youtube to Blogger, and Drive to Docs, both to uncover information and share it. Round tables are being organized to discuss issues facing the transition of journalism from paper to the web.

At Google, we are aware of the need to work with publishers to smooth the transition not only from oppression to freedom, but from analogue to digital distribution. We are sponsoring a series of digital journalism prizes with Institut de Sciences Politiques, the International Press Institute in Vienna and the Global Editors Network in Paris. We also are the proud backer of Reporters Without Borders’ annual Netizen of the Year award.

This isn’t Google’s first project with Le Monde, either. We brought six Tunisian journalists to the paper last year to work for three months in the newsroom. Its great to see that adventure expanded to promote young French journalists.

Posted by Anne-Gabrielle Dauba-Pantanacce, Head of Communications, France

Freedom burns bright in Prague

Only two decades ago, the Czech Republic shook off the shackles of authoritarianism and planted the seeds of a vibrant democracy. The Velvet Revolution’s leader Vaclav Havel spoke of the “power of the powerless,” explaining how, in a society ruled by lies, truth gains a "singular, explosive, incalculable political power." Although Havel recently passed away, his powerful memory lives on, strong and steady, as made clear at a recent Google-and Open Society Fund sponsored event in Prague. A group of top ranking Czech editors met in the cozy Bar and Books to discuss the topic, “The End of Free Media.”



For the past two years, we have partnered with the Open Society Fund on a Journalism Award honoring innovative civic journalism. Our Google Digital Innovation Award celebrates the best online entry. Authors, editors, readers, viewers and listeners are encouraged to nominate interesting articles by February 2013. More info can be found here.

Our goal at Bar and Books was to share ideas about the current state of media freedom, potential threats, and steps to protect from government censorship and control. I represented Google on the panel and came away confident that the Czech Republic is a strong ally in the fight for Internet freedom. The Czech government is a founder member with the Netherlands’, Sweden, Estonia, the United States and others of the Freedom Online alliance. This December, Prague joined other European allies, in rejecting an International Telecommunications Union treaty that could open the door to authoritarian control of the Net.

The Czech capital is also home to a dedicated and broad network of freedom-loving NGOs. It was inspiring to hear from former Czech parliamentarian Oldrich Kuzilek how he has set up an association called Otevrete to encourage the government to allow access to taxpayer-funded data. Other organizations such as Transitions monitors regional trends in press freedom, while the Pasos think tank regroups 56 organizations around the region, united to promote democracy and human rights. Apologies to the NGOs omitted here for reasons of space.

We look forward to cooperating with both the Czech government and Czech civil society in order to promote Internet freedom.

Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Calling for entries for a data journalism competition

Technology and the Internet offer many new opportunities for journalists, including the opportunities to use data to tell stories. For the second year, Google is supporting the Data Journalism Awards organized by the Global Editors Network.

Entries open today until April 5, 2013 at datajournalismawards.org.The competition is open to professional publishers, nonprofit organizations, and freelancers. A total of EUR15,000 euros will be awarded to eight winning projects in four categories:

• Data-driven investigative journalism
• Data-driven applications
• Storytelling with data
• Data journalism website or section

A short-list of candidates will be announced during the Perugia International Journalism Festival 2013 on April 27. After being chosen by prestigious jury of data experts, the eight winners of the 2013 will be announced on June 20 at the GEN News Summit in Paris. This year, the public will vote on their favorite data projects, and a special prize will be given for the “Public Choice Award”.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations