With the ‘NewsTAPAS’ project, Roularta Media Group again among the projects selected for the Google Digital News Innovation Fund

Three years ago, Google launched the Digital News Innovation Fund to stimulate innovation within the European news industry. Since then, Google has supported more than 559 ambitious projects for which it has awarded more than € 115.2 million to news organisations in 30 countries. Today Google announced the selected projects for its sixth and final round: 103  projects were approved in 23 countries. Roularta Media Group (RMG) was honoured by Google for the fourth time in a row for the NewsTAPAS project. 

RMG innovation projects

One of the pillars of RMG’s innovation department has the objective of stimulating digital innovation by establishing partnerships with technology suppliers and research groups at universities and colleges. With this partners RMG forms a triple helix (collaboration between government or private fund organisations, business and education) with the aim of bringing to the market advanced technological solutions that users truly need. 

 
NewsTAPAS: From personalisation to individualisation

NewsTAPAS aims to increase engagement with RMG news brands by offering (digital) readers a unique, personalised and individual reading experience. To this end, RMG is developing a 'content adaptation engine' that can be integrated into the editorial systems. This technology will be able to automatically adapt the personalised news articles to a format (with respect to both form and content) based on users’ interests, needs and context (device, time, location, etc.).
Roularta Media Group is collaborating with the Flemish public radio and television broadcaster VRT, ML2grow (AI service provider and spin-off of IDLab affiliated with Ghent University), imec SMIT-VUB (research group at Brussels University with a strong focus on user research, and UGent imec-IDLab (research group at Ghent University with strong expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence).

More information on the 6th financing round of the Google DNI Fund: https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/