June 2017
SONAE
Jornal Público – P24
Público has long been in the forefront of digital innovation: in the early years of the internet, our newspaper was the sixth all over the world to go online, early in 1995; and also one of the first to have a dedicated newsroom creating news online, since 1998. We are now claiming back that legacy and maximizing our efforts to develop an innovative approach regarding news products.
As such, when Google announced that it was funding innovation efforts in media all over Europe with its brand new programme DNI, we took the chance. We won the first round, also the second and are now competing for the third.
The project that won the first round (and a grant over 500k€) is P24, already fully functional on our website. P24 is an innovative approach to audio news and personalization, because it consists on a personalized podcast based on the type of news each user prefers and the last time he visited the site. So, if you favour sports, science and economics and the last time you logged on our platform was two days ago, you get a personalized podcast consisting on readouts of the main news of each area from the last 48 hours: sports, economics and science. We developed the project with the help of the amazing guys from Bright Pixel, whom you all know, and are proud with the results so far.
We are still in the process of tuning the concept, in order to maximize reach and better serve our users. At the same time, we took advantage of having the specific knowledge and equipment to work on audio and thus developed a podcast division inside Público. We have already developed 5 original shows and a few more are coming our way during the summer.
At the same time, we are finishing the project that won the second DNI round: it is a data journalism project called “Cidades” that will allow for council-specific searches related to national databases from our partner INE, allowing at the same time for readers to access local news regarding their favourite councils. We’ll do a soft launch by the end of July and the final release will occur in October, but I’ll get back to you on that!
This article is a contribution of Diogo Queiroz Andrade, Deputy Director of Jornal Público.
