The Digital News Initiative is an European organisation designed by Google to support high quality journalism through technological innovation and media development. It includes an “Innovation Fund”, worth Euros 15m, that in next year issued grants to 4 positively selected projects from twenty different countries across Europe. It is an open-access project run by the Electronic Press Foundation (EFP). In this article I take a look at one of the projects that received funding from the Innovative Public Media Investment Strategy (IPI) from the UK Government. This report also covers the role of the Netherlands’ University College of Journalism, University College London Media Lab and University of Twickenham’s Media Lab.

The project is called New Media for Digital Times. This is part of the European Journal of Radio Broadcasting’s new media initiatives. It will seek to combine traditional audio clips with real time streaming multimedia – such as images, video, audio clips, user interface controls, and interactivity. It should offer news consumers access to information in the same way that newspapers and magazine s have done traditionally – by publishing articles, stories, programmes, films and visual media. But it will also provide a second level of reading experience: users can also “tweet” or “like” the content they are reading.

What does this mean for you? For a first user, this might seem a strange idea: given that the only thing that has changed is the format, the end result should be exactly like a traditional printed version. For a long time, I’ve been advocating that newspapers, magazine s and other similar publications offer multimedia content in addition to their print versions. Over time, I have become convinced that this strategy has several key benefits: providing a better and more engaging experience for both readers and publishers, generating revenue from advertising, and creating a wider base of customers who can subsequently buy goods and services. These benefits are all very well provided by digital media, but there are also some additional benefits that digital news offers that traditional media won’t be able to replicate.

The most obvious benefit is that multimedia content tends to appeal to a much larger audience than a regular article would. Indeed, studies have shown that the number of people who are actively following a story on Facebook increases by around 25% if the articles they are linked to have multimedia elements. Furthermore, there is another benefit that goes beyond the increase in traffic: as people begin to read digital versions of articles, they tend to share them via a social network. This has the effect of making the web much more alive than it was in the not-so-distant past – think of how many times you’ve forwarded a friend a funny video you found on YouTube, or shared the link of a fascinating article from your favourite website.

Digital news, by its very nature, will always be multimedia. Think of any piece of print media that has included footage of an actual explosion. Or of any piece that has featured interviews with scientists or government officials. These examples provide us with a perfect example of how multimedia can change the way a story is told, making it far more appealing to the casual reader than a dry, informative article does.

As well as the increase in the number of people who are actively following digital news, there is a distinct increase in the number of people who are actively sharing it. The rise in subscriptions to digital news websites is evidence of this growing trend. Because multimedia content is relatively new in comparison to printed media, many people are not yet comfortable with the idea of simply reading words on a page. The fear of turning the television on and then being faced with grainy footage of interviews, or a picture that doesn’t quite come together like it should have is one of the main reasons why people turn to digital news instead of their traditional sources. But this need not stop people from reading and, in fact, making use of the medium in a number of different ways.

One of the most obvious forms is of course the news itself. Although the increase in the number of news stories that are made available through multimedia means that we are now able to access news from virtually every part of the globe and in every colour and every genre imaginable – there’s no reason why you can’t enjoy some of the best digital news from the Middle East, Russia, China, or North America, for example. If you are interested in international news, the ability to easily search through relevant articles and then – if you feel like it – comment on them is simply too much of a convenience to resist. Similarly, if you are a sports fan and enjoy following your favorite teams, having access to live games is simply too convenient.

Of course, the internet has also played a large part in the digital news initiative, as is the increasing number of websites that are dedicated solely to bringing you the latest news stories. Even those who are more traditional news watchers are beginning to take advantage of this medium by tuning into certain websites to keep up with breaking news wherever they may be around the world. Newspapers are also starting to use digital news initiatives more frequently, and it is not uncommon to see an entire section of the newspaper being dedicated to news stories, given the convenience offered by modern email technology. This is, perhaps, one of the biggest transformations we have seen in the history of newspapers – and the impact it has had on newsrooms as a whole. The end result is a newspaper that is more dynamic, more informative and more focused on reader satisfaction than ever before.