Journalism seeks to structure information for its consumption by readers and continues to be of vital importance in ensuring that the citizens of democracies have the information needed to hold governments and the powerful to account. It involves selecting, prioritising, presenting, projecting, sharing and editing raw information to make it appealing and useful to readers. However, the increasing digitalization of production and distribution, associated with the emergence of new patterns of reader behaviour and fragmentation of audiences, mean that news businesses are becoming uncompetitive. News and media organisations have been squeezed by declining circulations, rising costs and loss of advertising revenue to non-editorial search engines and social media such as Google and Facebook (Anderson 2014), resulting in cost-cutting measures and shrinking newsrooms, particularly in chain newspapers. The result is a crisis in journalism, one that requires both old and new newsrooms to operate more competitively. INJECT sought to increase this competitiveness through the diffusion of new digital services and tools to increase the creativity and the productivity of journalists, goals that if achieved could also contribute to increased good journalism in Europe.
INJECT sought to achieve the following three strategic objectives:
Objective 1: Extend and aggregate the new digital services and tools to increase the productivity and creativity of journalists in different news environments. INJECT sought to extend and aggregate research-based digital services and tools to increase the productivity and creativity of journalists in a range of diverse European news SMEs. Measurable outcomes included the production of at least four discrete and standalone INJECT digital services with high market potential.
Objective 2: Integrate and evaluate new digital services and environments in CMS environments. INJECT sought to integrate the aggregated digital services in different representative CMS environments already in use in the partner news organisations and technical integration work in services as add-on components to commercial CMSs and as third-party software services with established APIs. INJECT also evaluated, formatively then summatively, the digital services and tools integrated in each CMS environment of each partner news organisation. Measurable outcomes included the production of at least three new INJECT digital services and tools, each also with high market potential.
Objective 3: Diffuse the digital services and support offerings in news and journalism markets. INJECT sought to diffuse its new digital services, related training and consulting offerings, and new business opportunities through a new partner business of consortium members, and establish growth and support of multiple ecosystems of ICT providers and news SMEs in different segments of Europe’s news and journalism markets. Measurable outcomes included the establishment of the new INJECT business spin-off, one core ecosystem of ICT innovative technologies providers and news and journalism SMEs, and a second new ecosystems of ICT innovative technologies providers and news and journalism SMEs in target market sectors.
