Google has announced its dedication to an immersive storytelling initiative that is called Journalism 360.
The technology company has made it public that they`re looking to support experiments, provide training workshops, and bring together technologists and journalists to push journalism forward. The project is focused on a new form of journalism that uses emerging technologies like virtual reality (VR), among others.
The project is presented as a global network of accelerating the understanding and production of immersive journalism. Since launching in 2017, the program has managed to build a community of about 1,500 immersive storytellers and funded 11 projects. The goal is to advance immersive journalism and it`s achieved with the generous financial support of Google News Initiative and Knight Foundation.
Here`re some of the key efforts that Journalism 360 hopes to achieve:
In-depth Content: Journalism 360 will produce a range of case studies, explainers, and analyses on subjects like narrative techniques, editing video, ethics, and more. They will be hosted on Medium.
Learning: Google will offer online and in-person workshops, events, and trainings to encourage more journalists, journalism educators, and newsrooms to use tools available from different technology platforms and to explore emerging forms of visual storytelling and to engage users.
Funding: Lastly and perhaps most importantly, in 2017, Knight and Google launched an immersive storytelling challenge fund that grants financial awards ranging from $5,000 to $35 for great ideas in the sector. This year, a similar challenge was launched and opened for applications at the end of May.
Now the deadline for submission is already expired, but the two organizations will continue to invest in improving journalism and making it more modern and efficient than it used to be.
Interested to learn more about immersive journalism? From VR to 360-video, and 360-photography, it`s exciting what the future holds. Here, the Narrative Technologists and former VR start-up CEO, Henry Keyser, explains all you need to know about its recent progress and formats.
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