The Southern California News Group will receive funding from Google as part of the North American Innovation Challenge designed to support local news projects.
The money will help editors study how local news readers interact with homepages differently across SCNG’s 11 websites, with the intention of boosting local readership and deepening engagement. The project will blend traditional news judgment and existing metrics with a Google machine learning tool.
The Innovation Challenge is part of the Google News Initiative, in which the company said it would give $300 million to help “journalism thrive in the digital age.” The SCNG project, led by Managing Editor Toni Sciacqua, was one of 34 chosen from 269 news applicants across the United States and Canada.
“This is a chance for us to see if we can use tech to improve the way we get our substantive local news more directly to readers,” Sciacqua said.
