IMU/ICCS is participating in a ground-breaking project that will develop new technology-based tools for journalists.

The project is called INJECT, which stands for "Innovative Journalism: Enhanced Creativity Tools". It is about the transfer of technology into quality journalism. We partner with, among others, City University London, Science Po Paris and the World Association of Newspapers.

The “INJECT” project is part of the EU Commision’s “Horizon 2020” program, an initiave to strengthen innovations in the European Union. After having been initially funded by Google’s Digital News Initiave, the EU funding is taking the project into the next round. The goal is to develop better technological tools and to integrate them into newsrooms’ content management systems.

INJECT’s aim is to transfer new digital technologies into newsrooms and the work of journalists to increase the competitiveness of European news and media organisations. Journalism seeks to structure information for its readers. This involves a variety of processes, such as selecting, prioritising, presenting, projecting, sharing, and editing raw information in order to make it appealing and useful to the consumer.

Newsrooms with content management systems (CMSs) tend to only use keyword searches of tagged content to discover news items, which requires the journalist to know exactly what they are looking for. The same goes for keyword-based searches using search engines such as Google and Bing. In contrast, new and more effective creative search and creativity support tools can enable journalists to discover previously unconnected information and create novel news stories more quickly, thus stimulating the journalist’s productivity.

To this aim, INJECT will introduce new technologies into journalism that provide journalists with context, better results, and new angles for their stories.

Working towards this goal, INJECT consortium members have researched and adapted new creative search algorithms and services, which they used to develop innovative creativity and productivity support tools. These tools work with written information and are therefore particularly useful for journalists. Four of these new services and tools provide the baseline and research to furthering this innovative process.

INJECT is a consortium formed to improve industry competitiveness through increased journalist creativity and productivity. It brings together newspapers, universities, journalist networks, web companies, journalist trainers and organizations. 14 organizations and institutions come together in the INJECT consortium:

The City University London, United Kingdom (project leader)
Bladet Sunnhordland AS, Norway
Explaain LTD, United Kingdom
Fondation Nationale Sciences Politiques, France
Hallingdoelen AS, Norway
Hordaland Bladdrift AS, Norway
The Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS), Greece
Interlink Academy for International Dialog and Journalism, Hamburg, Germany
MLabs, Norway
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands
Stichting VersPers Uitgeverij, Netherlands
Stichting VJ Movement Foundation, Netherlands
Universitetet i Bergen, Norway
WAN-IFRA FR, France

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