Google launches data journalism awards with GEN

Google will partner with the Global Editors Network to offer a new data journalism contest aimed at both "established news organisations and newcomers".

Director of external relations for EMEA at Google Peter Barron announced the awards at the first news summit held by the Global Editors Network, which launched in March this year.

He told the conference data journalism is "a really key area for fantastic opportunity".

The awards will offer a total prize fund for first-prize winners of $60,000 (£39,000) across six categories, including data-driven investigations, interactive data visualisations and data-driven mobile or web apps.

CEO of the Global Editors Network Bertrand Pecquerie added that the two organisations decided to offer the awards "because we consider data journalism will be part of our future, of journalism, of news production".

"At the moment you have very few experiences, very few experiments. Evidently you have ProPublica, evidently we have some newspapers, some television doing data journalism services, applications, but we are the beginning, just as we are at the beginning as GEN, apps are small babies, as GEN, so for GEN it was very important to launch those awards because they have the possibility to say 'look at this app it's really innovative, look at this news service mixing data visualisations and database-driven services, it's the future of journalism'."

The winners of the awards, which will offer three prizes in each category, will be announced at GEN's next news summit, which is due to take place in Paris in May.

Today Google also announced the first winners of the International Press Institute's News Innovation Contest which Google announced it would sponsor in February.

Google gave the IPI a grant of $2.7 million (£1.67 million) for its contest, which named three winners today who will receive $600,000 of this funding, including the Journalism leaders Programme at the University of Central Lancashire "for its digital media training programme for the UK and Turkey".

The other two winners were the World Wide Web Foundation "for its voice-based citizen journalism project in France, the Netherlands and Mali" and Internews Europe "for its crowd-sourced journalism project in five African countries".

The rest of the money will be awarded in the second round of the contest next year.

• Want to get started or take data journalism to the next level? Journalism.co.uk has a one-day introduction to data journalism course and an intermediate data journalism course, both taking place in January

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