Archant has announced a new three-year partnership called Project Neon aimed at creating a sustainable model for local news by creating new digital platforms for up to three UK communities.
With funding and support from the Google News Initiative, the Archant-owned project will see the publisher build new platforms for communities “identified as being currently underserved by local news.”
Archant chief content officer Matt Kelly said: “We will release more details of the project in the near future, including the locations of our target communities. We will chronicle our successes (and, no doubt, our failures) and share them publicly with the industry at large, enabling other media companies to do similar work.
“Nobody can accurately predict how the future of local journalism will look. But with our shared vision for building strong communities, Archant and the Google News Initiative will break new ground towards the goal of a local news industry that not only survives, but thrives.”
Archant is the second partner worldwide in this Local Experiments Project following McClatchy in the United States which launched its Compass Experiment in March.
