DOORS WIDE OPEN

The commenting suite for news sites will stimulate and encourage regular daily interaction between newsrooms and the communities they serve. The project will focus on relatively small locales of highly-engaged readers, who are the key to subscription and donation-based news business models in small-population countries. The product suite will be developed by Zetland, with input from partners Direkt36 (Hungary) and Athens Live (Greece). ‘We are very excited to be part of Google's initiative. Our project makes it possible to get ideas and feedback from Zetland's loyal users on a hourly basis. We will, in effect, integrate the readership in the newsroom – a promise that online journalism has so far failed to deliver on. With Google's support we can pursue our development plans with great technical ambition, the results of which we can then share with the wider news community by open-sourcing it,’ — Jakob Moll, CEO.