Ludovic Blecher, NF ’13, is now manager of Google’s Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund in France. The bold new €150 million ($166 million) initiative is open to anyone involved in Europe’s digital news industry and will support online journalism experiments over the next three years. The first round of applications

Ludovic, the former editor-in-chief of Liberation.fr tells Nieman Lab that his group wants to encourage publishers to take risks on storytelling or revenue-generating projects like those developed in the U.S. “It’s about the creation of new revenue streams and addressing the creation of original journalism.”