Journalism has been a symbol of freedom, and Google believes this to be so. In order to extend the horizon of media organizations across the globe, the search giant is investing $5 million to non-profit organizations for them to develop new approaches to journalism in the age of computers and the worldwide web.

Google has already come up with some breakthrough innovations such as Google Maps and Youtube Direct, making news items more interesting and attractive to readers. They have developed their products from the roots up, and they will continue to innovate in order to aid media outlets regardless of size and span.

Of the $5 million budget Google is investing, $2 million is granted to John S. and James L Knight Foundation, an American non-profit organization that has a proven track record of fueling digital journalism with innovation. $1 million of their budget will be used for U.S. grant-making, while the other $1 million will help boost their Knight New Challenge, a competition that accepts funding proposal from anyone, regardless of location, and will be on till December 1. One of the competition’s products is the DocumentCloud, which bring more investigative-reporting source material online for it to be visible to everyone.

The search giant wants to span the challenge outside US so the remaining $3 million will be given to other countries through a similar transaction. Google hopes that the investment will give rise to innovative ideas and new products. They even cited a quote by Thomas Edison (yeah, that scientist who failed a thousand times before he got the long-lasting electric light bulb right) which says, “ “When there’s no experimenting, there’s no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward.”

Today, Google has finally decided to award the remaining amount of $2.7 million grant to the International Press Institute in Vienna which sponsors the IPI News Innovation Contest. The competition aims at uncovering new ideas that will influence digital media in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa like never before. It welcomes both profit and non-profit organizations to work on journalism initiatives, be it open-source or mobile technology projects by and for journalists. Starting today till 1st of June, IPI welcomes proposals from around the region dedicated to innovation in digital journalism, new economic models for news and training in digital reporting.

It is true that digital media is sort of killing traditional media, however, the latter is not entirely putting the former into utter disgrace.   The Daily publication, which claims to require about $500,000 to keep their operation running.  In order to garner more revenue, it partnered with Apple. However, both the companies have invested heavily on this partnership, Murdoch putting up $30 million to get it working, while Apple, considering that it’ll charge only $.99 every week for the newspaper app, will need thousands of subscribers to get back its investment.  To aggravate the situation, Apple’s feat is losing as its digital issue purchases are dropping by the year’s end. From 100,000, it went down to as low as 23,000.

Despite the momentum of digital print media as the trend of the new age, traditional print is still not going to die out anytime soon. Google recently came up with something interesting in  the form of Google Cloud Print, a new feature in Chrome enabling users to print Gmail messages. HP’s also doing something similar with HP Photosmart eStation-All-in-One printer, featuring a bit more because it is inclusive of internet, Facebook and e-mail support.