The Google Fund for the French Press | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

This agreement ends — temporarily — three months of difficult negotiations. Now comes the hard part.

According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, the deal is built on two stages:

“First, Google has agreed to create a €60 million Digital Publishing Innovation Fund to help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers. Second, Google will deepen our partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using our advertising technology.”

As always, the devil lurks in the details, most of which will have to be ironed over the next two months.

The €60m ($82m) fund will be provided by Google over a three-year period; it will be dedicated to new-media projects. About 150 websites members of the IPG association will be eligible for submission. The fund will be managed by a board of directors that will include representatives from the Press, from Google as well as independent experts. Specific rules are designed to prevent conflicts of interest. The fund will most likely be chaired by the Marc Schwartz, the mediator, also partner at the global audit firm Mazars (all parties praised him for his mediation and wish him to take the job).