Google partners to fund new local media sites

Google is launching the Local Experiments Project, an effort to fund dozens of new local news websites around the country and eventually around the world. The tech giant says it will have no editorial control over the sites, which will be built by partners it selects with local news expertise. The first effort within the new Local Experiments Project will be ‘The Compass Experiment," which is a partnership between Google and McClatchy to launch three new, digital-only local news operations on multiple platforms. Google says the investments will be significant. "We will be spending many millions of dollars on this overall," says Richard Gingras, Google's VP of news. McClatchy will choose 3 cities that are less than a half million people for the site launches.