Ludovic Blecher is the head of Google News Initiative Innovation. Previously, he was running the Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund. Prior to joining Google in 2015 he was the director of the FINP, a digital press fund for French publishers. Blecher is a former journalist and has spent 15 years in the news industry. He was a reporter, then editor-in-chief and executive director of Liberation.fr. He was a 2012 Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and a member of the French Digital Council, an independent advisory commission for the French government.