News Publishers today struggle with their business model: their efforts to convert their traditional business into digital products have generally proven to be futile. In order to explore a possible reluctance to innovate in the digital news publishing industry, in our study we are focusing on the Digital News Initiative (DNI) which is a partnership between Google and news publishers across Europe to support high-quality journalism through technology and foster innovation. Founded in 2015, the DNI has already funded over 460 projects across Europe with €94m. In our study we will deep dive into these projects by categorizing the type of innovation in a simple document analysis. Afterwards we will conduct a explorative survey with publishers. This will help us finding out whether they also dealt with a reluctance to innovate within their organization, what the main obstacles have been during their innovation process and how they have overcome them. The explorative results are not only valid for publishers but can also be transferred to other industries whose products and services are affected by digitalization. Anonymus survey with 31 full answers from publishers in the DACH Region conducted with LimeSurvey in March 2018.