Every Innovation Challenge project we support represents the best of the best ideas in advancing digital news media. Applications undergo a rigorous and competitive assessment process. When a project is selected for funding, a wide group of Google employees and industry experts have agreed on a high potential for meaningful impact and inspiration. We are excited to share the 357 recipients of the GNI Innovation Challenges in Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, Turkey & Africa and North America representing 78 countries around the regions.
Egab - The journey to build a news product is far from linear
When Dina Aboughazala, founder of the journalism marketplace Egab, spoke to people in her home country of Egypt, they were actively avoiding the news. Many young people in their 20s and 30s wanted to leave because it was full of problems. As someone with an editorial, journalistic background, she felt moved to act.
Sirius: A publishing system for Le Monde and beyond
In this story, Sacha Morard, CTO of Le Monde Group, shares learnings from the project to create a content management system to handle the creation of both print and digital content. With the launch of Sirius it took the newsroom into a digital future.
The biggest lesson from a local news startup: listen
Kelsey Ryan, founder and publisher of The Beacon, first started thinking about launching a digital news startup for Kansans and Missourians after getting laid off in 2018. She envisioned an investigative-only outlet but that's very different from how The Beacon looks today. Here's why.
From rural India to the world: These women make the news
The journalists at Khabar Lahariya have been embedded in rural areas of India for close to 20 years where the team of mostly young women live and breathe their work in the thick of the community. They've created ways for international organizations, such as universities and NGOs, to subscribe to their content on a 'bulk' basis, where organizations purchase a subscription for their employees, students or partners.
A Chilean startup helps newsrooms grow their audiences
As a former journalist and newsroom editor, Miguel Paz, CEO and Founder of Reveniu, knows how difficult it can be to develop technical solutions. Being part of a small organization focused on producing good journalism doesn't always leave the time or resources to develop advanced tools or platforms to drive audience revenue but here's how this team succeeded.
Designing a new local product for French urban readers
When Pascal Brouet, EBRA COO and Local Pulse Project Director. took on the job of leading digital transformation for the French local daily newspaper group EBRA in 2018, print circulation was falling. The challenge for its future was revealed in the data — while circulation in the countryside was holding up, there was a sizable opportunity for expansion in metropolitan areas. And so a three-pronged internal project (at that time code-named "Local Pulse") was conceived.
Crime reporting gets a boost in readers: A GNI Journey
D.C. Witness developed a new approach to criminal justice journalism to try to address issues of accountability. Traditional crime reporting can give an incomplete and warped view of what's really going on, often based on only the most salacious cases. Instead, D.C. Witness reports on every step of every homicide from act to judicial resolution. This offers a distinct perspective across the entire criminal justice landscape.
The media platform helping Indonesians donate for good
As an avid news reader, Andrias Ekoyuono, Chief of Corporate Strategy at kumparan, would read stories in the media every day about social problems and natural disasters. This made him want to help by donating to those in need but was difficult because he had to search for other websites that could channel the funds. He decided that the experience of giving donations after reading the news should be easier.
The News Minute turns fans into members
In a country as large and diverse as India, it's difficult to represent everything happening on any given day. This is what motivated journalists to launch The News Minute (TNM) in 2014. From its beginnings, TNM has been a media platform reporting from, and about, South India, often for an out-of-country audience. It has also emerged as a strong feminist voice in Indian media, setting the standards for sensitive and on-the-ground coverage of issues related to children and women.
Middle East, Africa, Turkey
A group of local Georgia online media groups, large and small, has entered a dialogue about how to protect local news by better understanding and collaborating to serve the needs of diverse audiences. This project will deepen our understanding of online audience needs, explore capacity building, and frame collaborative digital media opportunities. It will be grounded in a range of community perspectives across Georgia. Through the Georgia Collaborative for Local News, media organizations large and small will work together to provide local news to Georgia communities throughout the state serving the needs for all residents.
Resolve Philadelphia
In partnership with Relatable, Resolve plans to develop Pulse, an innovative text diary approach for assessing community information needs. We will ask a defined sample of Philadelphians to keep a daily information needs and sharing diary via SMS, using the Relatable platform. We'll recruit participants by acquiring phone numbers and through Resolve's deep community engagement work, which reaches communities often excluded from or misrepresented in the news, including black and Latinx folks, immigrants, workers in low wage jobs, and gun violence survivors. Pulse learnings will flow into Equally Informed Philly, Resolve's initiative to bridge the information divide, which connects to a critical mass of Philadelphia's local newsrooms.
The research will use digital tools and print media to guide readers to the digital. We will first reach out to the community and discover what readers think about our coverage. Then we will compare it to what we think readers think of our coverage and pivot to what is lacking. We then use the research to do outreach to our readers and advertisers as to who we are and who we are trying to be. We seek to increase digital readership and coverage to fill in a growing news desert and discover if readers would support switching a free paper to a nonprofit model.
Montclair State University Foundation on behalf of the Center for Cooperative Media
This project addresses two ongoing problems for local journalism simultaneously: sustainability for local news outlets and addressing community information needs. We believe that by thoroughly understanding their community's information needs from the beginning, the startups involved in this research will be more sustainable and more responsive in their journalism. Second and related, having the opportunity to conduct rigorous research into their community's information needs during the formative startup stage will allow make the journalism produced more informative therefore potentially producing community-wide benefits such as greater civility, understanding, and civic involvement.
Carolina Public Press's project, will discover the news needs and distribution preferences of those living beyond the end of the digital line. Carolina Public Press will use targeted surveys and focus groups within affected rural communities to research known news gaps and preferred delivery methods in order to serve these residents with critical news and information.
Wick Communications and Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
The Voices Listening Project will study participants' social media use, news consumption habits and, most critically, gauge their response to misinformation mitigation strategies from local journalists. Research will be focused on small, diverse communities in Arizona. It will first understand more deeply how these small communities are engaging online, then collect feedback on the products and strategies that will help facilitate a return to fact-based conversation.
Record-Journal
Through deeper community listening, engagement and data gathering with our local Latino communities, we will produce more inclusive reporting that represents the diverse communities we serve and develop a playbook other media companies can use as a blueprint.
Maine Public
This project will enable content creators to better understand their entire audience by measuring total audience engagement across all platforms regardless of the many disparate platform metrics. Audience engagement is measured in different ways on different platforms – web sites, apps, social media, time spent listening or watching, etc. This makes it nearly impossible to compare engagement across all platforms. This project will create an "engagement currency" so that the disparate platform metrics can be normalized and directly compared.
The Texas Tribune
The Texas Tribune will work with a research firm to create a detailed diversity profile of its current website audience. Empowered with these findings, the Tribune's award-winning audience team will identify new potential groups of readers to engage and will gain insight into the types of stories they want to read and the information they seek. The outcome of this work will be a research-informed strategy that will increase reader engagement and prioritize audience-first stories that reflect the rich diversity of Texas.
Univision Los Angeles
Research shows that corrective information can help to inoculate people from attempts to misinform, but trusted organizations like local newsrooms must know that misinformation exists in order to counter it. Univision Los Angeles will conduct research and prototype a tool for surfacing local misinformation. The tool will use inputs such as community-submitted reports to identify potential misinformation circulating in communities and will provide journalists with an easy-to-use interface to categorize these inputs as misinformation or not.
Borderless Magazine
Borderless Magazine has an incredibly diverse and young audience. The majority of readers are under 40 years old and nearly half of the audience reads in Spanish. This project will deepen the strong market position by blending the high-tech audience analysis tools of e-commerce with the low-fi approaches of grassroots political organizing to better understand and serve the needs of the diverse audience.
Newsday Media Group
Long Island needs credible information, research, and insights to collaboratively resolve some of its most persistent problems. The region also lacks a space (physically or virtually) to convene important conversations across boundaries. Until Newsday can understand the perspectives, the biases and the beliefs that underlie the most divisive policy issues of the region, they cannot begin to address them. The starting point is illuminating these conflicts with research and focus groups to shape a roundtable on important topics. Ultimately, this project will better inform the newsroom about the concerns and views of all our communities to better serve them.
Combining the community-listening methodology developed in an Open Newsroom program, staged with libraries and other community partners, with user research conducted at scale to support rapid, iterative product development, and to inform THE CITY's core editorial and marketing strategies. It will implement an approach informed by human-centered design and built on three pillars: community engagement through the Open Newsroom project, surveys and one-on-one interviews with existing audience members, and data sourced from web, newsletter and social media analytics. This project will help reach a substantially broader set of New Yorkers, focusing on those who are not yet being reached, and grow revenue and impact.
Sahan Journal
Sahan Journal has identified an audience that needs high-quality, reliable, and timely news in non-English languages and in interactive formats. It is collaborating with three Twin Cities-based, community-focused media outlets that produce programming and content exclusively in Spanish, Somali and Hmong on Facebook and YouTube: La Raza 95.7 FM, Somali TV Minnesota, and 3HmongTV. "Citizen Lab," a series of bi-weekly, public editorial meetings to learn what stories, topics, and issues are important to each community will use what is heard to jointly produce news in Somali, Hmong, and Spanish.
Louisville Public Media
Through research, Louisville Public Media will learn how best to deliver news and information for and about these communities and adapt its offerings or develop new products and methods to do so. It will bring issues and potential solutions to mainstream media, connect community members to resources, build empathy, and prompt calls-to-action to affect change.
Building off the success of its existing Spanish-language WhatsApp news service, Documented Semanal, this project will bring unprecedented access to news and investigations that matter to these communities, and a two-way channel for immigrants on the ground to interact with journalists and define the content that is relevant to them. The project researches what Chinese-speaking and non-Spanish speaking Caribbean immigrant communities need from a news product -- understanding news consumption habits, obstacles to news access, and desired areas of coverage, through interviews, focus groups, and research. We will then create, test, and launch products dedicated to engaging these communities to determine best strategies. Information on this project and the data collected throughout will be shared publicly.
Local Media Foundation 2021
Word is Out seeks to better understand the needs of the LGBTQ+ community in order to produce the most relevant content and membership offerings. The research will consist of surveys and focus groups. The results will guide the strategy for the national launch as well as the six individual publishers.
El Tímpano
Through a rigorous study of three newsrooms and their audiences, this project will conduct the first ever impact assessment of community-centred news on civic engagement among Latino immigrants. Understanding how news can contribute to the health and civic participation of Latino immigrants and other marginalized communities is urgently needed.
Particularly in 2020, newsrooms across the country have made impassioned declarations about their commitments to DEI. But newsrooms are increasingly resource-constrained, which makes manual diversity audits of sourcing and quoting practices impractical. Human audits are valuable, but time-consuming, expensive, and retrospective, usually done annually. Human audits also do not create an everyday "nudge" factor (a concept from behavioral economics) to affect behavior change. This solution is to offer real-time/on-demand source-diversity proportions visualizations through a dashboard. It will be released as a CMS plugin and web application; it will work for both draft stories in the CMS and published work.
Next City
People of color are left out of news coverage. Although there's no hard numbers to prove it (because no one is counting), just ask anyone living in a majority-minority neighborhood whether they're reflected in local media. Too often reports from these places only when someone is robbed or killed. In this way the media stretches and amplifies a place's worst moments until tragedy and dysfunction cloud the whole picture. Next City's "representation tracker" will enable newsrooms to track the diversity of their published sources so they can hold themselves accountable. The tool tallies the number of named sources in coverage and breaks them down by demographics such as race, gender and sexual orientation.
Overture Global
We know that there are talented people all over the world that typically don't have access to opportunities that match their specific talentsand while we have been able to create amazing platforms that connect consumers with the services that they need on demand such as food, transporation and consumer goods; we still have not utilized technology platforms to create connection points between people whom lack the networks and access to capital. Overture will be launching composer flow to help change by bringing innovation and a new found approach to connectivity that will help reshape the technology landscape.
Vox Media
When news breaks or stories are being told, too many newsrooms are left scrambling, trying to create standards around complex topics while juggling deadlines and their own staff's implicit biases. The very language, verbal and visual, can keep people disconnected from the rest of the story. Is it possible to catalyze inclusivity and editorial equity in newsrooms for how they see themselves—not separate from, but directly entwined with the larger editorial process?
Educational Video Center
There has been a sharp decline in local news desks in NYC leaving millions without a vital source of local news. This has disadvantaged communities, particularly historically marginalized youth, of an institution essential for exposing systemic injustices and encouraging civic engagement to meet the demands of living in a healthy democracy. Youth voices are underrepresented in mainstream media and important stories are not being told which makes the news media increasingly less valuable to them. To address this EVC will create the first of its kind B2B video licensing platform for mainstream media to acquire youth-produced documentary shorts and clips.
Texas Observer
Why, if there is significant interest in local news on the part of at least two communities of color -- as was demonstrated by a 2019 Pew study -- are those same communities not, generally speaking, following news closely? Is it perhaps because there isn't enough engagement centered on communities of color that might serve to strengthen those audiences' participation in local news ecosystems? Creating a wholesome feedback cycle will demonstrate real commitment to communities of color on the part of a news organization, and encouraging direct support by those communities of said news organization via grassroots efforts to collect and analyze data about different communities' specific interests.
Proposed solutions to racial inequities in America should be led by the Black press, but that isn't happening. Word in Black is creating a national news collaborative that is powered by ten of the leading Black publishers. A national site will feature local stories from the ten markets, with commentary from a national journalist. The group will host virtual town halls, events and more. They'll sell sponsorships, branded content and seek community contributions on a website powered by Wordpress. A newsletter will be created with a goal of 500K subscribers in year one. The Black press, not mainstream media, will be a leader in this space.
Defender Network
Confronting the declining print industry, the audience shift in information access to digital, the limitations of systemic racism and the challenges of COVID-19, this project opens the doors of opportunity to create a new business model that addresses all of these issues. Houston Defender Network will tackle these challenges by creating new digital products and services that transform the way it connects and engages with stakeholders (audience and advertisers).
Bloom Labs Incorporated
Traditionally, local newsrooms have communication strategies exclusive from other businesses in the same region, creating blind spots or overlaps in news coverage and accessibility. Consequently, one news service may not serve areas that other newsrooms cover well, causing readers to have inaccurate or competitive local news perceptions. Bloom Labs and six local newsrooms in the San Francisco Bay Area will collaborate in this project to assess problematic patterns in local communities. The project will guide newsrooms to geotag stories, obtain location-based insights, and implement news solutions that leverage its hyperlocal value for readers and businesses.
cleveland.com/Advance Ohio/Advance Local Media
The project is solving a fairness problem. Readers often ask for stories about old criminal arrests or convictions to be removed. Those stories can prevent them from getting jobs or housing, even if courts have expunged their convictions. This project will create a system to scan archives and identify such stories so that human editors can decide whether to change or remove them. This system will aid even citizens who do not request help, and will help the team review more stories more efficiently. It will be shared with the rest of the industry upon completion.
Gannett Co. Inc.
The challenge local newsrooms face is that data on which communities they are covering and how they are covering them does not exist. Reporters and editors can make a best guess at how diverse their coverage is, but they're unable to make an informed strategy based on an assumption. Because of this, newsrooms often don't have a strategy focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion. Diverse communities as a result have a hard time trusting their local news outlets because they don't see themselves represented in their coverage.
Black Voice News
Black news organizations need to innovate content to grow audiences, increase engagement, and generate new revenue streams, but rich data sources about Black people at the city, county, state, and national level that can serve as a foundation for bold content innovation strategies and more data-informed reporting, are difficult to access and analyze. Save The Black Press will be a collaborative effort to develop a data access portal, a content discovery platform, and a resource support model that will help to innovate and sustain Black news organizations' revenue and content development strategies.
ABC Owned Television Stations
During this time of unrest and calls for increased diversity across all sectors of our society, high-growth demographic groups report a lack of representation and little accountability to correct systemic inequities. Additionally, educational content often fails to accurately illustrate the stories of underrepresented groups. Through a newly-created Equity Report, the ABC Owned Television Stations will gather raw, detailed data to both look back at the root of racism and track progress towards the future. And, through its multiplatform lessons and curricula, the "Our America: Hidden Stories" project will make consumption of this groundbreaking content both engaging and measurable.
Gannett Co. Inc. Pass the Mic
With Pass the Mic, reporters can search for sources by expertise, going beyond asking "who did we talk to last time?" by accessing a wide catalogue of new faces and names to choose from, all nominated for their expertise on a variety of topics, which would be vetted, categorized and contextualized for reporters to have at their fingertips. This solves a few problems. First, sources are often not reflective of the communities that journalists serve. Second, reporters often turn to their own social circles when sourcing. Third, underrepresented groups have often found reasons to distrust media institutions, especially legacy organizations.
KUAM Communications/Pacific Telestations LLC
Local broadcast media faces a great challenge with the growing prevalence of digital and social media. Digital platforms provide more access to larger audiences, more convenience with on-demand options, and the opportunity for viewers to customize news and information that is pertinent to them. Creating a seamless digitally-led product expands the amount of news and information and ends an antiquated analog operation.
South Philadelphia Community Radio
LPFM stations face difficulties in paying bills via securing underwriters, often struggle to find new audiences and rarely share programming of interest. This website will streamline the obvious resolution of all of these problems at once and greatly aid in the diversification of American radio programming.
National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP)
Long-brewing demographic shifts and societal stress (COVID, social justice, workforce development, climate) have brought issues of diversity to a tipping point in the common consciousness, not only reflected in corporate commitments to DEI, but also in public stands for justice. Diverse news consumers demand deeper coverage; majority consumers look to understand diversity better. As local revenue bases are challenging for members, NNPA and NAHP have seen a significant increase in the long growing interest from national brands, opening new opportunities. While print advertising remains a significant source of revenue, new digital offerings from emails and updated websites, to network efforts represent a big growth opportunity.
The Lenfest Local Lab
News organizations can struggle to offer fair coverage when they don't have the capacity to assess their coverage of local communities. Existing methods for detecting underrepresentation, misrepresentation, or underreporting are expensive, time-consuming, and rely on small data sets. The collaboration seeks to accelerate DEI best practices through an open-source suite of machine learning tools that allows newsrooms to better understand how communities are portrayed. The tools examine how editorial and product decisions manifest themselves in language, locations covered, and story placement. These tools can shed light on disparities in coverage measured relative to demographic benchmarks, and offer insights into product opportunities.
Shaw Media
The Herald-News, serving the greater Joliet market, needs to be essential to the entire community, specifically the Black community, which is underserved. This project will make that happen through strong community engagement with the app and through monthly community meetings with social service agencies, schools, the city and others seeking to better connect with their neighbors.
The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc.
A challenge facing traditional media organizations is decreasing news literacy and engagement. While all ages consume news in new ways, today's students have grown up on a steady diet of social media and disparagement of the press. The futures of both our democracy and The Tribune depend, in part, on the informed engagement of young people. This project taps into the diverse student body at SLCC and amplifies their voices (and those of their communities) through student reporting and journalism, while also offering new content and revenue opportunities for local media.
Hearken
In this era of compounded uncertainty and complexity, the public's information needs have never been higher. At the same time, newsrooms have never been less able to meet the demand due to shrinking resources and lack of trust and public support. The more people feel heard, the more that they see a newsroom is serving them directly, the more likely they are to trust and pay for that newsrooms' services. By centering the needs of the public in their content strategy, newsrooms transform editorial staff from the Loss part of the P&L to the Profit side. Hearken's tech solutions helps newsrooms simultaneously translate audience insight into lead generation for original stories and for new subscribers.
Ripple Effect Images
Despite unprecedented digital connectivity, vital information frequently does not reach those who need it most. Literacy and language skills remain a barrier for millions of Americans who struggle to access critical advice on themes including health, emergency response, and essential services. Ripple's animation campaigns communicate across languages and to those unable to read. By scaling up this innovative approach and establishing an animation center of excellence for regional media outlets, this project will bring economies of scale in service journalism, for local news organizations seeking relevant content that reaches a significantly wider audience.
The Washington Informer
The goal is to bring awareness to an issue that is transforming the face of one of the last historically Black areas of the capital, while also addressing the loss of intergenerational Black wealth as properties are lost to back taxes. The project will be a definitive source of information about gentrification, providing a vital service to longtime residents of the area. It is also a scalable model for building digital products that serve Black residents in cities in which displacement is a significant issue, while producing news about a critical issue in historically Black communities.
Reversing revenue declines means tightening the paywall with fewer free articles and higher prices, which reduces access to essential journalism. Launching verified student discounts and creating a donation portal for institutions to underwrite tokenized access for disadvantaged groups, creates a long-term, sustainable model that funds journalism and keeps local communities informed.
Jambalaya Deportiva Corporation
The importance of local news in Spanish often does not align with how easily the Latino Immigrant can find it and understand it. Jambalaya Deportiva Corporation's audience accesses Facebook at significantly higher rates based on our analytics than any other internet/social platform; thus, it causes local news to gets lost in the user's social Facebook timeline updates. Levelling out the communication field in the state by offering a service for Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants to be well-informed means meeting them where they are.
Gray Television
A recent Appalachian Regional Commission study found that region trailed the U.S. average in 33 of 41 health indicators, including 7 of the top 10 that result in death. A CDC study of the Mississippi Delta found similar results, with residents there faring 22% worse than the U.S. average in health outcomes. Gray will develop digitally focused products to provide resources for people who live in those regions to improve their health outlook and will leverage our teams of journalists in both regions to boost the long term outlook for people who live there.
QNotes
Many LGBTQ publications have disappeared in the last 20 years due to increasing overhead and decreasing advertising. The niche has not evolved well and few online-based initiatives have focused on the true interests and voices of local communities. There is a need from LGBTQ people to talk about more experiences that cross the lines of sex, race, gender, nationality, and economic identities, and like early queer publications reflect the diversity and urgent needs of marginalized communities. Qnotescarolinas.org will provide an online-first publication and community hub focused on local needs, local voices and a local forum.
nextLI, Newsday Media Group
Newsday is the primary source of regional and local news for 2.8 million people fragmented across two counties, two cities, 13 towns, 118 villages and 125 school districts. These municipal cutouts undermine traditional efforts to inform readers about the challenges facing their communities, to unearth larger patterns of public policy concerns and to help businesses understand their patrons. The project's solution is to create a data vault that explores the relationships between datasets affecting communities. The project will free each dataset from its original use in a single news story/investigation to benefit both the audience looking to advocate for policy changes and for business clients.
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Build shared trust<br />An extractive mindset treating Black audiences as sources on crime and poverty stories TO a practice that serves communities of color, builds trust, demonstrating solidarity, and increases power through a framework of engagement.
D.C. Witness
D.C. Witness gathers data on every homicide in D.C. As the data has grown, the team has looked for ways to integrate the database into the website, providing data visualizations, creating a "data playground" for readers to explore data and find trends themselves. After considerable research the team hasn't been able to find a database, plugin, or other available method that allows them to do this easily and in a journalist-friendly manner. There are available databases and plugins to create visualizations, but they all suffer the traditional data journalism issue of needing data scientists or high levels of computer knowledge to be leveraged to create journalistic value-added.
The Dallas Morning News
We want to help parents of all income levels navigate the increasingly complex landscape of choosing a school and a school district, whether within traditional public school systems or beyond.
The Salt Lake Tribune
Communities across the nation are losing their newspapers, tearing a hole their civic and democratic fabric. We are taking proactive, innovative and swift action to pioneer a new model so that this does not happen in Utah by becoming the first legacy newspaper in the US to transition to a nonprofit organization. By doing so, we are transforming The Salt Lake Tribune to a community institution owned, operated and working for the people of Utah. We are building this model with other communities in mind
MaineToday Media
Local publishers have poorly integrated sources of customer and user data. Data is often hard to access from proprietary, legacy systems and disconnected databases. Unifying that data is expensive. These costs can compete with our investments in our core product, valued content. At the same time, publishers are challenged to rapidly grow digital subscription revenue through targeted and personalized reader experiences and innovative approaches to marketing. Better managed customer and user data is the key to that growth. This project will address that challenge by leveraging open source technology to build a CDP integration specifically design for local publishers.
Detour Media LLC
For digital publications, pure audience growth is still the major benchmark of success. These metrics are unsustainable for journalists, toxic for our industry and disruptive for democracy.
Many of today's reader metrics support advertising-driven business models. As the industry pivots to an increasing reliance on reader revenue, it's critical that news organizations understand subscriber behaviors. The absence of insight about subscriber behaviors creates an imperfect understanding of what those readers value and what they do. This lack of understanding is compounded by no mechanism to benchmark among peers. The Index will allow news outlets to prioritize strategies around reader retention and address behaviors causing churn.
MediaNews Group 2019
Print circulation and revenue continue to decline a faster rate than digital revenue is growing, even with the addition of a robust digital subscription program. In order to increase our paid digital audience, we must quickly develop a first-class user experience that delivers news and information to our subscribers in creative and innovative ways. Our solution is to build a premium subscription tier for our most engaged, loyal audiences that doubles down on local news discovery and community building and provides a VIP experience that goes beyond just unlimited online access to our great journalism.
Vermont Journalism Trust
We aim to solve two problems: 1. Readers who have already subscribed or donated are annoyed by promotions. The Conversion Toolkit will suppress popups for readers who are current members or subscribers. 2. Small, local newsrooms don't have access to free or low-cost tools for evaluating the effectiveness of popup and email subject line messaging. We will create dashboards that enable news organizations to make data-driven, real-time decisions about what messages, tailored to local markets, most effectively convert readers to members and subscribers.
GateHouse Media
The platform will enable us to broaden our coverage of community events, providing an easy way for trusted contributors to acquire, submit and be paid for their effort.
ASU Cronkite School of Journalism
Civic health is strongly correlated with informed communities, but the rise of newspaper 'deserts' and loss of newspaper jobs puts many communities at 'information risk.' The Interactive Story Wall will enable local broadcasters to fill that void by making it possible to visualize important but complex stories.
ABC Owned Television Stations 2019
With an increasing amount of publicly available data in our "smart cities," it is the duty of local journalists to mine that data to discover, investigate and communicate relevant findings. Yet as the amount of public data explodes and becomes more accessible, local news deserts are becoming more prevalent. Through this project, and in service to democracy, we hope to discover and nurture a new business approach to covering community news at scale by identifying and reporting on important, need-to-know information hiding in public data.
Graham Media Group
Local broadcasters need to act now to secure our future as a critical news source in our communities. Retransmission fees have propped up our business model, but with forecasted declines ahead, and shifting ad dollars, we need to diversify revenue while we still have the opportunity.
#ThisisTucson
Local journalism needs a diversified revenue strategy to support the important work of covering our communities. With disruption in print and digital advertising and shrinking subscriptions, local news is caught in the middle of massive changes in the way people get and pay for information.
MuckRock Foundation
Paywalls and advertising are generally a one-size-fits-all solution, when the reality is some readers won't be able to get enough of some stories — and are interested in ways to directly offer their support above and beyond a normal subscription or the ad revenue from a single pageview. Meanwhile, local news organizations often have the fewest resources to manage membership programs or invest in technology. BackerTap will make it easy and rewarding for both publications and readers to participate in topic specific membership programs.
Lookout Local
Membership sales are fundamental to new local news growth. Sold individually, they can work well with considerable effort on the part of the publisher. Augmenting single sales with group sales — through earned, ongoing relationships with civic groups -- will accelerate membership adoption and improve retention.
Scripps
Most advertisers have radio creative though research shows that announcer read podcast ads are preferred by listeners and more effective for advertisers. At the same time, it's difficult for local advertisers to buy podcast advertising with scale. We'll build the tools to enable advertisers, business owners, and agencies, to easily upload copy points to instantly create an announcer read ad using natural language processing then place a targeted ad to reach podcast listeners in local and national podcasts.
The convergence of on-demand audio, voice-enabled speakers, and connected cars poses a significant disruption to the current public radio revenue models, which rely upon on-air pledge drives and corporate underwriting. WBUR will create voice-enabled mobile experiences that support transactions within a connected car, for the first time connecting the experience of listening in your car to interacting and transacting directly with your public radio station. To do this, WBUR will extend its mobile app to include prompts to take action related to the live audio content, laying the groundwork for frictionless donations and purchases as well as alternative sponsorship models.
Lee Enterprises
Many medium to small newsrooms don't have the staff, expertise or equipment to create and record news scripts that are suited for audio.
Wick Communications
As documented through recent research and news coverage - as well as our own pilot usability testing - social media platforms are generating more questions than answers, and the technology companies behind them have not been successful in generating trusting relationships.
University Radio Foundation
People of color and other underserved communities have long felt ignored or misportrayed by the media. The crisis in local news (as many newsrooms shut down or cut back staffing) has only exacerbated this problem. Dwindling resources and struggling business models have widened the gap between local news needs and media companies' ability to address them. The project will give residents access to journalists and the reporting process, helping them drive coverage and building trust. It also will provide journalists with access to sources and ideas beyond their normal reach, thus improving their reporting and having more impact on issues.
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
News414 seeks to engage residents of underserved Milwaukee neighborhoods in interactive public service journalism. It will equip residents with information they need to advocate for a better quality of life from their government and elected officials, and to better navigate the existing system. The information — both "news you can use" and in-depth pieces exploring the causes of problems plaguing these neighborhoods — will be texted directly to residents' cell phones for free. Subscribers to the texting service will become crucial sources of news tips and on-the-ground information. It is expected that easy access to relevant news through text messaging will create a better informed and more engaged community.
Independent Television Service
Communities of color struggle to connect to local public media stations for varying reasons: lack of newsroom representation; lack of compelling, resonant, unbiased content; outsider engagement and marketing strategies. As a result, stations miss opportunities to serve viewers, win audiences, or/and earn financial support through new memberships.
According to Pew Research, 87% of local news consumers believe government issues are important or interesting. But only 30% say it's easy to stay informed. As local newsrooms continue to face financial pressures, tracking local government issues will become even more of a challenge.
Homepage audiences have different reading patterns than search engine and social media audiences. The audience is comparatively small but it tends to be made up of local, loyal readers who make the best subscribers. We want to produce better sites for homepage readers by using more powerful tech for analysis and predictions.
Local newspapers across America are closing and rigorous local journalism is being replaced by streams of unverified information spread rapidly via social media. Using crowdfunding and digital tipping technology, Okayplayer's Investigative Reporting Platform will harness the power of online movements for justice and accountability into a funding model that will support a network of investigative journalists embedded in the communities that they cover. We see it as a model that other digital publications can adopt to connect paying audiences to content that matters to them.
Local Media Association
Local news organization reporting resources are diminishing, rapidly in some markets. Yet, market research shows that consumers are highly interested and engaged in enterprise reporting, especially investigative reporting.
The Lensfest Institute of Journalism
It's challenging for residents to find reliable, consistent and trustworthy sources of community news and information outside of the noisy stream of social media. Our project will leverage automation and partnerships with existing hyperlocal publications and community groups to give neighborhood residents one place to find the information they care about. The newsletters will feature nearby things to do with family and friends, news stories and analysis about the area, local data that ties to neighborhood lifestyle, safety and health, as well as be a place for community members to ask questions and get honest answers about pressing issues.
Crosstown
We are trying to prove that there is a financially sustainable model for local news that helps residents stay more connected and engaged.
Beacon Media
Like local news ecosystems across the U.S., the Midwest has suffered massive cutbacks. Robust audience development around membership is sorely needed to ensure growth and sustainability.
Quality local news is at risk. This threatens the sustainability of the sector but even more deeply, democracy itself, since many people rely on local news to form their political views and develop community attachments. Thirty counties in Georgia do not receive local news coverage. In many cases those same counties — and surrounding communities — are also the areas in Georgia with double-digit poverty rates, high levels of uninsured families, and low rates of civic engagement. Local news, as well as in-depth exploration of regional and state-level issues, is essential to these population centers and can inform the whole state.
Understanding community information needs remains a challenge for most media organizations, leading to gaps in coverage, and misaligned resources. Pulse is a tool for understanding not only what info communities need, but also why they need it and when we can best serve those needs.
How does Eugene Weekly provide an alternative voice and also provide the coverage the community lacks? Will readers support increased coverage of rural and underrepresented communities? We seek to reach out and understand what the community sees as under-covered news topics. To do so we will reach out not only to our regular readers but also to those who might not see themselves and what they care about as positively represented by a newspaper, particularly rural and BIPOC community members. This includes discovering how to digitally access and encourage those new or slow to digital media.
This project will assess the information needs of three communities in New Jersey that will be served by new hyperlocal startups. These startups were among the first round of public funding recipients from the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. The Center will work with the people behind these new hyperlocals to identify potential audiences, conduct focus groups and surveys, and incorporate the findings into their organizational planning and content. The research design will be written up as a playbook for future hyperlocals to better understand their community's information needs during the formative startup period.
Studies show that 1.1 million North Carolina households lack access to either high-speed broadband or the digital tools and skills needed to access this essential service. Most of these households are in rural communities leaving NC with a significant digital divide. As a result, digital news is failing to fill gaps in declining print-based media, the primary news source in rural areas. More than half of NC's 100 counties are, or are at risk of becoming, news deserts. This disproportionately impacts rural communities where broadband access simply does not exist, leaving residents without essential news and information.
Wick Communications, a family-owned local news company, is partnering with Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication to research new products and strategies to facilitate healthy online discourse in small communities. The prevalence of online misinformation has evolved from an unintended consequence of the digital revolution to a public health crisis. In a July advisory, the U.S. Surgeon General called health misinformation an "urgent threat to public health." And much of that misinformation is originating from small communities in the U.S., not overseas.
Our local Latino communities want their voices heard, their inequities brought to light, and more local, fact-based news in both English and Spanish that they can trust. These are some of the many important insights we learned during our 5-month Listening Tour, and which led us to our mission statement: To amplify the voices of our local Latino communities. The Record-Journal will build upon the foundation & momentum of our Latino Communities Reporting Lab to bring together journalists, data experts, a network of community leaders and technology partners to understand the needs of our local Latino communities and build trust through deep community listening, engagement and data gathering.
Maine Public has robust individual-platform reporting. We aggregate the data by hand and present it to key stakeholders. We know the demo-, geo-, and socio-graphics for all of our individual digital platforms. However, each platform can only be understood in isolation. We don't have aggregate or comparative information across platforms. What we don't know: who are we missing and on which platforms are they consuming media? How can we engage underserved and new audiences where they are? The audience segmentation study and the aggregated audience data & the new "Engagement Currency" will help answer this.
The Texas Tribune is committed to educating and engaging all Texans on matters of politics, policy and current events and, as stated in their 2018 strategic plan, has a goal to double and diversify their audience by the end of 2025. With proper audience research, the Tribune will gain insight as to who the nonprofit newsroom is serving now, and what initiatives to prioritize in the future to increase audience diversity in pursuit of their mission.
Addressing misinformation is a critical audience need, given that a majority of Americans see it as a big problem and research shows that misinformation can affect people's beliefs and have real-world consequences. As AP reporter David Klepper noted, "misinformation at the local level hasn't received as much attention. In part, that's because there are fewer reporters to call out those responsible for misinformation." The tool being created aims to make this work easier.
Just half of the immigrant-serving news outlets that existed in Chicago in 2012 are still in business today. As immigrant communities continue to grow, news outlets have done a poor job filling the gap in our ecosystem, rarely offering content in Spanish or other non-English languages.<br/>Borderless Magazine's project will blaze a trail for newsrooms who want to develop and serve multilingual audiences. Experimenting with new distribution and engagement strategies for Spanish and English audiences and hiring immigrant grassroots organizers to fill in gaps in coverage and help distribute our reporting.
Newsday seeks to better understand Long Island and its multi-racial, multi-ethnic web of communities. Through a collaboration with Hofstra University, they will execute credible, science-based, objective research to find out more about the people who live there and what they need to thrive. They will then bring urgency and attention to specific societal challenges through informed and respectful dialogue at at least one live streamed roundtable event powered by the research.
Two years after it launched, THE CITY is at a critical juncture. It must leverage editorial success and accelerate the audience and product development, identify multiple revenue streams and engage more New Yorkers to succeed. THE CITY's project is designed to inform efforts to reach a broader set of New Yorkers, focusing on neighborhoods where immigrants and people of color are in the majority and often gravely underserved by other media, while also growing our revenues and impact.
Minnesota is seeing a growing number of residents who speak multiple languages. Over 11% percent of Minnesota residents don't speak English at home. And in Hennepin and Ramsey county, the two largest counties in the state, 55% percent of the population are multilingual, with Spanish, Somali and Hmong being the common non-English languages. Despite this, those who don't speak English as their first language, or are interested in accessing reliable news in their native language to maintain ties to their local communities, are particularly underserved in Minnesota's current media ecosystem.
Louisville media is not lifting up enough Black voices and experiences, leading to distrust in media and a disconnect between available information and resources and the people who need them most. Louisville Public Media wants to better serve local Black communities through listening and building authentic relationships. The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the effects of generations of disinvestment in Louisville's Black communities, specifically the city's West End neighborhoods. The killing of Breonna Taylor highlighted inequities and intensified the community's pursuit of racial justice and accountability in government, policing and business.
Immigrants are in the audiences of nearly every newsroom, yet have long been left behind by mainstream media, and have few places to turn for investigative reporting on issues relevant to them. Documented will use research to define, test, and pilot a news product or messaging strategy to reach Chinese-speaking and non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean immigrant Communities in New York City.
Word is Out is collaboration formed by six LGBTQ+ publishers and Local Media Foundation. Together the group will produce great journalism focused on inequities and solutions. They will also work on business strategies including the launch of a national website, newsletter and membership model.
Community-centred news outlets like El Tímpano, Enlace Latino NC, and Conecta Arizona have recently emerged to address gaps in local news for Latino immigrants. Unlike the dominant model of Spanish-language news — commercial television — these outlets have a dynamic relationship with audience members, who communicate questions and stories directly with local journalists. An abundance of research has examined the impact of local news on democracy, civic engagement, and public health. Yet the majority of such research focuses on English-language news and commercial Spanish-language media, ignoring new and innovative models that serve growing immigrant communities.
The project will prototype automated digital tools for reporters and newsrooms to view source-diversity proportions in real-time/on-demand for both draft stories and published. A CMS plugin will help reporters visualize source-diversity proportions for quotes. A web monitor application will offer the same visualizations at the site level for up to 7,000 US sites. Unlike one-time manual audits, these tools will offer near real-time/on-demand feedback to ease barriers to assessing stories' representativeness. An analytical framework will be based on a synthesis of journalism ethics vocabularies and design research findings. Santa Clara College will release the tools to early-adopter newsrooms with training.
Newsrooms can know instantly how many page views or unique users they had at any given time. But they don't have metrics for how many of their published sources were people of color, women, or LGBTQ. You can't improve upon what you don't measure. This new tool will empower newsrooms to track representation in their coverage.
For the past four and a half years Overture has held fast to the mission / belief that society has not prioritized technology and innovation to create opportunities that benefit humanity. To set an example and provide a framework as to how the application of technology can be used to create an opportunity for all, Overture will be developing a technology platform that will erase boundaries and create a framework that allows for talent to be recognized and for their efforts and for individuals to receive monetary compensation that will allow them to be judged according to their abilities.
Creating a comprehensive, inclusive open-sourced style guide and editing resources designed to deliver lasting change. The Vox Media free editorial style guide serves a dual function: It is both a comprehensive resource that helps drive and responds to public discourse, and a training tool designed to teach staff how to keep DE&I issues at top of mind as they work. Outlets from small or local publications to large or national news organizations will have go-to resources that give regularly and nimbly updated information on how to cover a wide range of complex DE&I topics, and offer guidance on how news organizations can adopt or tailor their content to their audiences as needed.
The Educational Video Center has a living archive of award-winning documentary films focusing on systemic inequities and structural racism produced over three decades by youth citizen journalists from historically oppressed communities in NYC. New films are continuously produced through ongoing educational programs. EVC's GNI Innovation Challenge Project is to distribute and license our incomparable youth-produced archive of documentary films and short clips to mainstream media. This will help EVC achieve sustainability and growth, whilst amplifying important stories reported by low-income youth of color that are not being told in local and national media.
To counter the prevailing narrative, and to better ensure meeting new audiences where they are, the Texas Observer will implement a community reporting strategy aimed at identifying community issues. It looks to better understand how communities of color engage with and support journalism by meeting the members of those communities where they are, wherever they are, across the state of Texas.
Word in Black is a news collaborative that also focuses on business transformation for the partners (ten of the nation's leading Black publishers). They are focused on proposing solutions to racial inequities in America. Word in Black will launch the following products: a national website (powered by Newspack); a newsletter aimed at 500,000+ subscribers in year one; a contributions portal that will generate $1MM in revenue and more.
The Houston Defender Network will increase audience engagement and generate revenue by combining its unique relationship with the Black and Hispanic communities, enhancing rich content/coverage and aligning talented journalists. The transformation is built on virtual events, digital programs in a variety of formats, and targeted newsletters. The project includes: a Newspack -powered website creating a flexible, responsive content hub; tools to expand audience reach and deepen engagement with sponsors/advertisers; resources to encourage community engagement through audience participation; and a marketing campaign promoting digital transformation.
Bloom Labs will collaborate with six newsrooms as part of the Bay Area News Collective to assess the geographic diversity and density of news in California's San Jose region. The newsrooms will use Bloom's geotagging tools and location analytics to leverage insights and formulate experiments for underrepresented communities. The resulting solutions will curate stories from all newsrooms on maps and neighborhood feeds that offer more diverse and equitable experiences for readers and businesses. The project will document how collective newsroom strategies influence the perception and value of engagement, subscriptions, and partnerships.
Creating a toolkit to help news organizations find and edit or remove archived stories that cause needless harm to the reputations of members of their communities.
The Diversity Dashboard uses geo-location tied to local content to provide reporters and editors with data on which communities they're covering and how they write about them. The data is displayed in a dashboard which includes a map with neighborhood breakdown ranking different topics covered. Census data is incorporated to provide further context of the diversity in each neighborhood. Users can filter results in the dashboard to see content mapped from the entire newsroom, their team or their own content. The goal of the dashboard is to help local newsrooms avoid gaps in coverage and build trust within diverse communities.
Save the Black Press will be a data access portal, content discovery platform, and resource support model for generating revenue and innovating content at black news organizations. First, by developing a subscription based data access portal which will make public data more accessible and usable, including functionality for querying the data, generating visualizations and building maps; second, by providing resource support to black news organizations e.g. hiring data/investigative journalists, updating organizational websites, and business planning; and third, by developing a subscription based content discovery platform to surface content from black news organizations that is data-informed and visually appealing.
"Our America: Hidden Stories," from the ABC Owned Television Stations (OTV), will illuminate the hidden histories of our cities through a multiplatform, immersive experience that includes video storytelling, a learning curriculum and a proprietary, data journalism-based "Equity Report" tracking progress around key social equity metrics in areas such as education and policing. The project seeks to better understand the formative "groundwater" that has led to systemic racism in our communities and will leverage data and curriculum resources to inspire local citizens to move forward in a more inclusive and equitable way.
Pass the Mic is a database of expert sources from underrepresented communities that can serve as sources on subjects you're already reading about in the news. Experts that come from an underrepresented community such as people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, female identifying or non-binary folks and people with disabilities will nominate another expert they wish they'd see being interviewed in the news more often. Nominated experts can input their qualifications and vouch for the qualifications of their nominees to the database so reporters can easily reference an expert voice from an underrepresented community to interview for their next story.
The Integration of our Broadcast News Operation with digital platforms would provide for a streamlined "One Kuam" approach in which quality content and journalism shifts from broadcast-led to a limited audience, to digital, cloud-based and accessible across the local, regional and global community. This digital overhaul redefines "mass media" by breaking down barriers and limitations.
Creation of a website which will allow for Low Power FM radio stations to syndicate and exchange programming. This will also aid station funding in mutual fashion through any combination of direct purchase, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.
NAHP, NNPA and AAN will explore technologies and content opportunities to build a membership network with and between the three national media associations, and with the members within each association, touching more than 500 local media publishers in the U.S. This partnership will endeavour to leverage demonstrated high levels of collaboration and knowledge sharing between members, allowing independent, local publishers to build more direct outreach to their existing audiences and grow readership throughout the United States and globally. Initial goals include: facilitating advancement and learning among publishers, promoting memberships, and elevating specific content verticals that raise audience and improve ad targeting.
The Lenfest Institute's Lenfest Local Lab, the Brown Institute, and The Philadelphia Inquirer are collaborating to develop a suite of machine learning tools that empower local newsrooms to make data-informed assessments of coverage that strengthen and accelerate DEI best practices. The tools will help newsrooms survey broad sets of content, including analysis of language, imagery, locations and sources mentioned in coverage. These tools will expand the scope and reduce the time it takes to perform content audits, allowing newsrooms to continuously monitor coverage. The tools will also support strategic planning and business modeling for more representative and equitable news organizations.
Joliet Focus is an app that will function as a locally-driven platform to share content from the underserved Black community of Joliet. With a focus on easy uploading and sharing, we will encourage a user-generated discussion through photos, stories and videos that will amplify previously underserved voices in the community and foster meaningful discussion and viewpoints on what makes Joliet a positive community to live in, what can be improved, and what's next. Promotion of the app will center around a local pop-up art gallery in downtown Joliet which will showcase photo submissions from the community.
A new project from nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune, in collaboration with Salt Lake Community College, adds diverse perspectives to local news through student journalism. A reimagined curriculum focuses on critical issues facing Utah communities and delivers stories to a free repository, providing sources for growing media engagement. This project will model how community college students and journalists can bring multi-dimensional points-of-view to local news organizations and provide a source of growing readership and revenue.
Engagement has become central to newsroom strategy, yet hasn't been realized as a viable business model. Through applying Machine Learning and classification AI to first party audience engagement data, Hearken can transform insights into editorial value for the public and financial value for newsrooms.
The 'Simply No Words' project harnesses the power of animation to reach underrepresented audiences without reliance on words. Ripple Effect Images will establish a collaborative model that facilitates the production and distribution of animated campaigns targeting timely public information themes, such as preventing the spread of COVID-19, voter registration, or how to prepare for a hurricane. The project will generate high-quality animated content that can be shared, repurposed and edited to meet the needs of local news organizations committed to inclusion through the provision of accurate and accessible information to underserved audiences.
The Washington Informer and the Center for Public Integrity will develop a sponsored email product that provides updated information about gentrification in Southeast Washington, D.C. The information will be based on a data analysis of public records about property loss due to back taxes in two key predominantly Black wards facing gentrification pressure. The email product will also include news about redevelopment efforts in the area.
MediaNews Group aims to expand access to essential journalism by offering discounts to enrolled college students and creating a token-based system of access to allow libraries, school districts, universities, philanthropic donors and generous individuals to underwrite access for disadvantaged groups.
Al Día is an SMS system that will allow readers in two of the most densely populated Spanish speaking, Latino, immigrant areas in Louisiana to receive instant messages on local/national breaking news, stories, events, and services in Spanish; with the ability to ask questions and get responses.
People who live in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta face pervasive health issues, with each area faring far worse than the U.S. average in health indicators and outcomes. Both regions are largely forgotten about in the national conversation, lacking in infrastructure that promotes education and economic growth. Gray plans to create a resource to help people in these geographically connected but demographically diverse regions access health information and resources to improve the quality of life in communities we serve.
Today's Southern LGBTQ communities need a news outlet that celebrates their unique and diverse voices and lived experiences. Qnotescarolinas.org will provide an online platform for LGBTQ Carolinians to amplify the struggles and needs that are often underrepresented in mainstream press. It will be a hub of online engagement with pilot programs in the Charlotte region and Central North Carolina, be community-sourced, community-involved and hyper-local. Focused on digital publication, it will create a place for community forum and reach people where they are despite barriers to news and information, while creating an archived history of LGBTQ people living in the South.
This project marries local data and engagement to better serve the community through the creation of a data vault. Newsday/nextLI will reach underserved audiences, create a renewable revenue stream and create a playbook to share with other news organizations. Newsday/nextLI's extensive data assets range from Census data to mapping to original surveys, building a high-level schema that allows different datasets to exist in relation to each other. Through a new messaging platform, community members can access the data, experts and tools to advocate for their needs. For clients, Newsday/nextLI will offer tiers of concierge data services for revenue: self-exploration, packaged, total customization.
Recognizing that legacy local media systems are part of the problem of structural racism in Charlottesville, the Charlottesville Inclusive Media project seeks to build a trusted framework for local news and policy reporting grounded in service to communities that builds trust, transparency, and power in inclusive local media and decision-making systems. The founding partners work together to create community connections, lift up important conversations, empower African American communities and audiences, and build capacity for independent Black media companies and professionals.
The goal of the project is to develop an easy to use database conversion tool that allows journalists to convert data into useful, impactful information without needing an IT department or data scientist
A comprehensive, searchable guide to pre-K through 12 education in North Texas. Education choices are not as limited as they seem, whether within traditional public schools or beyond. This will help parents of all income levels understand what choices they have and empower them to choose what is best for their children.
The Salt Lake Tribune will be the first US legacy newspaper to transition to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We are also creating The Utah Journalism Foundation to provide long term support to local journalism. In doing so, we are creating a mechanism to sustain local journalism in perpetuity. Funding from GNI will accelerate our transition by building out a critical and innovative series of tools, policies and procedures. The goal of this project is to create a sustainable business model that can be adapted by other local legacy news organizations in small to mid sized markers.
Our goal is to address both the technical and economic challenges of unifying customer and user data for local publishers. The project aims to create a customer data management solution will combine the open source technologies Wordpress and the Apache Unomi CDP. Integrating CDP technology with the Wordpress publishing platform will enable scalable, cost-effective solutions for customer data management for publishers. The integrated Wordpress features and hooks to the CDP will be used to create valuable experiences for readers and new ways for publishers to reach specific audiences.
Create a sustainable funding model for community-focused journalism outlets to amplify the needs and stories of historically underserved populations. Detour Detroit will test and quantify the success of hybrid journalist/engager roles to amplify readership, strengthen relationships with readers and grow revenue. We will track how stories, journalists and their engagement work in the community directly impact membership growth and retention. This creates a virtuous cycle of engagement and is a replicable model to reward attentive and responsive reporting. Google's grant will fund the tech stack and tools to support this program.
The Medill Spiegel Research Center's Subscriber Engagement Index would be a new tool that would give local news organizations timely, unique, actionable insights about the online behaviors of their digital subscribers. The Index would show participating news organizations what digital subscribers are consuming on local news sites, and what's leading some to churn. This anonymized data would be shared and benchmarked in a wide array of categories so news outlets can measure their performance against their peers. Top-line findings would be shared with the journalism industry and thought leaders globally.
We are developing a premium user experience for our most engaged, loyal subscribers that includes an ad-free news website, location-specific content recommendations, improved commenting and engagement tools and exclusive access to live events with our journalists.
We propose to build an open source toolkit for conversion and audience tracking that allows news organizations to quickly build an email subscriber base and an effective year-round membership program.
The GeoReporter project will develop a system to help editors easily source contributors of community content, make assignments and electronically pay those contributors in a streamlined digital experience, helping to cover more events in the local community.
The Interactive Story Wall is a way to visualize and explain data-driven stories on broadcast and digital platforms using a touch-screen that helps audiences better understand complex issues.
We aim to expand data journalism from a primarily project-based and text-based activity to a mainstream, daily core of our newsrooms. To do so, we will pilot a systematic and holistic orientation around public data starting with the state of California. Evaluating the full public data ecosystem across the state will give our newsrooms unprecedented ability to extract the most important data points to deliver information in ways that can make a real difference in the lives of local consumers in hundreds of under-covered communities. We will bring the content to life on video through an innovative new "Data Studio and support the creation of hyperlocal digital news products, beginning in California.
The Membership for Broadcast Project will demonstrate that local broadcasters can develop their relationship with their digital audience into a sustainable business model that offsets expected declines in retransmission and advertising dollars. It's a crucial lesson for local broadcasters who need to act now while they still have the resources, audience and clout to build new businesses. Local newspaper- companies waited too long and now face steep declines not only in revenue, but influence and impact. Broadcasters have time to build an audience-based revenue model through user funnels, which will allow them to maintain their leading role in local news.
#ThisIsTucson — a digital vertical of the Arizona Daily Star that serves more than 200,000 engaged local residents a month — will test, launch and manage a membership program to demonstrate a new, sustainable revenue stream for local news.
BackerTap gives news organizations' most passionate readers the inside story by letting them sign up for exclusive documents, analysis, and other bonus materials that go beyond the headlines. It will also harness the enthusiasm for journalism that makes a difference, making it a more rewarding experience to donate, subscribe, or help share the stories that matter knowing that support is going directly towards original reporting.
Lookout Local Community Partners Plan employs state-of-the-art tech to connect two big dots in the development of local news media for the 2020s: reader revenue through membership and authentic digital and physical connection with those most involved in civic life. We empower a new level of community connection with our readers and create a flywheel effect, generating journalism-building dollars membership more quickly.
We're going to simplify the development of podcast advertising creative assets to accelerate revenue growth in podcasting. We'll do this by building a platform for purchasing podcast ad impressions and utilizing Google's natural language processing & AI to automate the production of advertising creative for podcasts. Local, regional, and national businesses and their agencies will be able to easily create podcast specific creative and place targeted ad buys to local podcast audiences.
WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station, will embark on a project aimed at enabling public radio listeners to interact and transact with live local news content, using their voice, while driving their car. By partnering with emerging tech mobile developers, WBUR's BizLab – an innovation lab developing and testing new models of support for public radio – will extend the listening experience of its existing WBUR Listen app to enable donations, transactions, and paid sponsorship within the context of listening to the station's live broadcast.
The Voice Brief Tool streamlines the creation of a human curated and read news brief for use on audio assistants and streaming platforms.
NABUR will establish a responsible, curated neighborhood social media platform for communities served by Wick newspapers that encourages geographic connections through healthy discourse, cultivating relevant story ideas, and periodically bringing members together in real life (IRL) for events and discussions.
Community News Connect is a collaborative local news platform that allows residents to partner with newsrooms to strengthen news coverage and amplify diverse voices. Community members would request coverage. Participating newsrooms would accept those requests, choosing to report on them individually or collaborate with other newsrooms. If newsrooms have interest in a topic but not the capacity to cover it, they could request micro-funding assistance from residents or community organizations. The platform would give local newsrooms a much-needed tool for tracking how well they are addressing the needs of segments of the community.
Three nonprofit news organizations will join forces to use innovative technology and research techniques to discover the information needs of residents of the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, investigate their most pressing issues and deliver accountability journalism to the residents, as well as the broader public and policymakers across the nation.
ITVS will help local public media stations use a new feedback platform to better serve, engage, and gain support from communities of color. Starting with five stations that are collaborating with ITVS on local content and civic participation strategies centered on criminal justice issues. ITVS will test and develop a model with the potential for national scale, serving public media's diversity mission and local stations' need to expand their revenue bases through increased membership.
La Noticia Audience Portal, is a pay-for-service model celebrations portal for user-generated content. This portal will allow Latino families to share with the broader community, beautiful pictures and descriptions of family life celebrations such as: Births, Baptism, Weddings, Quinceañeras and Community celebrations.
In the past few years, thousands of big cities, small towns and counties across America have started streaming video of public meetings online. But for the average citizen, keeping track of these meetings remains time-consuming and difficult. The Michigan Radio Public Meeting Tracker will make the content of these meetings easier to access. We'll pull audio from meetings and make it available on podcast feeds and smart speakers, and we'll use speech-to-text transcription to create a new database of meeting transcripts that newsrooms can use to track issues across communities.
Using machine learning, this project will build a predictive analytics tool to help editors determine which of hundreds of staff-written stories are best suited for homepage positions on local news sites. Essentially, it will help us focus our homepage presentation based on the reading habits of our homepage users.
Okayplayer began 20 years ago as a community of messageboard users bonding over similar interests in music, culture and politics. For two decades, we've been a publication serving the needs and interests of that community. Okayplayer's Investigative Reporting Platform is the next step in that tradition, a new way of funding quality reporting in places underserved by traditional media. Our model will empower local communities to direct their limited resources at journalism designed to shine light on opaque issues and bring accountability to local institutions.
We will design and build a technology platform, with related services, that effectively matches the right journalism-funding entity with the right news organization and project, and ensure successful program execution. Accelerate Local will become the premier source and enabler of journalism funding in North America, and possibly the world in the longer term. This will produce more and better local reporting, which in turn will enable local media organizations to better meet the information needs of the communities they serve.
The Lenfest Local Lab and The Philadelphia Inquirer will create partially-automated newsletters serving targeted Philadelphia-area neighborhoods. The newsletters will include a mix of editorial content, public data, and other automated information that will empower residents to stay informed and connect with their neighbors. The project will also explore new forms of community collaboration and revenue on a neighborhood level. Targeted community newsletters will give local businesses the opportunity to connect with more residents, and also amplify the services and information that community groups already offer on a hyperlocal level.
Local news is broken. Crosstown is trying to fix it -- through data. We deliver community-level data to the people of Los Angeles who want to make their neighborhoods and city safer, healthier and more connected. Our GNI project will create a specialized news product -- such as a newsletter -- targeted to each neighborhood in Los Angeles.
The Beacon, based in Kansas City, plans to launch in 2020, focusing on in-depth journalism in both Kansas and Missouri. It will be the first of its kind in the region to focus on a nonprofit news membership model outside of public radio/TV. This project will focus on the necessary steps to define and engage our unique audience for long-term sustainability, identify and build relationships with other civic engagement players, and create a forum for discussion of news and engagement with our audience.
Moose FM
This will develop recommendations and tools to help other rural media operations connect with their audience and develop trust in the news that is delivered. It will provide guidance for other small and rural journalists that will help them build trust with their audience and find ways to reach their remote and rural audiences better.
Golden West
Golden West wants to identify significant segments of the population in three distinct local communities, to understand opportunities to improve content coverage and delivery methods. It is particularly interested in discovering cohorts whose needs and interests are not being sufficiently met. In an environment of information overload, delivering the right information to the right person at the right time is critical for true comprehension, understanding, and satisfaction. Based on research results, solutions could include broadening content categories, introducing new ways of serving content, and fostering local journalism and increasing exposure for local contributors.
Metroland Media
Through dedicated sections on its websites, Metroland will amplify the voices and tell the stories of 20 First Nations reserves as well as urban Indigenous populations in Ontario. This project seeks to address a deficiency in news coverage of and for Indigenous peoples, and advance the fractured relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples through education and information. The project will honour Indigenous tradition and values, and storytelling will be at its heart. Storytelling reflects the best of what community journalism is: a focus on people, their achievements, their struggles, their concerns and hopes for the future.
Metro Media
To solve the problem, the approach Metro Media proposes combines design thinking and data analysis. This allows them to combine the various qualitative activities of design thinking with quantitative methods to validate the set of hypotheses that may emerge from the design process but also to bring new insights.
Association de la presse francophone (Réseau.Presse)
Solution: The "Research Centre on the Francophone Minority Communities' Interests" project responds to an important challenge for the local print media serving these communities: the research and identification of content of interest to the readership. The project's main objective is to obtain and compile data that will allow newsrooms and journalists to match topics of interest to the expectations and needs of their readership. This initiative will directly contribute to broadening and retaining readership, better respond to the needs and interests of Francophone minority communities, and attract a greater variety and number of advertisers to ensure not only the viability, but the profitability of these print media.
Stronger and more sustainable growth can and will be achieved by reaching and engaging with a more diverse range of readers, including LGBTQ2+ communities, members of First Nations and visible minorities who might not see themselves reflected in traditional media. It wants to better understand who the readers are, and what value they assign to Le Devoir. Additionally: what is the trigger that gets them to move from being readers to becoming subscribers. Leveraging this knowledge will reach more communities.
La Converse
La Converse has been sending out surveys through their newsletters and noticed the same people answering, who are privileged in their marginality. The underserved people it is trying to reach do not have the time and luxury to fill a survey or don't understand why they should in the first place. Now it will build spaces to engage with the people it wants to reach while respecting their realities and lifestyles.
Trust in journalism is eroding and historically, news reporting favours institutions of power. How do we ensure journalism effectively reflects the voices of citizens and change makers? JeRI underlines structural inequity and generates actionable data to improve news coverage of traditionally marginalized communities. In the face of increasing revenue challenges, JeRI aims to help FPLP grow audiences by engaging new readers. It will shine a light on reporting that is well-sourced and equitably represents marginalized people, re-establishing trust and improving coverage of Indigenous communities and other underrepresented groups.
Institute for Investigative Journalism
The IIJ Data Hub will help us to support local and national news organizations, particularly those serving small markets and minority audiences. These outlets are essential to a functioning democracy, sharing the work of journalists who have deep roots in their communities, yet many don't have the means to carry out investigative work. This hub will empower reporters to join our regional and national communities of journalists and access our resources.
The future depends on growing a more diverse subscriber base that better reflects the increasingly diverse population of Manitoba. The Winnipeg Free Press Reader Bridge is the path to build to get the stories that connect with new audiences to deliver the understanding and the connections that will enable continuation of funding for the independent journalism the city and province demands. The deeper the connection developed with the readership, the more loyal they will be, and the more willing they will be to sustain the digital future.
Canadian Press
The D3 will have a significant impact on the depth and breadth of local news generated in Canada. This comes at a time when smaller newsrooms -- short on both resources and time -- are struggling just to report the basics. A key focus of our data gathering will be public data sets from all levels of government as well as national-level NGOs, research institutes and academia. Using both human and algorithmic analysis, we will find patterns in those data sets, determine what news stories can be told about them, and generate content as a result.
Earbank Inc.
Local news broadcasters record hours of valuable news clips and soundbites each day; however, not all of this content is saved for future use, because the broadcasters do not have the resources to archive their audio or the tools to monetize this content.
Village Media Inc.
Today, most readers take a predominantly vertical path into and out of a local news site. They come in for a certain type of content, they consume that content, and they share it, comment on it, and/or leave. A tremendous amount of engagement takes place outside the local news sites, in particular, within social networks.
Torstar Corp.
One of the unsolved problems of journalism in 2019 concerns providing quality service for local news in an economically sustainable and scalable manner. While larger, national news sources are seeing success with subscription models, the community news model remains challenging. Project Local Pulse aims to re-invigorate community discourse and showcase the full range of diverse voices and interests in each community. Project Local Pulse will be driven by local people, feature local content and help local businesses reach relevant audiences.
Connecting with the local audience is increasingly becoming difficult due to the increased availability of news sources. In rural and remote environments, this availability of local news is limited but complicated due to the vast geographic area covered and limited connectivity, along with a distrust of media in delivering unbiased news. How do publishers connect with the local audience in the way they want to be communicated with, with the news they need and want?
As audiences grow and change, so does the type and scope of local news and information they need to stay informed. The mediums and methods they use to find and access information also changes. This established news source in small markets across the Canadian prairies will complete a formal research study in three specific test markets, to develop a greater understanding of the news and information needs, and identify opportunities in coverage in the communities served. It will be looking for population segments that are underserved, new and innovative content delivery methods, and how to provide on-demand content in a timely manner.
Community news outlets in Ontario, and across Canada, have historically provided little or superficial coverage of Indigenous peoples. Attempts to change this have failed for an amalgam of reasons, perhaps foremost among them a failure by the media to put in the time to make meaningful connections and build trust required to produce meaningful and comprehensive content. Through in-person consultation with Indigenous peoples in their communities, they will be able to make those meaningful connections, build trust and begin to understand what stories we should tell and how they should be told.
How can Metro Media, as an independent and credible information channel, more effectively share essential information with citizens, particularly hard-to-reach communities? The Metropolis 2022 project will identify possible solutions to enable the media to better meet the information needs of communities. A data-enhanced design thinking approach will be applied to the project.
Réseau.Presse has a network of 24 local media in 8 provinces and 3 territories across Canada. These vital local media are geographically dispersed and serve many Francophone minority communities. The sudden shift from traditional to digital marketing has weakened them, leaving them without the resources to update their content and business model to the needs and expectations of their readership, their community and their advertisers. The "Research Center" project aims to bridge this gap between readers and publishers by synchronizing the interests of the former with the journalistic content of the latter.
Le Devoir wants to extend the reach of its brand of strong authoritative journalism. The focus on the past few years has been on improving and diversifying the content offer. It fuelled a strong digital subscriptions growth. Since January 2021, it had hit a plateau and requires many more subscribers to remain a sustainable business. Underrepresented communities represent a fertile pool of future subscribers and so Le Devoir wants to understand what messaging and delivery system will help them bring their value proposition to these new audiences. In order to generate stronger growth in the future, it wants to make it as diverse as possible.
La Converse aims to serve Francophone marginalized people in Canada. Our objective is to conduct action-research allowing it to better serve these communities that aren't heard. Journalism aiming at marginalized communities often feels extractive and rarely results in change for them.
The Journalism Representation Index (JeRI) uses AI to analyze news stories by weighing power, in-story placement and frequency of the sources in text to deliver an index score to newsrooms and readers. Ryerson University researchers, working with FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership (FPLP), publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, are developing this journalistic-source-based accountability tool to help FPLP newspapers build trust with their readers and engage new, traditionally underrepresented audiences.
The IIJ Data Hub is a secure, user-friendly repository of documents, data, maps, responses to access to information requests and other materials acquired over the course of award-winning national investigations. The hub will serve as a knowledge base for hundreds of member journalists, sharing document catalogues, at-a-glance data visualizations, and other tools, training and best practices. It will also connect to resources provided by industry associations and innovation hubs at universities and colleges nationwide. The public-facing platform will offer researchers, students, and members of the public access to archives from previous investigations.
The Reader Bridge is designed to help diversify, engage, build and sustain our readership, in large part by delivering stories and potential readers from underserved racialized communities. The Reader Bridge will provide the opportunity for readers to participate in Winnipeg Free Press' journalism in a direct way; to ask specific questions they need answering, to flag both problems and success in their communities we should be reporting on, to offer perspectives and expertise otherwise lacking in our coverage; and to build a relationship with our organization built on mutual respect so we can be trusted to tell more diverse stories.
The Canadian Press aims to build out a Digital Data Desk to take advantage of two emerging trends in journalism: access to data and the use of AI to create content from that data. D3 will change CP in fundamental, necessary ways. It will update our culture to become fully digital. It will introduce new storytelling tools and a new breed of journalist. It will expand our market beyond the troubled traditional news industry. And it will allow us to operate at scale, generating bespoke solutions for customers that can range from hyperlocal to global.
Earbank News Exchange is helping news broadcasters and journalists to turn their audio assignments and archives into a new source of revenue.
Village Media seeks to trigger a network effect within our community news platform by enabling and encouraging both Readers and Advertisers to connect on a one-to-one and a one-to-many basis with other members of their geographical community of interest.
Project Local Pulse is a digital-only product that combines quality local news with a community hub. In a world in which print news products are in decline, Torstar is looking to develop a sustainable new platform to maximize reader engagement through combining Torstar's powerful news brands with deep community content. Critical to success is that this be truly local – strengthening the role of the local newspaper as the community's digital gathering place.
Missing Perspectives
Young women are consistently underrepresented as news sources worldwide. Studies of news coverage from around the world have consistently found more than 70% of people seen, quoted and heard in the news are men. When it comes to 'expert' sources, around 80% are men. We will be challenging this continued underrepresentation by connecting newsrooms with young female talent worldwide. The Directory will remove all the pain points we have identified when speaking to domestic and international newsrooms: identifying, vetting, and curating local young female reporters; providing messaging functionality; and managing international payments.
Murray Bridge News
Until now, newspaper publishers have held one major advantage over online publishers: their product has a physical presence. It can be seen on coffee tables and shop counters. This project will neutralise that advantage. As well as enabling us to reach a wider audience, the project will grow our revenue by increasing awareness of our content, helping us grow our paid subscriber base; and by making our advertising offer more attractive to clients. This will better position us for sustainable, long-term success.
The Conversation Media Group Ltd.
Aggressive, off-topic or misleading comments can undermine trusted information in our articles. While most commenters abide by our community standards, certain topics are prone to spin, misinformation and sexist abuse. The Conversation will build a safer and more inclusive place for users to make comments. We will develop new community standards and guidelines to create harassment-free experience for expert authors, readers and editors. We will introduce new tools to let users create richer profiles and provide for pre-moderation. We will invest in active community management, and new processes to foster intelligent, constructive and respectful discussions.
Australian Community Media want to create a new digital platform for buyers and sellers across Australia to exchange goods and services through our existing Audience network including print newspapers, sites, apps, email, advertising and social channels.
Crikey, Private Media Pty Ltd.
As advertising revenue becomes less accessible to small media publishers, journalism like Crikey's increasingly depends on reader revenue to achieve sustainability. As the longest running reader revenue model in Australian independent journalism, Crikey understands what works in a reader-focused business model. We have identified a demand for a Crikey group subscription product, yet have not yet been able to deliver a product that meets this demand. Crikey Group Access will allow us to do this and will help to diversify and grow our revenue pool without taking our business model in a direction that is contrary to our current efforts.
Community Broadcasting Association of Australia
Despite 22% of sector income being raised through fundraising, most community radio station websites do not include an online fundraising system (60%).
Women's Agenda, published by Agenda Media Pty Ltd.
The first is the need to offer broader opportunities for a female perspective on major news events, which we can support and provide through membership revenue -- with at least three female sources quoted per piece. The second being the need to raise the number of female contributors and sources in the mainstream media, which this project will build over time through our database of female sources -- developed from those quoted in our regular news features. And, finally, to address the expressed desires and needs of our readers to better connect and share knowledge regarding the key issues we cover on Women's Agenda.
GNM Australia Pty Ltd. Parent company: Guardian News & Media in the UK
As the business model of journalism pivots towards having a larger portion of reader revenue, we are seeking to unlock the potential to activate this revenue stream in audio content. Guardian Australia's pilot technology solution will make it easier for podcasts listeners to make financial contributions to publishers and audio creators.
Mamamia (Mamamia.com.au Pty Ltd.)
Mamamia is looking to build on the high engagement of our audience with our content and talent to diversify both revenue and traffic sources for the organization.
The Missing Perspectives Directory will be a first-of-its-kind AI-powered app and workforce solution that will connect young female reporters and experts around the world with domestic and international newsrooms. Our team has spoken with newsrooms who have found it difficult to source local young female talent on the ground to cover breaking news. Our goal is to use the Directory as a tool to transform the news industry to more accurately represent the world we inhabit as young women - and get more young female reporters on the radar of international newsrooms. The app has the potential to ultimately be scaled beyond young women and change the way news is made by prioritising local reporters.
This project will demonstrate a new method of hyperlocal news distribution. Murray Bridge News will establish a network of 10-12 smart digital signs in the community in which we operate, partnering with local organisations to convert existing public TV screens into community noticeboards which will display news stories, weather, event calendars and advertising.
The Conversation will develop new community standards and tools to verify the bona fides of commenters. This will make conversations on its platform safer, more inclusive and constructive.
Many newspapers and publishers were founded on classifieds and trading posts.
Crikey Group Access is a new approach to handling group subscriptions. The project aims to build a new group subscription offering that can be tailored to organisations, businesses and groups of all sizes. Our business model is already geared towards reader revenue, with over 90% of our total revenue coming from individual subscribers. We're now ready to expand and diversify our pool of reader revenue by developing an innovative, user-friendly group subscription offering.
This project will pilot an innovative fundraising platform for Australia's community broadcasting sector, underpinned by a technology-based solution to support community journalism.
The Women's Agenda Extra platform offers our loyal readers a little 'extra', through a simple membership platform. It features three core components including: regular deep dives on key news events that intentionally feature female sources; opportunities for members to discuss stories and issues together and directly with journalists and editors; an innovative database of female expert sources built over time through those quoted in our news features. The platform is not designed to gate or paywall our regular editorial.
Guardian Australia will develop, prototype and user test a technology solution that will allow the timed release of rich media, during audio playback on mobile. These events will enhance the user experience and make it easier for listeners to make financial contributions to publishers via audio content.
Mamamia is in the process of developing an innovative membership proposition that caters for different audiences' content preferences.
The Daily Prothom Alo
While Prothom Alo has established its credibility amongst the urban population of Bangladesh, the company is yet to fully address the needs of an untapped yet large rural population at the district level who are yearning for hyperlocal and personalized content. This project envisages auto-discovery of quality yet contextual news and delivery of superior experiences to the audience. This will enable Prothom Alo to drive engagement and serve as a one-stop destination for businesses to identify and cater to their local customer base. Additionally, advertisers perceive Prothom Alo as a desired partner to reach the target audience in large cities and now the company is looking to build a similar narrative for district-level markets.
Prothom Alo is striving to address the content consumption needs of Bangladeshis in smaller cities. The team will embark on this journey by offering real-time, personalized and hyperlocal content which is curated by the vast network of 'on-ground' reporters and news bureaus spread across various districts in the country.
Atlas auto-generates user personas and journeys as inputs to optimize editorial curation, user-centered design, and algorithms to maximize user engagement & retention, and monetization. Whenever a user interacts our product or content, we only employ a small degree of "personalization" in terms of content, format / packaging, and next call-to-actions (CTA); and even so, these are extremely limited, manually-defined, and not user-specific. Atlas allows us to personalize our users' experiences based on their behaviors and motivations, and show them relevant product and content -- whether this be a subscription offer, a newsletter, a conversation, a ticket to an event, content in a specific format, etc.
Matters Lab Ltd.
Journalism faces two fundamental challenges today: broken business models and platform censorship. We believe the future roots in a decentralized solution for an independent journalist network. The distributed ledger allows us to build a solution that can provide durable hosting, independent governance and payment solution for Internet content. The deliverable product will be an integrated toolkit including plug-ins powered by IPFS, Matters content management system and Liker Land social network. Journalists can use this toolkit to publish stories on Matters.news or freely distributed to any other platforms and receive rewards from their readers.
Hong Kong Free Press
There are no viable free, secure, open source membership or fundraising portals available to small newsrooms. With media funding in crisis, direct reader support remains the most feasible solution and the best way to ensure press freedom. Our Open Membership Portal for Small Newsrooms will be fully maintained, with a training pack, documentation and case studies. Supporters will be able to select different commitment levels and manage their donations through card payments or PayPal. Customisable and secure, it aims to remove barriers for both newsrooms and readers to accepting regular donations.
SCMP Atlas is a system that dynamically classifies users into persona clusters based on their demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. These personas can then be fed into prediction models and recommendation engines to better personalize user journeys, increase engagement and retention, and optimize monetization opportunities.
We aim to provide an open-source solution to build a decentralized independent journalist network in the Chinese community. The solution will be an integrated toolkit for independent journalists to write and publish articles with permanent preservation and content authorship, distribute work bypassing platform censorship, build communities and get paid via nano payment. The solution aims to empower independent journalism at lower logistic costs, with higher audience engagement.
We are creating an open source funding platform for small newsrooms focussed on reader membership. This out-of-the-box micro-site can be easily deployed to bypass, or reduce reliance on, expensive, third-party crowdfunding sites, and flawed fundraising plugins. Regular, monthly support from readers has proven to be the best hope for generating a sustainable income, but accessible, functional and affordable tools and expertise are rarely available to small news startups and outfits. Designed specifically for media outlets, this solution will empower newsrooms to finally take control of their fundraising and manage their relationships with supporters.
PublicNext
The main source of local authentic content is print media which reaches 660 million people in India. But the print media has a massive distribution challenge, no video format content and is one-way communication. All news platforms are one-way of communication without giving any importance to people's opinions on the editorial content. PublicNext will have a "Network recommendation engine" to encourage people's participation. "Discussion module" will enable readers to start discussing, dissenting, and debating on the local editorial content. A new "AI engine" will enable readers to block, and report, unsuitable discussions.
Despite the advent of social media, the gap between newsrooms and readers is larger than ever. Most often, emails/letters/calls made to the newsroom evoke no, or worse, an indifferent response. While powerful lobbies hog all the news space, readers go years without knowing who to contact if they have news to share. We will empower our readers and turn stakeholders into contributors for impactful ground reports that bring about crucial and contextual change. Rather than citizen journalists, we aim to build a community of 'News Responsible' citizens who are aware of their rights and believe in amplifying issues to bring change.
The Ken
As paywalled articles become more ubiquitous, their user experience hasn't kept up. We want to reimagine that for both existing subscribers as well as non-subscribers.
Newslaundry Media
Newslaundry aims to incorporate Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and re-engineer the website and app to increase accessibility for people with sensory, cognitive and learning disabilities, along with promoting the use of news to facilitate interaction with diverse news consumers from across languages, societal groups, geographies and ideologies.
Mojo Story
Key focus areas are enhanced self-esteem and self-confidence, positive role models, explaining burning current affairs issues, a safe space for taboo conversations. This will lead to improved interpersonal skills, guidance on career choices, self expression and user-generated content, online leadership modules in partnership with schools.
Scroll Media Inc.
Producing high-quality video is expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive. Our deep experience in this area now points out that, as an industry, we need process innovation in video production. After multiple pivots and folded teams world over, this is now inevitable. At the same time, as India's short video consumption soars exponentially, there is a huge opportunity to provide independent, fact-checked news and original reporting to this new generation of audiences. Our ML-based tool to create short news videos will tackle both these points: (a) On the audience front, our end user has access to credible news at scale. (b) On the video production front, our producers are able to cater to the needs of both volume and creativity.
IE Online Media Services Private Ltd.
Our platform will assist in the identification, funding and coverage of causes, both local and global, that impact people, environment, lives and lively hoods, by creating communities, crowdfunding from those being impacted and those who care and finding the best of the journalism minds to cover them.
Gaon Connection Private Ltd.
Two of three Indians live in rural India, but rural India is not the priority of the mainstream media. So India's policymakers and citizens in general have no credible way of knowing what rural India wants, and what it doesn't. In the world's biggest democracy, there is no way of regularly knowing the will of two-thirds of its citizens -- critical for policymaking.Gaon Connection app will use the power of tech to showcase the will and aspirations of rural India in a never-before manner.The project is unique because it brings together technology and ground presence, statistics and field reportage, to create a heady mix -- that shall change the news narrative, nudge policymakers and provide new insight to urban India on the real issues.
The Morning Context, Slowform Pte Ltd.
We're trying to solve for subscription: new subs, as well as renewals and prevention of subscription fatigue. By converting subscription fees into tokens, so different segments of subscribers can read/engage only with the stories they're interested in. This would lead to a more engaged and vibrant subscriber base, which means more renewal revenue.
The News Minute
A membership programme that respects readers, and where they come from, what they want. TNM Connect will continue with The News Minute's niche of covering south India, from the south, and identifying that the reader is not a monolith. There are 16 million Indians living abroad, and we recognise that all of them are not the same, nor do they want the same things. We will drive diversity of coverage and diversity of ideas, through diversity in the newsroom. And with this, we believe that it is possible to build a sustainable business model.
Chambal Media Private Ltd.
Rural issues are not represented in the mainstream media, and local vernacular models are hard pressed to sustain themselves. The project seeks to create a local media subscription model which can be replicated across the world, and which will enable the sustainability of local media platforms. The product will aim to bridge local/rural and urban audiences, through reporting, analysis, commentary in multiple formats. It will expand the scope of revenue generation for grassroots media by making the content relevant to educational and research institutes, national and international media platforms, think tanks and governments.
Turkbox
With the advent of the subscription-led business model in the online news landscape for publications in India, there are doubts about whether readers will be willing to pay to access their news. A subscription system can have a considerable impact on user retention for online websites, and alienate users that don't wish to buy a subscription. Turkbox provides a consistent solution for the reader to "pay" the news publication by performing an elementary data classification task in exchange for access to news. This enables news publication to monetize content while also keeping access to content free.
9 out of 10 smartphones in India are used by people with a local language. 90% of their time is spent in the neighborhood so what happens in the neighborhood impacts their life with everything from local infrastructure, law, and order, human stories, or politics. PublicNext is a confluence of authenticated local news in a digital world and a new way to encourage local people to network, participate in debate, discussions, and dissent around the editorial content
EM Connect will allow readers from across the North East of India to share information with our editorial department. This is not citizen journalism 2.0, rather, this allows citizens to engage with EastMojo to produce news that meets editorial standards. Users will connect with us via text/voice/video/photos, after which our monitoring team will conduct a few checks to establish the credibility of the information received. Once confirmed, our journalists will cover the issue, ensuring the points raised by the citizens make headlines the way they ought to have been
The Ken wants to make it easier for existing subscribers to interact with paywalled articles through more granular and more richer experiences.
Accessibility to news and information channels remains a challenge for over 26.9 million people living with disabilities in India. The paucity of credible content also extends to people who are not literate. Over the past few years, most news organisations have shifted to the digital sphere making accessibility a more crucial feature.
Content for Change: Providing young girls with a platform of like-minded peers, and mentors through the accessibility and outreach of a microsite with tech driven solution such as self publishing testimonials, dedicated hourly programming every week to discuss issues with a cross section of stakeholders (teenage girls, parents, schools, peer networks), frequents AMAs on YouTube livestreams etc.
We are building an ML-based tool to create short news videos at scale for India's diverse audiences. The country's online video user base is 350 million people - with a 60% to 70% increase in time spent per daily active user per day (in 2018 - 2020). Many of them lack access to responsible sources of news. Our tool will aim to bridge this gap by helping create access to credible news that meets the highest standards of factual accuracy and fairness, as well as original reporting that holds power to account and shines light on vital yet under-covered areas of our national life.
Platform for crowdsourcing funding and journalism for covering causes that matter. It is often said that media reporting is not covering issues that matter. We believe the economics of the media model is responsible for this.
Gaon Connection will create India's first national rural insight platform: an app that will regularly showcase national surveys carried out by community journalists across the country, which would be also turned into video, audio and text content. This opinion mechanism would become the never-before voice of India's voiceless majority. The app will enable accurate surveys every week, ensure citizens' engagement as respondents and community journalists, and have them suggest/decide the issues on which opinion should be sought and amplified. The findings of the surveys would be embellished with powerful ground reporting on the same issues by the Gaon Connection editorial team across, video, audio and text formats on our digital platforms.
Growing both our audience size and audience engagement, by giving audiences the ability to customize their reading experience and access specific stories they want via tokenisation.
TNM Connect is a membership programme that will cater to the NRI – the Indian expat – living in the US, UAE, or UK. TNM Connect will enable NRIs to stay in touch with their cultural roots, and allow a community of like-minded individuals spanning geographical locations to come together. Through targeted content, newsletters and discussion forums, TNM Connect will empower members to engage meaningfully with issues back home, whether political or social, celebratory or tragic, allowing them to provide help in times of need or distress.
Aapki Khabar, Aapki Bhasha' - seeks to create a viable, replicable monetisation model for local, rural journalism across the world, by creating digital news products for a local language audience.
Turkbox allows news websites to embed widgets on which readers complete CAPTCHA-like data classification and annotation tasks to gain access to articles. This gives readers a novel pay-as-you-go system where readers "pay" news publications by completing elementary data classification tasks. Turkbox pays news publications for each classification task performed while the widget is hosted on their website. Turkbox will work with publications that do not have a strong enough readership to sustain a subscription-based model. Instead of direct payment, readers will classify data.
With over 4 million podcasts on Spotify, discoverability becomes an issue for many listeners. People have a hard time finding podcasts that they yearn for, especially ones that engage in deeper conversation and offer new perspectives. With such a diverse market, Indonesian listeners deserve to have more access to podcasts that one can feel engaged with, inspired by, and in awe of its storytelling experience. As a podcast hub and digital ecosystem, KBR prime will be a solution for people to find that, and to interact in a more inclusive space in their journey to create a better Indonesia.
Society of Indonesian Science Journalists
Although data and dataviz tools are widely available, journalist from underprivileged newsroom have limited time and resources to gather and visualize data and it affects the accuracy of their report. It often makes journalists distracted so that they are often frustrated, tired, stressed, and have an impact on their mental health. ISN Labs provide free, open source, and ready-to-be-used visualization for those journalists. We hope this tools helps them in producing accurate and engaging news and stories. These data can be easily accessed to be understood in language and appearance, simple in presentation, and the features do not make it difficult for journalists.
Kumparan
Media is a powerful tool to disseminate information on disaster and social movement. Yet when people are interested in making donations for the disaster relief or helping the movement they have to experience a painful procedure to do it: finding organizations that organize all of those, unfriendly banking procedure, and monitor the result.
Tempo.co (PT Info Media Digital)
There is a mismatch between Tempo's in-depth, quality, and investigative content with what Indonesian younger, digital savvy audience want from a media. We need to build a bridge to connect them.
Asumsi.co (PT. Muda-Mudi Berkarya Sejahtera)
KBR Prime will be expanded from being a podcast platform into a podcast hub and digital ecosystem that connects the curious-minded alike with value-oriented creators, pushing for a better society. KBR Prime will strive to be an ecosystem filled with quality & diverse content, with a high rate of participation and interaction from audience & communities, yet managed with journalism ethos engrained. Having so far produced 50+ podcast shows with 800K plays, we believe this initiative will have an impact on bringing trust back to media and journalism content. Thus, countering disinformation while harnessing insights for a better audience experience.
The innovation is called ISN Labs, which means Indonesian Science Journalists Labs. ISN Labs is a journalism tool that provides data services (datasets) from researchers and scientists that is open source and free for journalists in Indonesia and Globally. The initiation of the program came from The Society of Indonesian Science Journalists (SISJ).
With its vast media network —has 36 exclusive media partners in 34 provinces through 1001 media programmes-- it's been proven so far, kumparan has become a nerve system for information collection and dissemination. Giving local media the opportunity to voice and disseminate local information and local concern to the fore of national consciousness.
Artificial intelligence (AI) driven platform for readers to interact, engage and collaborate with Tempo's newsroom.
株式会社テレビ朝日 (TV Asahi)
The news broadcasting business has provided "16:9" horizontal video in mainstream, and we have spent time and effort converting the existing videos into vertical one for smartphone user. Thus, by inventing a production system which AI technology automatically converts the videos from horizontal to vertical size, we could provide more vertical news in more effective operation.
Iwate Nippo Co., Ltd.
We have some severe problems in Iwate prefecture. First, it is an aging society. The older people are lonely and cut off from society. They are also exposed to the risk of fraud and disaster those are increasing year by year. Secondly it is a shrinking economy including newspaper industry at local area. We are not only raising some problems on newspaper but also provide solid solutions against that problems by using this application software.
The Asahi Shimbun Company
The challenge is reader loyalty. When reading an exceptional article, the reader may be impressed enough to consider making a contribution to the interviewed community. Our team plans to develop a simple tipping and donation tool as a means of expressing such feelings, while at the same time creating new reader revenue that would have been untapped by a fixed subscription fee system. Since tipping and donation income is deemed to be closely related to reader loyalty, it is likely to lead to the improvement of churn rate and a shift to more premium subscription services.
Smartphone users are more familiar with vertical videos due to the popularity of YouTube Shorts. Therefore, we, as a news broadcasting business, would like to invent the vertical video production system that enables more people to access to news videos wherever they want.
The residents in Iwate prefecture is aging so fast. We construct some services that helps residents, especially older people by using this application software and our physical network spread around Iwate prefecture.
Our team will focus on tipping and donations as new means of reader revenue separate from those gained through ordinary advertising and subscription. Readers who sympathize with the story or the article they read and wish to commit themselves will be enabled to easily tip or donate to the interviewed community or the journalism they support by using a tool and platform developed by our team. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency will enable us to lower the cost of such monetary transactions.
The challenge for the ordinary Malaysians is for their voices to be heard by local authority or their local assemblymen to help them with bigger and important issues. Most often their voices are drowned, left in the dark without updates. Malaysians have very high regards for Malaysiakini as a social justice platform. Malaysiakini enjoys a certain degree of respect among local residents, politicians and government officials. There is a strong believe that if Malaysiakini becomes the mediator for the ordinary citizens via KEEP, the relevant parties will take notice and act on it or risk being escalated to higher authorities
Media Prima Bhd
The gaming community is huge but insular in Malaysia as the interaction among the online communities is very little and does not get much attention from the local mainstream media. Hence, the solution is to build a geolocation based content recommendation engine around the community to increase the consumption of the content from the community of gamers. The recommendation engine will also grant us the opportunity to study the audience and their interest which is based on different demographics and users' browsing behaviours. Consequently, increase the potential for successful engagement of the audience with the portal.
Malaysiakini, Mkini Dot Com Sdn Bhd
Following 2018's election of a new government, Malaysia's media environment has opened up. Malaysiakini thus needs to find fresh ways to set itself apart.
KEEP allows Malaysiakini subscribers, readers and any registered users to engage with their local Assemblymen, MPs, local councils or authorities, for latest news or new developments in a constituency. Users can select more than one constituency. KEEP's hyperlocal features allow users to post their views, grouses, suggest ideas on any matters affecting their day to day lives. Each posting will be monitored to ensure its authentic and tracked for its popularity. If relevant representatives fail to address crucial issues raised, Malaysiakini will escalate the matter to higher authority and if needed, publish a story, hold them accountable until it's resolved.
The key focus of the outcome is to build a targeted gamers community that drives content consumption. The gamers community will be built to consume and produce content. Cooperatively with quality breaking news, investigative reporting, tournament coverage, and analysis of every important event within the esports world on the platform. The platform is complemented with a geolocation based recommendation engine accompanied by personalised user experience that increases the consumption of the content from the community of gamers.
"Kini Community" will introduce a subscription model incorporating community rewards and recognition for Malaysiakini readers. The deliverable is a points-based reward and loyalty programme, and an e-wallet system that incentivises readers to engage productively with Malaysiakini and its community.
Yonhap News Agency
News service without customer analytics will fall short on providing optimized, and appropriate content recommendation for readers. Therefore, Yonhap will introduce news games for readers to stay longer in digital platforms(webs, apps), involve in gaming content in order to collect data on their content consuming behavior. Based on users' preference data, new journalistic business model optimized for each reader can be made. Segmented user data from every news platform may be accumulated in one single news CRM system.
대표/앱서비스/슬리버 (Team Sliver)
Sliver's own special UI/UX and CMS will help address the income reduction of content creators and tackle the spread of fake news.
The Busan Daily with The Maeil Daily and The Gangwon Daily
Korean news papers have failed to convert website visitors into subscribers and ultimately turn those subscribers into paying customers. That's because their news websites are not personalized.
The DongA Ilbo
Using this archive, users can search and find the articles that are published at the time they experienced. Also, they can add his/her own story. The Dong-A Ilbo will offer the one and only 'autobiography newspaper' to the users via PDF file format.
Maeil Business Newspaper
Korean publishers are faced with three main challenges: falling readership and revenue, a news industry dominated by portal giants, and the spread of fake news. Our reward system seeks to address these problems by actively pulling in readers with an innovative distribution model that asserts "you can make money from sharing good news." This would drive traffic of individual news sites and help them break free from media distribution that is dependent on major portals. It would also incentivize readers to share quality journalism, gradually rooting out fake news.
Dotface Inc.
Current revenue system of online video platforms, which is based on the number of views and ads, rewarding provocative materials over quality contents. Diversifying monetization strategy is important for quality video journalism that requires more time and money to produce. Existing revenue models have the trade-off between stable income, scalability, content spreadability. We decided to combine them instead of choosing one.Acquire user by crowdfunding project and convince the participant to join a membership program through personally optimized promotion to achieve to stable and scalable both.
There are many ways to gather readers' attention, and a playful approach is one of them. Gamification of news will lead readers to stay in news website longer and provide their personal information and interest willingly. The information will serve as data to make room for new media business model. While enjoying a game, readers may reflect their behavioral tendency on news consumption, and the growing tendencies will build up as a combined data platform of 'News CRM', which will lead to more sophisticated form of content marketing.
Development of a CMS that can distribute news and creator contents in one place.
The goal of this project is to build a smarter system to have access to user insights and furthermore an artificial intelligence based recommender system.
Media records every history. However, that is not for the individual. So we will make 'the newspaper for one's own' for normal people, not special, those who want to make his or her autobiography. We have 100 year's article photo archive and this is the longest and largest scale in Korea.
This is a reward system that allows paid subscribers of our site to share premium articles with non-subscribers via social media and rewards the first sharer depending on the number of views the article generates. It is an attempt to take the reward-based advertising model commonly seen in mobile games and applying it for the first time to the news industry.
Dotted is the crowdfunding-membership integration model for quality video journalism. Membership model and crowdfunding had apparent pros and cons. and we found that combining two models can more than the sum of parts. It offset their downside and improves reader relationship management. It will help scale and stabilize the monetization process.
Frontier Myanmar. Parent company: Black Knight Media
The political climate in Myanmar has deteriorated, affecting the ability of media to cover topics central to the democratic transition, while limiting the voices of marginalised communities. At the same time, the media industry is going through significant economic upheaval, making it harder for outlets to maintain editorial independence amid external pressure. Our solution is to diversify Frontier from an ad-driven model by adding membership components. By putting our audience first through an approach based on solving problems specific to them, and building engagement through proprietary sites and applications, we want to keep our core reporting accessible and free.
Frontier Myanmar delivers original reporting from all corners of Myanmar, making space for a range of voices, and setting high editorial standards. Our mission is to inform and connect people who care about a more liberal, tolerant future for Myanmar. We will do this through journalism, advocacy, community, and research built around membership components. This will help to safeguard our editorial independence, enabling us to provide a community of diplomats, NGOs, academics, journalists, and businesses with vital insights into the complex socio-political changes shaping Myanmar.
Zasgiyn Gazriin Medee Daily Newspaper (ZGM Daily). Parent Company: National News Corporation LLC
The project aims to solve current problems faced by the print industry, especially in Mongolia using technological advancements while creating new sources of revenue.
ZGM Workflow Optimization Project is aimed at optimizing the newsroom workflow as well as making it easier for our team to manage our online presence and subscription services.
The Record, Published by Allied Media Pvt. Ltd.
The main challenge we are trying to address is to find a sustainable business model suitable to produce high quality journalism online.
The Record Membership Project is to grow Nepal's first member-supported publication. With an inclusive team, the project aims to produce quality journalism online and use digital innovations. Our vision is to publish the most trusted journalism on Nepal's politics, society, and culture while staying true to our values of editorial independence, accountability to our readers, and innovation.
Kīnga Voxpop Ltd
Independent community-based newspapers in New Zealand are in an incredible squeeze. Most have no digital presence and are in crisis with an up to 90% increase in print costs this year. Their audiences are growing older and advertisers want to attract a broad range of customers. Most have no funds to make the critical transition to the digital world in a way that protects their subscription income while not creating dramatic extra costs. Our world-leading platforms for cash-strapped public radio will be modified to help small newspapers introduce digital products, earn digital revenue, and serve their community better than ever.
The traditional news business models have been in crisis for some time now. To solve this Scoop started the ethical paywall model under which organisations and professionals are required to pay a scalable fee based on organization size for professional use of content. This in turn keeps the Scoop website accessible for the general public for personal use for free. When members of the public have free access to news it produces a public benefit, but professional users of Scoop receive a private benefit. Scoop's mission is to support a healthy democracy and society by providing timely accurate information. The technical solution for Scoop's ethical paywall will be able to be used by other news websites to deploy the same revenue model as us.
PressPatron (Ripple Media Ltd.)
After more than a decade of revenue losses and job cuts, the media community needs sustainable business models to fund the production of quality journalism. PressPatron helps media organizations identify the best business model for their journalism, while also providing technology that makes it easy to run a successful funding campaign and adopt best practices. We're excited about the new functionality we'll be adding to our platform, with the support of GNI. Our project will allow media organizations to gain easy access to a comprehensive range of features that will further streamline the process of running a successful membership campaign.
The Westport News, a small New Zealand daily newspaper, is the beating heart of its community reflecting and revealing what has been happening in its area for more than 151 years. But like many small community outlets it faces big challenges relating to audience behaviour and costs. Kīnga Voxpop Limited is working with The News to develop a model to help small newspapers and media outlets diversify into digital subscriptions at a very low cost. We want to ensure it, and many others, are still serving their communities for another 150 years.
This funding will allow us to build our ethical paywall model into a software product which will increase our ScoopPro product professional level of reader revenue.The product will also allow us to better leverage our data to provide a better customer and user experience.
PressPatron is a media monetization platform that turns readers into paying supporters, by streamlining the payment process for memberships and donations. Our GNI project will add new features to our platform, making it easier for traditional publishers to sell print and digital subscriptions under a membership model. This will generate extra revenue, by letting readers make an additional contribution towards a publication's in-depth analysis and investigative reporting. Under this business model, a reader would be invited to contribute any amount that matches their budget. The reader would then receive different subscription benefits based on their level of giving.
The Current, LIFE Media Productions
It isn't just about an alternate form of revenue. Yes, it is imperative that organizations find a way to grow and sustain costs but there's also this intense desire of followers wanting to be a part of the process. The challenge is to provide these followers, the ones that take the time to comment, share, message, email, call, or even come to the office, a way to be a part of the organization. The Current wants to give that follower a chance to step inside the newsroom, ask questions about how credible journalism is practiced and to be able to get training and learn at the same time. The way to do it is through a membership model, giving that user options that they want and also giving them a way to support their favourite news source.
Jang Media Group
There is no easy way to find authentic historical information from news archives as it is available only in a couple of libraries in paper-form that requires people to travel all the way to that library in a country that is spread almost around a million square kilometers with not very supportive transport infrastructure. Being the oldest Urdu newspaper we plan to provide access to this wealth of authentic information through digitization of newspapers while organizing it in various taxonomies and making them available through a news archive platform as well as a set of 7 AR-assisted interactive books.
The Current is Pakistan's fastest growing independent digital news platform. The appeal is simplified content, exclusive videos and constant engagement. Its followers are made up of millenials who want information on their terms and The Current follows through by providing credible journalism in an easy to understand way. The Current's membership model will be the first of its kind in Pakistan - with three levels of membership provided for its most avid follower. The plan is to provide content and training that members want and also test a viable alternate stream of revenue for digital news startups.
This project exhaustively chronicles over 5 million news stories printed in Pakistan's oldest Urdu newspaper in a span of 70 years, organized in multiple taxonomies like people, organization, products, brands, locations, events, issues & incidents. Auto summaries for each taxonomy topic will be processed using an AI-based algorithmic system. End result will be published in the form of an exclusive membership based platform as well as a set of 7 AR-assisted interactive books where each of the reference material will just be a QR code away.
GMA News and Public Affairs
Years of fact-checking projects did not stop the Philippines from becoming "Patient Zero" in the global misinformation epidemic. Seeing that debunking has largely been ineffective, we will focus on "pre-bunking," which studies says can be a more effective way to fight misinformation. Beyond just addressing one piece of misinformation, this project will aim to create journalism products that will "inoculate" audiences to make them more resistant to false information. We will use emerging technologies including AI to speed up surveillance and content production, but we will still lean on our incomparable reach on traditional media and our leadership on social media to effectively get our message out.
This project aims to build a surveillance system that will ultimately aim to "inoculate" audiences from misinformation. The surveillance team will use emerging technologies, including AI tools, to speed up: 1) the early detection of misinformation before they have a chance to go viral; and 2) the production of factual pieces information — articles, social media posts, and videos — that would pre-bunk these pieces of misinformation. Beyond the Philippine context, the project seeks to develop a sustainable model for pre-bunking that can be applied by other traditional media organizations in the Global South who are dealing with their own information disorder.
Kontinentalist
Across Asia, there is a gap between data and the public. While there is no dearth of research reports, these findings almost never reach the public. Quality data storytelling can help address this gap–data stories can help combat misinformation, increase public awareness on issues, amongst others–but this can be a daunting and tedious exercise for users. Most content management systems aren't built for data storytelling. Our product removes the barriers to entry, allowing users to easily and consistently publish data stories for their audiences. The product is also well-placed to nurture creativity and excellence as the data storytelling field grows.
Tech in Asia Pte Ltd.
As newsrooms have increasingly moved online, the technology to support seamless user experience and editorial insights have lagged behind. In particular, newsrooms often lack nuanced information about its readers' behaviors that could help drive editorial decisions. Tech in Asia's Digital Membership Platform aims to solve this information gap by providing a continuous feedback loop between the readers and the newsroom. As our editorial team produces more relevant, higher-quality content for our audience, we hope to see increased engagement with our readers and broader TIA community.
Singapore Press Holdings Ltd.
Out of our 2.3 million monthly users, we don't know the reading behaviour of 95% of them. In addition surveyed non-subscribers see no need to pay for news. However, they accept delayed gratification for free content.
Kontinentalist is building a publishing tool and platform that will allow users to easily and quickly produce engaging data-driven stories. Our product will be low-to-no-code, with intuitive features, enabling storytellers of all levels to create and publish data stories easily and in accessible formats for their audiences. In the long-term, the product will facilitate collaboration, and users will be able to share their work with and learn from a community of data storytellers. We hope to bridge the gap between data and the public, while encouraging innovation in the field of data storytelling, especially in media and journalism.
Tech in Asia plans to deliver a fresh user experience through a Digital Membership Platform. The platform will have two key components: a Reader and an Editorial Dashboard. The Reader Dashboard will let readers track their own content consumption, view recommended articles and events based on their site activity, and connect to other members of TIA's online community. The same members' reading data will be aggregated and visualised in an internal editorial dashboard. allows our editorial team to better understand reader behavior and interests, identify trends and hot spots, and use this data for continuous content improvement.
zaobao.sg is widely recognised as an objective and credible Chinese digital news site in Singapore and among global Chinese communities. It currently runs on a freemium model and has 2 types of readers: subscribers and guests.
Roar Digital Pvt. Ltd.
The South Asian internet population is at an all time high, with a majority who are only comfortable in consuming content in their own native languages. In terms of content creators in South Asian markets; on one end of the spectrum, there exists a number of biased media organisations controlling the narrative and focused on gossip whereas on the other end of the spectrum, there is the issue of "Fake news" masquerading as citizen journalism spreading through a multitude of social media platforms.
Roar Media has been working on a contributor platform to allow users to submit their own content (UGC) in local South Asian languages - https://roar.media/contribute/
The News Lens
We are trying to solve the problem that the online discussion is either trolls or non-meaningful fights. We would like to re-establish a meaningful social networking experience. One that is fun, rational, and filled with interaction with the content team. We will use gamification design, rating and referral system to encourage rational discussions and discourage purely emotional outbursts.
CommonWealth Education Media & Publishing Co., Ltd.
Challenge: Can we use voice technology and conversational AI tools to engage families with children?
The goal of this project is to increase reader engagement as well as subscription conversion. The project will focus on implementing personalization system and related algorithms to efficiently recommend the right content to the right user.
This project is to establish a brand-new way to encourage readers to participate in constructive online discussion. It combines gamification, socialization and editorial participation to create a more engaged and rational discussion mechanism.
CommonWealth Education Media & Publishing Co., is a publisher of books, magazines, and online content for educators, parents, and children. We are exploring new ways of providing educational news content to families with young children. Could voice technology offer our target audience some fun and education while giving them a break from screens?
For better reader journey before becoming a loyal reader or a paid subscriber, this project aims to develop a recommendation system to provide personalized content experience using machine learning algorithms.
FACTS CHECKING BURKINA FASO
The media plays an important role in disseminating truthful information to the population. Our solution provides a fact checking widget displayed on 5 of the most visited online press platforms and 30 blogs, in collaboration with 30 bloggers, members of the association, to automatically debunk false information and correct fake news.
Association des Bloguers Du Burkina
Burkina Faso has been weakened by terrorism spreading across the country. In this crisis situation, there's a lot of fake news which exacerbates socio-cultural and political tensions. In a country with more than 70 print media and a very active blogging community for an audience of 20 million inhabitants, fake news represent a real challenge for the media and journalists. We want to automatically debunk false information and correct fake news by building a fact-checking widget app.
News Supporters Platform
News Supporters offers readers a platform to contribute financially to listed long-format story projects pitched by journalists and other content creators. News Supporters aims to solve the issue of lack of funding to diversify content created and shared to the audience.
RegionWeek
Many great story ideas that can have impact on the community are pitched in newsrooms but won't be developed and published due to the limited budget that media houses in Burundi operate with. News supporters will give a chance for new voices to be heard. By leveraging mobile money payment, content creators will be rewarded, media will diversify and increase reach with fresh and original content
'Vérifions' (Let's Verify)
Many Internet users consume fake news for lack of means to verify. Those with media literacy skills can find contacting sources or checking with fact-checking organizations to be time consuming. Additionally, news from the Internet reaches people who have difficulty logging on to check for themselves. Congo Check provides a platform to submit content to be verified through keywords, a space to discuss topics related to disinformation and the ability to share verification techniques. In addition, the tool reduces the distance between Internet users and fact-checking organizations. Through the USSD, those with connectivity issues can also use the tool.
AfrikPic NFT
Photojournalism is struggling to find its footing in the Congo because it requires resources that are not within everyone's reach. Also, most Congolese photojournalists operate under orders from foreign media and organizations and so have been forced to exploit the same themes attached to clichés about the country such as famine, war, poverty etc. With this project, that will change and Congolese photojournalists will be able to carry out their work.
Habari RDC
Habari RDC to diversify its sources of income by providing paid content (videos and podcasts) to its users. However, the technological environment of the country is not conducive to such a project. There is no single local streaming player. This project for a tool to offer paid content will focus on the user experience of subscribers, many of which do not have bank cards.
Congo Check
Initiated by Congo Check, Vérifions (Let's verify) is a fact-checking tool that provides a platform where users can submit content to check its veracity or accuracy in order to further engage the public in fact-checking activities. Featuring a form of search engine, the solution makes it easy to verify information through keywords. Users also have access to a discussion platform on factchecking issues where verification techniques are also shared. The solution also includes USSD technology to allow people with internet connection difficulties to check news offline.
Afrikpic
Halvest company
This project seeks to help Congolese photojournalists find alternative sources of funding for their work. Thanks to blockchain technology, it will allow the authors of photographic works to benefit from the financial support of any internet user regardless of the sector in which they operate. Afrikpic's project is welcome in a context of scarcity of direct support to photojournalists, especially in Congo where the media sector no longer has enough funding. It also responds to requests from enthusiasts of blockchain applications for purely local projects. The Congolese market for NFTs is no longer exclusive to foreign platforms.
Mobile application offering videos and podcasts accessible by subscription.
ASSOCIATION 3535
84% of internet users in Africa have an instant messaging account. AKWABA help news providers increase readership and monetize through messaging platforms.
AKWABA leverages messaging apps to build paid readership for news outlets in Cote d'Ivoire and emerging markets.
Support for the Open Source Directory Project for Arab Journalists
Through the project strategy, Open Source Handbook For Arab Journalists aims to provide technical and technological support to journalists and institutions, in addition to creating new tools and programs that help them develop and increase production and improve the quality of content in its various forms "written - visual - audible", and maintain its digital security and privacy - digital protection is no less important than protection when reporting in the field.
ES+: New Revenue Streams with an Impact
ES+ will be Egyptian Streets' two-part subscription and educational offering, enabling Egyptian Streets to create a new, sustainable revenue stream for the business while making a difference for young, emerging journalists. ES+ will consist of ES+ Stories, providing readers with access to subscription-only content, and ES+ Educate, a capacity-building subscription service for young and aspiring journalists. ES+ will be promoted by Aswatna - a multimedia series, published and released in collaboration with storytellers from cities across Egypt, offering diverse views and shedding light on the complex issues, joys and more encountered by people living across Egypt.
Egab (Official incorporated name: Egab for Digital Content)
Globally, news organisations are struggling to engage audiences (especially younger ones) and to find original stories. At the same time, up-and-coming local journalists are struggling to connect with international media outlets. Our solution is a platform connecting local journalists to news outlets to produce and sell original, engaging and inspiring stories at a lower cost.
Open Source Handbook
The project mainly focuses on supporting and developing journalists and media from a technical and technological point of view. The Open Source Handbook For Arab Journalists team noticed significant shortcomings over the past years in the Arab region, and this shortcoming has caused delays in journalists' growth and development and their competition at the international level. The primary goal is to create a new opportunity for Arab journalists and institutions to take advantage of technologies in developing and improving content to achieve sustainability for institutions and enhance the income of Arab journalists by creating new tools and technologies to facilitate acquiring data and gathering information
Egyptian Streets
Egyptian Streets' reaches two million people a month and is looking to grow the content offering to explore new areas and increase the representation of Egypt's diverse communities. Through a subscription and educational offering, ES+ and its promotional arm Aswatna, we will be able to sustainably continue telling the stories that matter through multimedia and modern, tailored format.
An online platform that enables local journalists across the Middle East and Africa to pitch stories in any format or language to the editors of regional and international media outlets. The pitches available through the platform will be original and distinct, allowing media outlets to discover authentic stories to be produced by locals at a lower cost and to reach areas, where they have no presence. The platform specialises in solutions journalism; a genre focused on reporting how people are responding to problems in their own communities. Solutions journalism has been shown to significantly engage audiences, especially younger ones.
Apex Admedia ltd, GhanaWeb BV
Online publishers face severe competition from online parties that do not produce content. The production of content is expensive. GhanaWeb will significantly increase the community that produces content, decrease the cost of producing content and get more people to the platform to share their news and opinions with other people. Online publishing becomes more social, more relevant to certain niches and easy to access and operate. More people can earn money with news and content. They will partly distribute the advertising proceeds to the part of the community that produce content.
The GhanaWeb reporter is an app (Android+IOS) which enables 4 million monthly visitors to (re-)publish their user-generated content directly on ghanaweb.com. The content will be published- after screening - on a personal micro page on the website or even as a news or opinion article should it meet their editorial guidelines.
DengNWS
This project helps news organizations search through videos prior to transcription. The program will transcribe the sound in the videos into searchable text, and editors can start searching to find the video content they need. News organizations spend a vast amount of time and human resource to write their daily content so speech recognition will help them write their articles faster and transcribe their videos in a more productive way.
NAS NEWS
NAS News addresses how to increase user engagement with local news content and giving the people a voice. Leveraging a mobile first, news social platform that puts local communities at the heart of the news content generation process, providing informed local opinions, key facts and assessment of local socio-economic challenges. The platform supports easy to set up and produce interactive video debates, that will be facilitated by news correspondents, investigative journalists and community activists. They fill a gap in the market to provide a much-needed service that allows local communities a voice in a democratic society.
Bawar Kamal
This project from Bawar Kamal uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to train a model that can transcribe spoken Kurdish into written words. A Speech-to-Text software for Kurdish doesn't exist so this project solves this issue for a language spoken by almost 50 million people. It helps Kurdish people use their voice for text input when searching or writing a document.
NAS News will prototype a platform for interactive video debates dealing with local challenges whereby the general public form the heart of the news generation process, by providing informed opinions, key facts and assessment of local challenges. The easy to set up debates are part of a mobile first access, built on an already developed Mushtarek group ideation platform. The tagged video debates would form a knowledge container as part of an overall well-tagged news content mix. The debates will be facilitated by a network of local correspondents, journalists and activists who have good social media followership and community reputation.
Haaretz Explorations – a news platform for families
The need for a liberal thought provoking look at news suitable for children has primarily come up in user interviews. Young readers do not consume news on traditional platforms. Reaching this audience requires an innovative and fresh approach. Haaretz believes that packaging our content in new ways, which young readers can easily relate to, will retain the brand's positioning as a leading voice in the Israeli public sphere.
ynet Young (temporary)
This is a broad project spread over social, content, data and product and aimed at acquiring new, younger audiences for ynet, Israel's leading news and content digital publisher. The project will include data research, new content formats and a new platform suited for new audiences.
A Bridge Across the Abraham Accords: creating a shared news-centered interaction platform for Emirati and Israeli readers
Enhance common human values and coexistence among peoples, and to achieve constructive rapprochement. Build a new approach by comments and discussions throughout the region to present a new optimistic vision. It also seeks to get the public acquainted with horizons of joint cooperation and rapprochement through new approaches towards joint development to serve the peoples of the region. How can we create a non-inflammatory discussion between two reader communities and brought together through recent geopolitical developments? Creating a cross-language discussion within the bounds of a news outlet, in a monitored manner can be a start.
ynet (Yedioth Internet) / Yedioth Aharonoth Group
Keeping our users "home" with their increasing audio content consumption, letting them engage with us without moving to social platforms e.g. Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces
Makor Rishon Limited Partnership
In many news outlets organizational data is available only to a limited set of people, and accessed most often during work hours on desktop computers. The result: relevant data is hardly used by most employees when making granular decisions, and news organizations lag in adopting a data-driven culture. The solution: make data more relevant by tailoring it to specific roles, and increase visibility and actionability by sending short text insights in real-time to employees across the organization via messaging apps.
Attaining user loyalty has become both a major necessity and a major challenge: repeating engaged users drive more page views, increase advertising revenues, and consume better-quality content. As part of a vision to make the news site better differentiated, Israel Hayom has developed a loyalty program to create a graduated incentive for users according to their level of engagement.
One of our many challenges as publishers is to keep our readers constantly interested and curious. Interested in the story they are reading and curious to read more like it. With many other content providers around, this is what will make-or-break readers' willingness to return to the brand, engage with the content and ensure the 'next click' on the site. Without any kind of personalization, keeping a single reader both interested and curious would be impossible, yet finding the right blend of personalization is not an easy task.
ynet (Yedioth Internet) \ Yedioth Aharonoth Group
With this project yNet wishes to face a major challenge in the digital news landscape: the current inability to produce such large amounts of content from data available to us. Without automation and with limited resources, they were previously forced to take each data-set and produce one article summarizing its findings. The user then has to comb through long and tedious articles - instead of getting the data they were looking for, the most relevant data.
AnyClip
The goal of Luminous Watch is to simplify the workflow of any publisher's video business strategy: to give publishers the tools they need to source, manage, stream and monetize video content to users in ways that attract advertisers with as little human effort as possible.
Haaretz Newspaper Ltd.
Haaretz Explorations is a digital news platform for children and their families. It will present the news adapted for young readers and will emphasize Haaretz's humanistic and inclusive point of view on current events. The content will be packaged for adult-child interaction.
Getting young readers to engage with traditional news publishers is a major challenge all over the world. Data shows many of them consume news content primarily or solely through social platforms. Our project aims to find new ways and new platforms to connect to this audience and better inform it on current events and news context.
Al-Ittihad, a leading UAE newspaper and news website, and Israeli daily Israel Hayom will partner to bring together their respective audiences through a news-centered interaction platform. The websites would simultaneously feature pre-selected articles, in Arabic on Al-Ittihad, and in Hebrew on Israel Hayom, including a commenting component with a three-way automated translation, Arabic, Hebrew, and English; comments by Al-Ittihad users made in Arabic will be read in Hebrew by Israel Hayom users, and vice versa.
An in-app interactive audio platform meant to allow journalist to engage with readers through live chats
Using a set of rule-based algorithms we will automate the creation of easy-to-transfer one-liner text notifications based on data from several internal data systems. Tailored to specific roles in the organization, the insights will be sent via ubiquitous messaging apps. In some cases, follow-up actions will be included directly in the message.
Israel Hayom, Israel's most widely circulated newspaper, aims to increase its digital footprint. To do so, it plans to implement a user loyalty program and offer e-commerce benefits to highly engaged users by partnering with third-party vendors. An algorithm-based system would give users points for engagement with our content, both on its website and apps, and on third-party platforms. The more points a user earns, the more and bigger rewards she or he can redeem.
Finding the right mix for the right audience is the magic trick of the editorial work. ML models can amplify accuracy in creating a new, personalized mix, and keeping our products up to date for the digital era.
The project is a combination of two separate main components: automation and distribution. With automation of texts and infographics, yNet aims to produce and publish a mass amount of articles from one structured data-set (election results, public schools ranking, socio-economical characteristics etc.) – each article summarizing the data available on a specific city. Then the distribution component kicks in – by sending each user on mobile apps (and in the near future, also users on their WPA mobile site) the article most relevant via push notification.
As the video content universe grows and audience attention scatters, manually-managed methods for operating an online video business underperform. AnyClip's Luminous Watch disrupts this tradition with a data-supported solution, simplifying workflows and improving business results.
AI Lab: A starter guide to AI-powered media in MENA region
Lack essential digital, data and AI literacy? Incorporate capacity building to the AI strategy based on current capabilities. AI strategy objective are underachieved? Thorough discussions between the AI expert/s with team members will take place to ensure it being realistic, relatable and attainable. Compliance and regular monitoring? The strategy will be included into ARIJ's internal policy and generalized and adopted by the editorial team. Ethical concerns of using AI? ARIJ editorial team will discuss with the experts all ethical concerns upfront, so that the expert will cater for the strategy and will be presented in the manual as well.
Community Media Network
Jordan is a relatively small country with a small group of people having a large role in public and private decision making powers. Connectivity therefore is an important tool that can reflect on individuals seeking a loan or getting a high appointment.
Sowt Podcasting and Training L.L.C.
While podcasting in the MENA region and the world is growing rapidly, the podcast ecosystem struggles with two main obstacles: discoverability and monetization. By curating high-quality podcasts from the region and cross-promoting them, the Zamakan network from Sowt will help regional audiences discover new content. In doing so, the network's aim is to increase total podcast listening time, both by attracting new podcast listeners, and by increasing the listenership of existing audiences. As the audience grows, revenue generation opportunities will increase as well. As such, the Zamakan network will work with existing podcasts to develop revenue opportunities through regional membership, live events and ad sales.
Al Bawaba News Ltd
Machines still can't read Arabic very well at scale. For publishers with terabytes of Arabic language content, this makes curating, packaging and selling that content to clients really difficult. Al Bawaba's solution is to leverage the Google Cloud and build a 'trained AI' capable of semantically understanding and tagging Arabic content with much higher accuracy. This solution won't simply help transform Al Bawaba's business. It will contribute towards capacity building Arabic language publishing on the Internet itself.
Arab Researchers for Managing Forums and Training
The first "AI Strategy" for small to medium media outlets in the Arab World in Arabic language. ARIJ aims at facilitating and promoting the development of an AI Strategy tailored to journalistic entities in the Arab World through producing an open-source Arabic language Starter Manual for small to medium media outlets and fact-checking units to build their own AI Strategy tailored to their needs and challenges.
Rabet is creating a visual map of key decision-makers in Jordan through collecting data on them, and illustrating the connection between them, based on their family, work, business, or other connections.
Zamakan from Sowt is a curated network of high-quality podcasts. It aims to promote podcast discoverability and monetization by helping audiences in the region discover great audio content and podcast producers access revenue opportunities.
One of the reasons Google Search, Google Home and applications like SIRI are so advanced is because machines can read English. Over the past five years, the Al Bawaba team has worked with IBM Watson, Open Calais from Thomson Reuters and Rosette to create a granular, vast digital archive from over 19 years of original and syndicated Arabic news content for a platform called 'DISCO Content Marketplace.' The problem? Al Bawaba's digital archive is in Arabic. Linguistic complexity and significant variations in the quality of content mean that machines don't always know what they are looking at. Working with the Google Cloud and Convz Analytics Advisory, this project applies the latest machine-learning techniques to improve semantic search in Arabic.
Audience acquisition and engagement through development of hyperlocal content across multiple digital channels
Innovate and invest in news products for local markets, rely much more on user-generated local content, seek opportunities to localise advertising markets and leverage a national tech backbone to gain efficiency for editorial inputs locally. Engage communities in news generation and partner with local news and media entrepreneurs.
WANANCHI Reporting offers a technology-driven platform to marginalized members of the public to allow them contribute to the news ecosystem
Inclusivity and diversity in news coverage and general storytelling is a major problem in Kenyan newsrooms. Kenyans living in marginalised societies; slums, geographically marginalised areas have either been misrepresented or totally left out in the news ecosystem. WANANCHI Reporting will offer a solution by providing a suitable platform that will allow the unserved and underserved to become active participants in telling and/or re-telling their stories from varied, yet rich viewpoints.
Standard Group PLC
We are solving two challenges being faced by the media:<ol><li>Declining revenue from legacy products. The audience has shifted to digital platforms where they consume content hence in attempt to recover declining revenue we will curate and monetize content on the messenger platforms.</li><li>Audience changing consumption habits. The audience in Kenya consumes content via digital and messaging platforms where fake news thrives, hence as through the solution we are able to offer verified news and curated content for the audience.</li></ol>
AFRICA UNCENSORED
In conversations with members of the public drawn from informal settlements in Nairobi, some of the region's largest, an air of under and misrepresentation of the issues that affect them the most arises. This project will provide them with a channel to directly air their issues while providing us with an opportunity to map the issues and better cover them.
Nation Media Group PLC
There exists a lack of local news products in the African media ecosystem, lack of local channels to access news content locally, lack of relevant local content addressing local issues, lack of independent local media entities in the region, and lack of credible media engagement with local communities. The objective is to develop highly desirable, trusted content that is localised for the different communities that Nation Media would like to serve in peri-urban and rural areas, leveraging on verified user generated content for engagement. The content will be relatable, engaging and grow a network effect for the brand. The product will leverage on the strong and trusted Nation Media brand, access to highly skilled talent, regional footprint, and multimedia presence in the region.
WANANCHI
WANANCHI Reporting seeks to offer a technology-driven, interactive platform to the marginalized members of the public to allow them to contribute to the news ecosystem in a measured, objective and assisted format. The platform will provide specific features that will allow both the unserved and underserved Kenyans from remote and excluded areas to tell their stories and highlight diversity in a manner that avoids misrepresentation. The audience will feel empowered, engaged and equally represented as they take part in telling their own stories.
The Messenger Reader Revenue project integrates bots and AI onto a WhatsApp number as well as a USSD platform that the audience can prompt and interact with to access news and other content categories of interest. The product will be on a subscription basis where the audience can select their content category then pay for the content of choice via mobile money, MPESA. The content offering will be uniquely curated content across different content categories such as on farming, investigative content etc that will be conveyed through text, audio and videos.
Aggregating news from members of the public to produce news at scale.
Raseef22 dba Levant Laboratories SAL
Improve news dissemination in terms of presentation and speed, develop a membership model and develop a deeper relationship with readers.
Daraj Media
With most of the newsroom's energy and resources being focused on the production of high-quality journalism, little attention has been given to audiences that in the absence of a strategy have been growing organically.
Free Media Company S.A.L, publisher of Nida al Watan
NAW Readward is based on implementing an innovative technology and algorithm to one of the oldest industries: the press. The target is to improve engagement on qualified content by providing a new type of reading experience coupled with a loyalty program. Readership becomes more valuable by implementing consumer lifecycle management to online news.This type of engagement is frequently adapted with commercial apps but not in the news and publishing industry in the Middle East.
Pricing a news subscription is a constant task. Publishers sometimes use the $1 entry point to attract readers, but overall revenue becomes too low. This is also not a permanent pricing as it changes back to the full price and risks churn. For metered paywalls, a limit of 3 articles per month, for example, might not be lucrative enough for entertainment readers. Whitebeard will be creating a tool aimed at any publisher with a subscription service, allowing them to choose their price flexibility, and let the system chase readers by presenting offers (price or metering changes) at critical decision moments.
L'Orient-Le Jour / Société Générale de Presse et d'Édition SAL
How to improve subscriber's loyalty and reduce the churn rates? How to build a strong sense of belonging to a community? L'OLJ Club is the solution! It aims to bring together, readers and writers, in order to create and maintain a healthy symbiotic relationship of content creation and consumption. In a region where loyalty programs are limited to some malls and supermarkets, L'Orient-Le Jour is going to step forward and give the privilege to its subscribers to become members of "L'OLJ Club".
Jawla Inc. ( جولة )
In the Arabic-speaking world, 58% of its 185 million internet users struggle to find relevant information in Arabic online (Wamda, 2015). Our research shows that most Arabic digital publishers have limited capacity, know-how, and budgets to reach targeted critical niche audiences through digital marketing. As a result, they miss out on serving and monetizing their content to more than half of their potential digital audience. Jawla is an AI/ML-enabled Arabic media web platform that classifies, curates, and distributes thoughtful news information in a relevant, smart, and personalised manner to Arabic internet users.
A pioneering Arabic language digital native celebrating eight years online, Raseef22 is clearly biased towards the most vulnerable members of our societies. Raseef22 needs to clearly target a core reader base spread around the 22 Arab states and beyond - readers looking for a better future for themselves and their children. Innovation will enable Raseef22 to be much closer to readers, identify their interests, seek a dialogue with them as well as their support.
LIFT-im is an innovation lab to integrate solutions that will leverage new technologies to enhance Daraj's journalism while addressing the most pressing challenges it is facing starting with audience growth, retention and monetisation.
ReadWard will enhance readership by creating a user-centric experience to improve engagement with readers by letting them monetize their time spent on the website and earn on both levels: Intellectual and material.
Subscription models are being increasingly adopted by the publishing industry in a step in the right direction for recovering from diminishing revenues. Publishers are struggling to attract readers who used to consume their content for free. With dynamic pricing and/or a dynamically metered paywall, manual marketing efforts can be refocused, and smart automation is brought in to make subscriptions more attractive to readers based on their behavior, interests, and purchasing power.
Because reader's loyalty should be rewarded, L'Orient-Le Jour will turn the news consumption to benefits. L'OLJ Club is a unique loyalty program that gives benefits for L'Orient-Le Jour subscribers whenever they engage with its content. When the reader subscribes, consumes the news and interacts with the content they will be rewarded. Whether they subscribe to the paper newspaper, digital version, shares the newsletters or the articles on social media they will be automatically eligible for special offers. They will be able to connect to L'OLJ Club platform and can learn about personalized benefits, select preferences from a large catalog and interact with the journalists.
Jawla Inc (tour in Arabic). is tech-enabled media start-up on a mission to re-engineer the Arabic web and create more informed societies in the MENA region.
MWNknows: AI-driven educational tool to promote media literacy and political engagement for young people
Morocco World News wants to offer a tool that asks users about their level of political knowledge (limited, moderate or advanced) and provides handy Artificial Intelligence (AI) automated tooltips when users hover over complex terms in the news they are reading. Depending on the indicated level of the user, these tooltips will provide brief and understandable explanations, from rudimentary explanations of terms such as "bilateral" or "diplomatic" to more advanced concepts such as Foreign Direct Investment, the importance of GDP in economics and other vital concepts that help people understand the news in a new way.
Société des Nouveaux Médias (in English: Company of the new media)
Moroccan economic data is spread all over the web: we struggle to find what we are exactly looking for, there is no platform for accessing all economic data.
TelQuel Digital
Members of the diaspora represent 13% of the total population of Morocco. In 2019, 3 million Moroccan living abroad visited their home country. Despite these facts, little is done to engage and empower this community. The project intends to achieve that. It is also an opportunity for advertisers to communicate with this community using innovative tools, brand content and classic ads.
Morocco World News
Morocco World News' youthful audience consists of young individuals who have learned English, often through Youtube and Netflix, who prefer to read their news in English, which most see as the language of the future. This project aims to stimulate their self-development by offering an interactive media literacy tool to allow readers to develop their personal knowledge about politics and economics.
Medias24 Morocco Data Hub Economy: After concentrating our efforts on writing articles and video, we will introduce economic information in the form of data in a massive and permanent way in our daily work.
TelQuel project aims to empower the voice of Moroccan diaspora through a dedicated platform, offering news from a trusted media brand, services, interactivity and networking. They will develop technological features and implement already existing open source solutions to build a platform offering a large range of tools. Members of the diaspora can share their stories or precious memories, access hyper localized content and be a part of the debate with voting/commenting tool. Articles, videos and podcasts will help share the information easily and create links between a diversified, multilingual community.
Mata : the voice of women
Gender inequality is a persistent problem in Niger. Everyone sees it, but no one talks about it or takes action against the inequality that persists between men who scrape for every penny they can get, and women, who fight in the shadows, but get injustice and disdain. Through women-centered podcasts that will be broadcast nationally and internationally, the African Development University will raise the profile of women, give them the voice they so desperately need to inspire future generations.
African Development University
Maata is the spirit that women incarnate. The African Development University offers a voice to the voiceless, challenges poor traditional practices, and breaks the language barrier to bring a message of hope to the youth.
ATLAS: a digital platform helping newsrooms source and license quality images from local African photographers and photojournalists
Local and international newsrooms struggle to find compelling Africa-focused photography to accompany their reporting while African photographers find it difficult to reach large audiences and formally monetize their work. Dignified images of Africans remain scarce in global news and media and African photographers remain underrepresented globally. ATLAS addresses these issues by making it possible to discover, source and license quality images from local African photographers, all on one platform.
TheCable Disability Inclusion News App (TheCable DINA)
Access to information is a basic human right. But millions of Nigerians are shut out because of their physical challenges such as visual impairments, auditory challenges, and many others with limb challenges.
Automated Radio Fact-checking
Disinformation and misinformation, colloquially referred to as "fake news' has become a driver for conflict, public health challenge, and a bane for democratic elections. Most Africans get their information from the radio, making it a key tool for spreading fake news. Fact-checkers cannot listen to all radio stations but computers can. This project seeks to solve the challenge of fact checking claims made on radio.
HumAngle Membership (stylized HumAngle+)
When people think of conflict, the overall theme is 'bad news'. This leaning has clouded the otherwise nuanced reporting that should exist in the space. Also, access to this key reporting remains limited because there is still no direct reader interface in the conflict reporting niche. Our solution is to build a membership community for innovative reader interaction where the audience has direct access to fresher angles, immersive, interactive reporting that cannot be found elsewhere; this content and the way it is structured will provide nuances that are scarce and validate the innovation that can be replicated for media sustainability.
The News Impact Project (NIP) of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism
A lot of social injustice is escaping the notice of news reporters. The front pages of newspapers are often dominated by political news — not issues relating to injustice. NIP will solve the problem of lack of public access to the media for social justice reporting by creating a help desk for members of the public facing some form of social injustice, helping them to take advantage of communication technology to secure direct access to the newsroom.
Richmond Hill Media Limited (Ripples Nigeria)
Project Eco-Nai+ is seeking to solve two major related problems. The first being the shared global challenge of climate change, and the second being inadequate local response to climate change due to disparities in knowledge of the crisis and capacity to contribute to solutions.
Legit.ng, Naij.com Media Limited
Digital publishers are competing for users' attention with social media, news aggregators and streaming services that have advanced personalization features.
Stears News Limited (Operating Company), Stears Information Services (Holding Company)
A primary pain point for African publishers is the lack of technology infrastructure that makes it easy, fast and efficient to enable recurring revenue from readers, contributors or members. Off the shelf billing solutions, widely available in international markets, are not built with African users or publishers in mind.
Ringier Africa Digital Publishing (Ringier AG - Parent Company)
The overall aim of the project is to increase user engagement on the news site. As more and more users bypass editorial platforms in favour of social media networks, the publisher is tasked with finding ways to get them back on the site and engage them once there. While theoretically having 'something for everyone' means all readers should have interesting relevant content to consume, the reality is they do not always find those pieces before exiting the site. This project will drive content relevancy through personalisation and to drive engagement (time spent on page & pages viewed per session) on our platform.
The Republic
ATLAS is a digital platform helping newsrooms source and license quality images from local African photographers and photojournalists. Starting with Nigeria, ATLAS will host relevant news images and editorial images curated from local African photographers and photojournalists which anyone can instantly download. A selection of photos will be available free while premium photos will be available at affordable rates set by individual photographers.
TheCable
TheCable plans to build Nigeria's first disability inclusive news application. The app will include assistive technology that makes it the go-to place for persons with visual impairments, auditory challenges, and many others with limb challenges. The app will also serve the general community of people without any form of disability.
Dubawa
Dubawa brings an automated radio fact checker application, that listens to radio stations in Nigeria and Ghana, records all audio, converts to text, identifies claims which could be false or misleading using a trained Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm, and presents a categorised and prioritised list of claims for human fact-checkers to verify.
HumAngle Media
HumAngle Membership (Stylized HumAngle+) is a web-based and direct-to-mail community for the audience to get unlimited access to conflict, humanitarian and development reports with data inserts, explainers and highly interactive and immersive reports. It functions as a community where audience members can have this access and request for more — including consultations with reporters and experts on the subjects and bespoke content packages. This will expand the road to media sustainability as the community will generate resources that would be ploughed back into research and audience interaction development.
Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ)
News Impact Project (NIP) is an initiative that extends the value of news beyond "informing, educating and entertaining", to "positively impacting the society". It hands the power of reporting to the public, allowing them to leverage communication technology to use the media for social causes. It is aimed at using the media to get justice for deserving members of the public by simple news reporting.
Eco-Nai+ is Nigeria's first digital geo-journalism platform providing access to interactive geo-data through web and mobile applications. It will host environmental data such as on drought, rainfall and erosion, while carefully tracking and marking changes to environmental phenomena to establish the incidence of climate change.
ReCo improves user experience by making content recommendations based on the users' preferences on the home page and within articles. ReCo shows highly relevant content and, as a result, metrics like page views and session duration will increase. In the long run, readers' loyalty will also boost with demand for certain topics being met.
If the future of sustainable media is direct reader revenue, then African publishers are still poorly equipped with the billing infrastructure required to collect regular payments from readers. This product is a subscription management service offering for the media industry, which allows publishers, bloggers and creatives to open up new revenue streams for themselves. As media pivots towards direct reader revenue, we are building a plug-and-play subscription platform that makes revenue collection easy. The project is crucial for the publishing industry to take charge of its own technology needs, by ensuring solutions are built by publishers, for publishers.
At the core of this project is personalization. Ringier wants to better understand the type of content each reader consumes and ensure they serve them the content that is most relevant to them (personalized) as well as improving delivery. They will also implement changes to the delivery of the newsletter to further drive traffic to the site (which will also help contribute off-site data points) to further develop these user profiles.
N a N
In newsroom, accessing news in real-time is challenging because you have to follow multiple sources of news (social media, newswires, rss, email etc). This app will allow aggregation of the news in one place and give the ability to prioritize and categorize them based on user preferences.
Donia Al Watan
Donia Al Watan will create an app that enables journalists to have an instant access to news and information by collecting them from multiple sources (social media, rss, email, etc) and prioritising and categorizing them based on user preferences depending on AI/ML algorithm.
Incorporating Audience Voice into the News through Innovative AI Enabled Publishing Platform
Build a creative digital AI-Powered platform for audience engagement to be incorporated into the newsroom and news publishing process, in a bottom-up approach, so that the news stories speak about the Syrian people. The platform would allow live audience feedback to be streamed from our websites and social media channels and funnelled into the news making process so that editors can see it, after it was parsed and categorized by AI, and use it to make the news, creating a healthy news-making cycle where the Syrian people's voices are heard.
Enab Baladi
With the Syrian catastrophe disappearing from the news, Syrians, especially those who are left in areas where there is no freedom of speech under Assad regime or extremist groups control, feel neglected, the media outlets are talking to them, not about them and their issues, they feel they do not have a voice in a top-down news making approach imposed on them by major media outlets.
The New Times
: Readers' Call on the News wants to address a general challenge in the media: a distant relationship between journalists and their readers. This creates distrust on one side, an assumption about the audience's need on the other. Readers' Call on the News, will create a bond again to make sure readers' ideas are heard, covered and in the end, that better news is produced about Rwanda.
Readers' Call on the News offers readers of The New Times the possibility to submit story ideas on any topic they are interested in. The idea with the most votes is then assigned to a journalist who develops the story alongside the reader. This provides more openness to the newspaper in addition to covering new story ideas from their audience. They want readers to feel part of the same community as the journalists. The goal is also to increase reader engagement in Rwanda, by having readers see themselves and their ideas in the stories.
Micro-Payments paywall for Okaz.com.sa website
A paywall system allowing Okaz to charge micro payments per article based on a wallet concept. This approach can help readers pay a few riyals to read articles. The solution will be based on a mobile application and a web based platform. Users to purchase content online without having to commit on monthly subscriptions Users to purchase credits when needed Solution to be integrated with Google Pay and Apple Pay.
In the Middle East, users are still not ready to pay for monthly subscriptions with most publishers providing content free of charge. Okaz seeks to pursue the advanced digital transformation being witnessed in the world of journalism in order to be the leading newspaper locally and globally by introducing a paywall system to charge micro payments per article based on a wallet concept.
25FTW (25 for the win!)
Daily Maverick seeks to address this widespread challenge for news publishers by designing a suite of tools that will improve engagement rates with high-impact journalism. These tools will focus on three areas, namely, 1) AI summaries and delivery options, 2) customised layout and visual presentation, and 3) gamified engagement features and trackers.
Quote This Woman+: WE HELP NEWSROOMS EFFICIENTLY ACCESS DIVERSE & MARGINALIZED EXPERT SOURCES
Women make up only 24% of news sources which renders them close to invisible in the current news context. When women+ do appear it reinforces gender, racial and cultural stereotypes. Unconscious bias, tight deadlines, industries with few women+ in leadership to act as sources, and a lack of resources all influence journalists' ability to find and utilise women+ experts. As a result, the media is missing out on half of the world population's perspective. Quote This Woman+ provides an online database of African women+ experts for newsrooms to diversify their sources in the most efficient way possible.
Data Desk: An open-source data collection, management and distribution tool for small African newsrooms
African data is hard to find and, generally, it's not machine readable. Also many globally-focused data sets do not cover African regions adequately. In order to report on local issues journalists are often required to build their own datasets, often from a range of disconnected sources and irregular updates. Collecting this data is time-consuming and laborious and it is difficult to re-use, share or build on. DataDesk enables journalists to build locally-relevant data sets for their own reporting as well as for the broader African journalism community.
The Africa Gender Data Portal: mainstreaming gender in African news through data
The Africa Gender Portal, under the Africa Data Hub project, will serve as a gender data and training portal that provides African journalists with the information, training and support they need to report on stories through a gendered lens with nuance, context and accuracy in three ways: 1. Streamlining the data pipeline and providing otherwise inaccessible data thereby diversifying coverage of new stories through a gendered lens. 2. Helping to "demystify" data and to upskill journalists with the capabilities and tools to use data in their stories with confidence. 3. Providing journalists with access to female experts that can offer alternative perspectives and improve diversity of voices heard.
TrustList: defunding disinformation profiteers. A red/safe list system for vetting South Africa's media and advertising industries
The project builds on proven methodology and data models developed by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and similar pioneering researchers. South Africa's largest media association, SANEF, will drive TrustList adoption in newsrooms, while IAB-SA will secure buy-in from major advertising brands and media buyers. TrustList will combat hoax media through a data-as-a-service watchlist, coupled with specialist analysis of over-performing or trending content. The resulting red-list (with recommendations to deny ad placement) & grey-list (with recommendation to ask for confirmation of anti-disinformation compliance) alerts will help advertisers/media-buyers their SSP (supply side platforms) & programmatic ad management systems
Olduvai Pty
Data costs in South Africa, and the other African markets which Scrolla.Africa will expand to, are generally very high - especially for pay-as-you-go users, who represent the vast majority. This means that accessing independent, accurate, and fun news is often an unaffordable luxury. Scrolla DataLite will provide a clean, easy-to-navigate platform - with all of Scrolla.Africa's content in English and Zulu, but without the burden of normal data costs.
Food For Mzansi, a digital news platform of Farmers For Change (Pty) Ltd
The Food For Mzansi Citizen Journalism Project is aimed at South Africans youth and young small-scale farmers who live in rural communities with limited internet access. Whilst internet penetration around the country's big cities are quite impressive, research shows that rural provinces have fallen far behind. Most of the people living in these rural provinces are unemployed, whilst those who are employed mostly work in the agricultural sector. They have particularly low literacy rates, and are also being held back by exorbitant mobile data prices which currently excludes them from the news agenda and access to news media.
The Daily Maverick (Pty) Limited
Small and medium publishers have access to a lot of data but few insights. This is mainly due to the disparate systems that publishers rely on. Structuring that data and housing in a single location to create a unified view of the reader will allow publishers to unlock the power of data previously only available to large corporates.
Long form journalism can change the world. But how do we keep audiences engaged beyond the 25% marker that has proven a such big stumbling block? Daily Maverick will develop a suite of tools to drive engagement beyond that 25% marker on long-form journalism.
Quote This Woman+ NPC
Quote This Woman+ is an interactive online database solution and tool that will help journalists and newsrooms efficiently access diverse expert sources for their news coverage. The database provides a growing community of African women+ experts from all fields, including science, public health, economic policy, politics, education reform, environmental justice and more. As the "+" in the name indicates, QW+ experts are not only women, but include other voices who are marginalized due to gender, location, sexuality, race, class, geography, disability, and other factors.
Media Hack Collective
DataDesk is an open-source data collection, management and distribution tool for small newsrooms working in resource-constrained environments in Africa. DataDesk is built on many years of experience doing data journalism on the continent and is specifically designed to allow incremental updates and extensions of data to build larger and more comprehensive data sets. With well-organised, consistently structured data that limits repetitive tasks, automates insights and flags interesting issues in the data, journalists will have more time to do great journalism instead of being bogged down in all the backend tech.
Open Cities Lab
Data offers a unique opportunity for journalists to report with accuracy and nuance and can provide the perfect mechanism for unearthing new stories and offering new story angles. However, access to data on the continent of Africa as well as the considerable resource and skills constraints faced by local journalists, hinder the prospects of data-driven and gender-sensitive reporting from becoming standard practice. The Africa Gender Portal aims to address the low coverage and poor sourcing of women in news media as well as the lack of accessible gender data, and gender disaggregated data, available for use by newsrooms.
Code for Africa (CfA)
Disinformation is profitable, funded by unwitting advertisers. Sock-puppet publishers & clickbait factories have built industrial-scale systems that churn out toxic content that is designed to go viral, raking in an estimated $235m annually in ad revenue from unwitting brands. This programmatic propaganda is so successful that it has spawned a new 'start up' sector of disinfo-for-hire entrepreneurs. TrustList seeks to change this by providing media buyers and advertisers with real-time warnings if they try place programmatic advertising. 'Red-listed' online media that have been flagged as guilty of systematic disinformation infractions, or alternatively 'grey-listed' media flagged as vulnerable to disinformation amplification due to weak internal editorial systems will be highlighted.
Scrolla.Africa's DataLite platform makes essential and entertaining news available to the millions of people across southern Africa currently excluded from news due to unaffordable data costs. The DataLite site automatically repackages content from Scrolla's core news site - featuring an exciting mix of breaking news, politics, sport, celebrities, music and religion. The ultra-lean DataLite platform is designed to be accessible even on the smallest smartphone screens, maximising the ability of underrepresented audiences to access high quality, popular content.
Food For Mzansi's new citizen journalism project will this year empower at least 50 small-scale farmers and farm workers. Targeting three agricultural communities, the citizen journalists will be trained and mentored in basic news reporting, filming and video-editing to tell often overlooked yet compelling stories from their own lives and villages. The content will be published on Food For Mzansi, who is making waves across Africa after winning the best digital news start-up category in the 2019 African Digital Media Awards presented by WAN-IFRA. All 50 new citizen journalists will be remunerated for their services.
Unlocking the power of data is a key element of sustainability and producing more relevant content experiences for readers. Small and medium sized publishers struggle with siloed data stored in disparate systems. The Rev Engine will bring key data from these commonly used systems, like email services providers, CRM, CMS and browsing activities into one central place. This unified version of the reader will help the newsroom create and package more relevant content to individuals, assist in membership/subscriber conversion and offer insights to aid editorial decision-making.
FrontlineInFocus.com tinyhand.net
Placing the audience inside the war and conflict zones, shift the newsrooms to open areas and all the places which are hard to reach and difficult to visualise. All this could be achieved by using VR.
Bringing the frontlines to your screen, by using the latest trends and tools of technology to shed light on the real life of people and children who live in conflict zones, covering the suffering and the impact that war leaves on all of them.
Nawaat is heavily reliant on institutional donor funding and donor-funded commercial clients. Nawaat's fairly undiversified revenue sources makes Nawaat vulnerable to shifts in donor priorities (ex: decreased focus on Tunisia, freedom of expression, etc), or decreased funding availability more broadly. Furthermore, Nawaat's position is increasingly precarious as foreign aid budgets are being reduced in response to COVID-19-induced economic fallout. Diversifying Nawaat's revenue sources is fundamental to maintaining Nawaat's editorial independence, especially as increased numbers of donors are granting funds for thematic based projects rather than supporting journalism for the sake of journalism.
An innovative approach to monetizing Nawaat's audience base underlined by robust privacy protections for paid subscribers. Nawaat's business model would constitute the first online loyalty payment system for digital media in Tunisia. This project constitutes 1) setting up a Nawaat Patreon account targeting the Tunisian diaspora community; 2) offering select online paid services for other specific audiences; and 3) upgrading Nawaat's existing web services to increase reader engagement. The project further aspires to transform regional digital news consumption behaviors by fostering a culture of paying for quality journalism, starting in Tunisia.
Establishing a subscription and notification system for an ad-free and/or personalized reader experience
The project will create a subscription and customizable notification (Push, WhatsApp, Newsletter etc.) system to provide ad-free content requested by readers. T24 aims to increase reader satisfaction and create an additional income by: 1) Frontend improvements for existing web and mobile apps 2) Content management system improvements 3) Payment, subscription tracking system development 4) Development of notification tracking system 5) Creation of a newsletter distribution system
KONOHA - All-in-one subscription management system
Mynet will develop an all-in-one subscription management system that includes ML decision support systems, subscriber and subscription package management, payment modules etc as a Software as a Solution (SaaS), specially developed for publishers.
COM+ : The Multi-Screen OTT Platform for Curated News in Turkey
COM is connected to a wide range of creators and journalists who are looking for a platform to publish in-depth news content that is objective and powerful. COM+ will not only provide a platform for such content but also result in consumption of more thoughtful, investigative journalism. In order to achieve this outcome, the organization needs to transform from a content and production company to a tech/media company.
MYNET MEDYA YAYINCILIK ULUSLARARASI ELEKTRONIK BILGILENDIRME VE HABERLESME HIZMETLERI A.S.
Push notifications on mobile devices are an important way for users to stay up to date with news. However, push notifications can also be a major source of annoyance for users; being interrupted at the wrong time for something you do not care about is frustrating. So, users are frustrated, less engaged; retention rates, CLTV and revenue is lower. Thanks to the Phantom's smart, locally-targeted personalize push system; user segments and content segments can be determined and user engagement level can be improved.
Aposto Teknoloji ve Medya AŞ
As paywalled subscription models become the go-to method of monetizing news content, audiences are increasingly experiencing subscription fatigue. Independent newsletters are emerging as an alternative source, yet they often feature links to major news outlets to establish trust and credibility. Readers still come across paywalls, and they either disengage with the content or resort to different methods of bypassing. This causes a discrepancy in compensation of intellectual property owners, drives down reader engagement and depreciates curators' value proposition. Dreamcatcher offers a way to overcome these challenges by creating an ad hoc licensing mechanism supported by a blockchain-based secure tracking and payment infrastructure.
Demirören Teknoloji Anonim Şirketi, Demirören Medya Grubu
Demirören Teknoloji wants to categorise content, at a microsegment level in order to increase readers' engagement on its platforms. To do this effortlessly, they need an automated system that does not rely on content creators. Named entity recognition is a method that enables extracting entities from a content. Currently, Turkish language processing resources are limited and they are not efficient enough for large scale applications. To address these issues, Demirören Teknoloji decided to develop their own entity recognition tool. By providing the tool as a SAAS on cloud, they hope to offer a Turkish language processing resource.
T24 relies its own advertising revenues to produce journalism and does not receive any financial support from any government, foundation, association, company, etc. Working with very modest budgets, T24 has to use the maximum amount of advertising space in order to meet its expenses. This increases the number of advertisements on the site which impacts on loyal readers the most so this project aims to provide a better experience to the most loyal readership.
Although Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) publishers often need a subscription infrastructure, global plug-and-play solutions are not compatible with Turkish systems and publishers cannot develop this system due to technical skills gaps.
Cuneyt Ozdemir Media (COM), encompasses content published on Youtube. The channel boasts 1.3M subscribers and monthly views that range up to 10M. To survive and thrive in an environment of misinformation, political pressure and biased information the intention is to bring quality news content and investigative journalism to the masses through a multi-screen OTT platform accessible with a subscription video on demand model, i.e. COM+. This would entail standing up the content delivery infrastructure, the content management system and the user experience in multiple screens. The ultimate goal is to create the most pervasive independent news ecosystem in the country between free content on Youtube and premium content on the OTT platform.
Project Phantom targets personalized content at the right time, while it enables teams to work in a more efficient and smart operation structıre. The system creates smart, locally-targeted, personalized push notifications with the sub-systems including detection of hyperlocal agendas, content based segmentation with Auto-ML and Customer micro segmentation with Auto-ML systems.
Aposto! Dreamcatcher is a blockchain-based link tracking system integrated with a micro-payment infrastructure, enabling independent newsletter writers and curators to license paywalled articles from major news outlets piece by piece. Using Dreamcatcher, newsletter writers and curators can provide their audiences unhindered access to select articles featuring quality journalism from trusted sources, and offer a frictionless reading experience. For news publishers, Dreamcatcher unlocks a new way to monetize original content beyond already existing ad-based and subscription models.
With the digital transformation of publishing sector, understanding the reader & content at a fine-grained level became possible. Now, Demirören Teknoloji can measure readers' interests at the article level. The next step is to detect the meaning of the contents automatically. By implementing an AI system they will be able to seamlessly categorise all their contents, and offer personalized news to readers on the topics that they are interested in.
Advance by Minority Africa: Creating a more open, diverse, and accessible African media
Despite the widespread adoption of CC licenses, many media organisations like ours adopting them have little to no control over the republication process. The workflow is often mechanical, requiring publishers to copy and paste content. This stunts smooth syndication and is a hurdle for media companies looking to track the serialisation of their content. Advance will deploy relevant technology to transform how republications are done. First by allowing republishers broader and automated access to Minority Africa stories about marginalised groups in Africa. To the wider ecosystem, publishers using the web application can seamlessly republish stories directly to their CMS obtaining content in high quality and also monitor their own republications.
Minority Africa
Advance by Minority Africa is designing and implementing a web distribution application that will primarily enable our newsroom and subsequently other African media organizations publishing under a Creative Commons (CC) license to effectively share and have stronger oversight over the process of other news publishers republishing their content.
Bayanat Majarra
A system to capture and analyze user behavior and apply Artifcial Intelligence (AI) to offer a personalized experience on the Majarra platform.
Jourlance
Jourlance is a platform that connects publishers with qualified freelance journalists and writers. Jourlance manages the pitching process, commissioning, and deliverables between the two parties.
SciComm X FZ LLC
<ol><li>As the content subscription model is being developed and adapted by many media organizations worldwide, the model is still in its infancy in Arab countries</li><li>Subscribers usually get access to premium content + exclusive daily offers including digest newsletters that are delivered directly to their inbox</li><li>Most tools that offer content newsletter subscriptions are not compatible with Arabic and don't support Arab journalists or Arabic Media</li><li>Many Arab media outlets are studying implementing subscription models and offering daily digests, but the successful case studies are rare, and there are no tools to support newsletters in Arabic for Arab audiences</li></ol>
Arageek.com (Motivate Media Group - Arageek's licensee)
Arageek will generate UGC from its users and bloggers. It will increase revenue from higher engagements and more pageviews and provide data and insights for editors for continuous content improvement.
Listening to news is becoming more important to consumers and news organisations as device proliferation drives demand for voice offerings. The Middle East is currently underserved by news organisations and big tech companies. High-quality content in Arabic remains quite limited compared to the size of the Arabic-speaking market. The National sees an opportunity to bridge that gap by launching a text to speech service in both English and Arabic, giving the wider audiences access to The National's high-quality news.
POPSCI ARABIA / Haykal Media
There's a gap between the academic community and the public. Although the academic community is considered as a credible and accurate source of knowledge, there is a shortage in Arabic tools and platforms that can help them share their research and breakthroughs in a language accessible to the public can consume. This project intends to lower the barrier to entry and expand the reach of the academic community and build a highway between the science readers and producers. They are filling the gap by building a platform that will become the destination for the academic community share science and tech stories with the Arabic-speaking world. This platform will allow authors to follow a simple, hassle-free process where they collaborate with editors.
Majarra
Bayanat Majarra is a personalization system based on user actions.
SciComm X
Lack of innovative platforms to manage the pitching process between publishers and journalists. International publishers seeking to receive pitches from qualified journalists worldwide, and journalists want to pitch their ideas to international publishers, but there's no dedicated platform to manage the process.
Scientific Arab is a platform dedicated to communicating scientific topics (Science, Health, Technology, Environment) to the Arab. Aimed mainly at the 15 to 30 year age group it creates simple, engaging, and interactive content from multiple accurate and prestigious resources. The platform brings together high-quality content from science journalists, professors, scientists, and international science magazines to make it available in Arabic.
Arageek.com, a leading Arabic magazine for youths, launches a digital membership platform. Extending the current model as an online magazine to include a User Generated Content (UGC) element to the business via providing self publishing tools for users and Arab bloggers. The platform will be available on mobile ( Android & IOS ) and web applications (PWA).
The National identified a unique opportunity to develop a new service within the rapidly expanding voice market. The aim is to create a text to speech offering with the help of Google that converts its award-winning content into both English and Arabic in real-time. The new service is designed to support its mission of increasing access to high-quality news across the Middle East.
Aloloom Lil Omoom (Popular Science Arabia) is a leading source that empowers Arab youth with reliable, well-written, science and tech stories. We are expanding our current platform to empower readers across the region with knowledge from researchers and academic sources. Their objective is two-fold: help readers become informed and inspired by reliable science content and empower new voices from the science and academic community in the region. They will provide new, credible, and up to date sources of information and topics relevant to the needs of the region by helping the academic community share stories about their work in science and technology in a simple, engaging and journalistic way.
The Citizen Bulletin (Zimbabwe Centre for Media and Information Literacy)
As the usage of social media platforms increases, local newsrooms are beginning to see the need to meet readers where they already are. In many developing media markets, including Zimbabwe, WhatsApp is one of the most important platforms for news distribution. However, to use the platform for engagement, news outlets can begetting banned for violating WhatsApp user terms and policies. To use the platform for engagement, a newsroom needs to get access to the WhatsApp Business API, a legally permissible and scalable way to engage with audiences on the platform.
263Chat
Zimbabwe is a highly polarised country with few independent media outlets. Radio is the easiest media to access for most Zimbabweans.
An open-source WhatsApp bot for news distribution and audience engagement. By leveraging WhatsApp Business API, small and medium sized newsrooms will be able to legally use the messaging application to distribute their content en masse while they engage new and existing users without violating the platform's terms and privacy policies.
Provide an alternative to radio with the establishment of a podcast network.
TeleNueve
To produce the news only once and let our tool do the newscast for you. Newscasts haven't changed their audience experience that much since they were created with an anchor telling stories. But the audience has changed a lot, especially in the last 15 years with the internet, social networks, and smartphone experience changing it all. Now the anchor has been replaced by the autoplay video so we believe that there is a gap to fill.
Editorial Jornada
This automated system would have a highly positive and beneficial impact: - Increase in income from direct advertising - Increase in advertisers. - Reduction of expenses in customer service and designs. - Agility, accessibility and time savings for the client and the environment. - Improvement in the user experience with the Jornada website. - Increased reach and traffic on the web, therefore, direct impact on increased revenue in programmatic advertising.
Publishers have numerous sources of information and analytics. However, resources and time are increasingly limited, so we need a correct interpretation of the data and an effective use of its analysis. There is often a gap between the volume of information and the number of specific actions that can be carried out daily and, furthermore, these actions will always have a subjective interpretation bias. This aspect prevents making correct and intelligent decisions, based on data that can mainly cross the interest of the audience and the quality of the content of each medium.
The platform will make visible content of value that today is limited to a specific region, which allows expanding topics such as diversity, inclusion, gender, disability, environment, among others. The product will increase the amount of in-depth content, with greater development and resources; more copyright paid, true and checked by chief editors. This results in more reading time and in more possibilities of monetization of the website. Finally, it will reduce costs in technology service providers that do not fully adapt to the environment.
Editorial Rio Negro, S.A.
We want to solve the loss of representation and territorial information and its consequent decrease in the diversity of points of view represented in our environment due to the closure of company correspondents. To create a new news product that uses audiovisual content generated by the community as journalistic input. That is a model of active participation that innovates the conditions of content production that expand the capabilities of the newsroom and diversify points of view by giving voice to different people in the community.
Nowadays, headlines depend fully on how keen the journalist is to write an attractive headline, and how much the person knows about SEO or best practices for social media. Actually the best way we have to give performance KPIs to journalists is via dashboards and reports.
The principal challenge is the reduction of churn. The platform will be able to recognize specific situations of users who have a high probability of leaving the service based. Second, it will provide information on the relation between the content and the users with the greatest and least interest. Third, the data will help increase audience retention from actions on the site's frontend to producing informative content that generates more engagement for the most active segments.
El Eco de Tandil
Local media companies, are going behind the clicks to survive, with higher and higher operational costs and a lack of latest technology to adapt to new markets. With this project, we can focus on the core of the business: the news. And of course, we can start to draw together a new vision of the industry, with combined efforts.
Grupo Octubre
The production and consumption of audiovisual content is growing at dizzying rates. Visual processing tools are expensive and difficult to implement. In the process of digitizing our historical content from channels, newspapers and radios with more than 60 years of history, we found a gap when trying to work with enriched content for our markets. This is why we started Visión Latina.
This project will shorten the gap between commercial media and cooperative news outlets by providing the core technological solutions that any cooperative or non for profit organization needs in order to carry out a news organization funded by a membership model. By doing that it will also bring plurality to the Argentinian media landscape and promote journalism driven by public interest. This kind of product is impossible to afford for any cooperative news outlet since these organizations don't have financial resources to hire or retain programmers, designers nor the UX research team required. Therefore their chances to compete in a highly concentrated media landscape are very low.
Our current transition from an editorial business model based mainly on digital advertising towards a model based primarily on audiencie's revenue is slow and non-automated processes. It is difficult to make an intelligent and agile use of our data in order to make decisions and execute commercial and editorial strategies that accelerate the process of acquisition and retention of subscribers.
Periodismo.com
To find an alternative method of monetization for producers of journalistic material that allows them to make quality content and generate a revenue stream that complements advertising and subscriptions.
RED/ACCIÓN
How can you take your audience by the hand in their funnel journey from following a social account to membership conversion? How to understand news consumption and participation patterns so that we can predict and identify the triggers that have the potential to drive new members into our subscription plans? The Smart Membership Project will allow us to work with segments so to design, track, understand and adjust best engagement actions (action buttons, polls, open questions, etc.) towards creating paid memberships.
Relevant articles recommendation and the ongoing usage of past stories in new reporting is an ongoing problem that every news organization faces on a daily basis. By using machine learning to link every person, organization or topic mentioned in the news archive, the opportunities for innovation are endless. To name just a few:
The most innovative aspect of the project is that, unlike other content recommendation engines, we will try to predict by means of Artificial Intelligence engines, what content or topics might be of interest to the user. We will not rely solely on the browsing history of the anonymous or logged-in user, or even just of users similar to the user who is browsing. We will take all this information, we will add the analysis of historical or current readings of the contents of the site, we will add analysis of propensity - affinity, activity in social networks and others. Last but not least, this tool will have to be prepared to learn from all users, incorporate their behaviors, receive feedback from our journalists, learn, learn, learn.
SaoVivo will help the newsroom produce a video stream by automating that feed with the elements already produced by digital and broadcast teams. It allows more resources for original content, by making it easier to access those stories on screen. The project will help small and big newsrooms to monetize their video resources and to make it more accessible to have a video feed of news live programming.
The objective of self-manageable classifieds for Diariojornada.com.ar is for advertisers (medium/small businesses and readers/individuals) to be able to upload ads completely autonomously through a form and predesigned templates through the use of technology. As an example, a small company will be able to choose the design of its created advertisement through a series of options of backgrounds/colors/typefaces, movement effects and other parameters; preview it, define periodicity and make the corresponding payment. Also, the common user/reader will be able to publish their buy/sell classifieds without the need for an intermediary.
La Gaceta will develop an assistant for journalistic editors, which will quickly and intelligently evaluate the performance and potential of each article in real time, making recommendations on where it should be published: website, Google AMP, Facebook Instant Article, and other channels such as notifications ( breaking news) and newsletters.
El Litoral will develop a platform with collaborative capacities and where the associated media can have access to different digital tools. It will be developed by a team that will also have the objective of defining performance standards among the media and negotiating and implementing custom software licenses. It will also include progress development; template development, UX design, first-level support, editorial consulting and other services that a medium may require at the design, analysis, or content level.
The project proposes to develop an app and web platform where, from regional talents to diverse and less represented communities, where users can upload photos or videos of topics of interest and thus broaden the spectrum of thematic and territorial coverage, optimizing the new culture of information production and using it in favor of communication.
We want to say goodbye to reports with the Diversity and Headline Strength checker, a tool inspired by the password strength checkers to tell our journalists how strong a headline is. We use Big Data to analyze all our articles to know which characteristics they have in common in order to improve the headlines depending on the traffic source.
The project consists of an analytics platform focused on the website activity of two types of central users for the subscription business model: registered and subscribed. Its objective is to analyze content consumption and user profiles in order to take actions and decisions that strengthen the relation with the audience.
This project aims to provide local companies with a technology that articulates the web and paper newsrooms (integrated CMS), with a platform to sale traditional media online advertising in real time, an engine for digital subscriptions and a benefits club.
Vision Latina will add tagging automation to audiovisual pieces, allocating human intelligence to the production of original content. The aim is to develop an open knowledge base trained with our language and content so everyone in the latin community can use artificial intelligence recognition models that are commonly used in others parts of the world.
This project will boost technological development in cooperative and non for profit news organizations in Argentina to develop their membership revenue model. We will develop a comprehensive journalism funding system that will understand audience behavior patterns and engage with their interests. A fully automatic engine will identify users and run targeted campaigns to promote their membership. This product will integrate a paywall platform, a payment system and a CRM. It will offer a complete solution to business model limitations for small news outlets. After the implementation in Tiempo, we will develop a prototype available for other cooperative or non for profit orgs.
Subscription Accelerator for News is a comprehensive solution that seeks to enhance news digital subscriptions through a propensity index (News Propensity Index, NPI) by linking users to content through multiple channels in real time.
Develop an open source, easy-to-use and free micro-payment network for media companies of any size to pay for and synergize long-form content, aimed to mobile readers.
Smart Membership Project is a data-driven engagement strategy to fuel paid members conversion and retention. It aims to identify, track and promote the activities that creates engagement and converts membership. We'll center our approach in a product that delivers call-to-action messages embedded across our platforms and products and track them to understand the optimal funnel. We are building our journalism practice around participation so we want to better understand and handle all those call-to-action in order to better serve our audience and build a more robust and data-driven customer journey, from bumping into our content in social media to membership conversion.
Archive Intelligence is a service that leverages machine learning to bring the historical news archive from any news organization back to life. By connecting their CMS to a straightforward API, journalists will be able to retrieve connections between any story, person or organization ever mentioned on their publication and the audience will get more relevant suggestions of related articles and trends to better understand the ongoing development of news stories.
"Zoltar News" (ZN) is a predictor of reading interests, based on models of artificial intelligence and Machine Learning. There are many content recommenders platforms on the market and most follow the same logic: recommend based on what we already read almost inbreeding, or based on our navigation history, what other similar users read, etc. Our goal is to create the first recommender built by a medium that links Big Data, IA/Machine Learning, Commercial, Product and Writing teams. This gives a unique value in the market and for the users.
Agencia de Noticias Fides
The voices of young people are often relegated by traditional media that prefer to cover issues that are beyond the interest of young people themselves. The ANF intends to attract new audiences from Bolivian society with the aim of expanding its following niches; wants to do it through the development of a technological mechanism (app) for participation so that young people promote their visibility in society, from their own narratives.
Periódico El País SRL
This project is focused mainly in solving the online payments recurrent problem that affects Bolivia and, particularly, Tarija due to its still incipient financial culture. This problem will be tackled with the development of a new payment method widely known to the population but unexplored outside the scope of telecommunication companies.
ANF wants to develop an application (app) that will allow young people interested in publishing content generated by themselves. Young people between the ages of 17 and 25, who live in certain localities, will be able to upload content directly to an editing platform. Their content will be published on a microsite on the ANF website, with simultaneous publication on networks social. The young people set the agenda for the media.
The project consists in the development of an app that gives access to news content and includes a payment platform based on pre-paid credit that provides the adaptability required to diversify monetization sources including gaming, micropayments for content, tips, subscriptions and ads.
Even big cities in Brazil lack a more profound journalism. Big media outlets are more interested in national politics, and local vehicles don't have the money or the expertise to report using more sophisticated tools and methods. Typically, regional and local media replicate official news. We want to change this, using funding from GNI to gather data with the use of IA, employing state of art tools and hiring professionals from IT and journalism to uncover important and unknown realities about our city life. We feel that this will be revolutionary in terms of community life.
In the current legislature, much of the disinformation content that circulates on social media reflects the message conveyed by elected representatives. In 2023, we intend to automate and put together all public communication from authorities on social media to show what disinformation is. The profiles of president, vice president, federal deputies and senators in office will be analyzed, totaling 596 profiles. The information will be published in an easy-to-read interface, with filters and searches. The tool will generate a database on political communication and will be an ally to fight against disinformation published by elected politicians.
A Gazeta
Society needs to better understand the methods behind professional journalism and the transformations it promotes. Newsrooms need to build capacity to identify, track, catalogue and convey to the public the impact of their work. Our goal is to provide a combination of methodologies and tools to help journalists and editors include this workflow in their routine to guarantee their stories are meaningful and impactful, gradually improving readers' lives and their perception of relevance and value.
Poder360 Jornalismo e Comunicação
There is a huge demand for a more complete product aggregating policy monitoring to news and analysis. There are very limited monitoring platforms available in Brazil, and none from a news organization capable of offering information the value of knowledge, access and wit beyond the automatized tools. We will develop a product that uses technology to gather information from all available databases and elevate the value of the results by aggregating the news and analysis from Poder360's journalists.
Amazon communities are marginalised in the global debate about the climate and biodiversity. Indigenous, quilombola and riverine peoples are conservation and forest management experts, but their voices often go unheard due to logistical, obstacles technical challenges and cultural differences. Sumaúma aims to address this by providing an amplification platform (podcast, trilingual newsletter and website), communications equipment and a forum for discussions, training and development of storytelling techniques. Initially working with seven remote communities in the Xingu River Basin, we plan to develop a model that can be scaled up to ensure the outside world talks not just about the Amazon but with it.
Brazil is a country of continental dimensions with great cultural and identity diversity. However, its media ecosystem is extremely centralized in the Rio-SP axis, as well as the entire process of narratives elaboration that doesn't reflect this wide diversity. In contrast, there are thousands of activist communication initiatives in the interior of Brazil, totally ignored by the conventional media, which are unable to give visibility to their agendas. NINJA has more than 2,000 collaborators spread across the country from different identities. NINJApp is a tool that automates and facilitates the collaboration process, strengthening a decentralized communication network throughout Brazil.
Carla Beraldo/ Frelancer journalist/ Researcher
We need to understand how the content creation tool can support the creation of accessible content without disturbing the journalists' workflow. We also need to understand how increased awareness among journalists about how to create accessible content can be achieved through training and increased knowledge. So, after testing the Reverta Protocol in different newsrooms and mapping the issues, we can create the plugin focus on CMSs that help the accessibility. This could then be customized.
Diário do Nordeste
The advent of the internet disrupted the old news media business model and forced publishers to rely on readership. Though this paradigm has been accepted by most in the industry, few publishers have been able to successfully tackle reader monetization to sustainable levels. By tokenizing our subscription we will rebuild trust between newsroom and readers to levels enjoyed prior to the internet, strengthening our commitment to reader-centric news, and monetizing the project from subscriptions instead of advertisers. We will develop a loyal new base of digital-native subscribers, reduce churn, and fund social programs that enhance the lives of marginalized communities, improving our bottom line while making our world a better place.
Grupo Matinal Jornalismo (GMJ) and Headline News Brasil.
News deserts are a significant problem in the Brazilian news industry, including in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, where tens of digital news outlets and independent journalists are struggling to produce content and reach local audiences. The partners community will be allowed to use Matinal content (premium content that covers all the state municipalities) to increase local readers' willingness to pay, monetizing news through the platform's sharing economy model. In doing so, Austral (and its network of local independent creators) will be a Headline leading local partner in Rio Grande do Sul.
Abril Comunicações S.A
In recent years we have seen a decline in the printed media market, one of our main products as a publisher. Concerning the loss of physical readers, we have not noticed a proportional increase in our digital subscribers. We have planned 4 phases in this project: 1) Creation of an AI Model aggregating information from articles and users in a single environment, understanding and predicting behavior and content relevance. 2) Customer Engagement: improve reader experience. 3) Increase users activation and conversion. 4) Clusters creation for 1st party ads.
Ambiental Media
In Brazil, with important exceptions, socio-environmental databases are dispersed, difficult to locate, and many times are simply nonexistent, inaccessible, or published in a messy, unfinished state. This is true for data at a national, state, and municipal scale, and this situation directly inhibits the production of data-driven journalism and other sectors where data-driven work is essential for producing insights based on socio-environmental data, such as ESG. The significance of this problem impacts more than just scientific reporting. Environmental stories connect to coverage of economics, politics, and gender equity.
Projeto Colabora
Build a platform to assist journalists and communicators in tracking climate-related acts of parliament published by Brazilian states and municipalities. AIl mechanisms will be used to categorize each act and organize to allow filtering and prioritization of information. With technology as part of the content production flow, topics that would otherwise be invisible to the general public can be covered. To promote equitable opportunities, the platform will be free of charge to journalists from underrepresented groups. Parts of the platform will also be openly made available to everyone.
Centro de Estudo da Mídia Marco Zero Conteúdo
The project proposes solutions to the lack of accessible quality journalistic content for people with visual impairments. In Brazil, this population is estimated at 6.5 million people and, although communication is a human right, there is no effectiveness in the practices of journalistic companies. Thus, this population is excluded from the consumption of quality information and is more vulnerable to disinformation and fake news. This project offers a research to understand the consumption of journalistic content by blind people; an automated tool for diagnosing accessibility problems on journalistic websites and a curator app of quality and accessible journalistic content.
Revista AzMina
Amplifica is both a tool that aims to facilitate community participation with news organizations, using "social listening" capacities to bring people closer. This approach is a step forward into membership engagement and data-driven understanding of our audiences. Working with communities and interacting with readers is not something new. However, going where the readers are is a great differential for participation and engagement.
Rede Gazeta
Legacy outlets fraught with digital transformation and media startups alike suffer with business model sustainability issues at a fast-paced tech-led landscape, which requires substantial and constant investments just to barely stay up to date. In order to spur trusting and impactful journalism we aim at providing a set of affordable tech-driven enabling solutions, starting with the development of a mobile-first and agile-driven CMS to drastically improve response times and productivity.
AppCívico
The cryptocurrency and the NFTs universe is full of investors but lacks a cause, a purpose beyond finance. Facts-NFT aims to launch and raise a new revenue stream line for media outlets, by offering them the opportunity to sell their content in the non-fungible token (NFT) format. Cryptocurrency owners and NFT collectors will then have the chance to express their support for good reporting, while also investing in a fast-growing market.
S/A Estado de Minas
Despite being fundamental in the journalist's daily life, the news round is a slow process and is often insufficient. Several times with the journalist contacting police and fire brigades by phone to try to find out if there is any news that is worth investigating, following the social networks and other news sites looking for stories that have not yet been covered. The aim of Scoop is to automate and streamlining this process.
Associação Fiquem Sabendo
Agenda Transparente tackles the lack of transparency and ways to monitor Brazilian authorities and public officials' schedules, which are currently fragmented on various platforms. Agenda Transparente is a pioneering initiative to bring accountability to Brazil's Federal administration by creating a live history of the Executive Branch's daily appointments in a unified, custom, and comparable way.
Folha da Manhã SA / Folha de S.Paulo
The formal education of women is increasing, they are entering senior positions and receiving more promotions. They are reading more and more news day by day, so why are they still less willing than men to pay for content? More space for women increases not their interest, but everyone's interest. When they see themselves more represented, they can feel more connected with the content and become a subscriber.
How do we accelerate the growth of digital subscribers? O Globo's current subscriptions growth rate—despite being the highest among newspapers in Brazil—is still insufficient.
The business model that sustained journalism over the last century has been exhausted. We have created an alternative model that meets—in a new way—the increasing demand for content in the Video on Demand market. We will not only sell the intellectual property rights of the magazine's stories, but also engage our team of journalists, screenwriters, and film directors into the actual development process of these audiovisual narratives. As in the oil industry, the more refined the pitch is, the greater its value becomes. Refining piauí's original stories into "TV Bibles" will increase their value up to five times.
Associação Desenrola
Bandeirantes Media Group journalists need to make VODs available as quickly as possible on our websites, apps and social media. Today this work is done by different teams (websites x social medias) and this process needs to be optimized. The solution found is to develop a proprietary platform that captures the signal from our 7 television channels and 5 radios and transforms it into digital media. The journalist can define what content he wants to distribute and on which platform.
Big companies are usually the only ones that can afford hiring teams or private consultancy firms. They have money, structures, tools and human resources dedicated to using legal and legitimate methods to manage their interests in the Congress. This leaves NGO's, institutes or smaller private companies poorly informed about how parliamentarians vote and how bills progresses.
Brazilian National Congress data, although available on official portals, is scattered and hard to find, making it almost inaccessible to non-specialists. So we are about to build, feed and maintain the largest database in the country of federal parliamentarians, in an economic, rational and replicable way on a national scale (in Legislative Assemblies and Municipal Councils with APIs involving similar experiences) and internationally.
Abraji
We have a lot of open data in Brazil, but often journalists don't have the necessary skills to analyze it. What the Abraji Dados/CruzaGrafos will do is to group the main Brazilian databases in an accessible way, so that journalists, whether with initial or advanced skill levels in data analysis, can carry out various investigations. It will be possible to explore the data with graphs, using CruzaGrafos, a tool that will allow even novice users to make complex data crosscheckings and analysis.
Radar Aos Fatos' purpose is to display interactively what's trending on popular misinformation/low level content profiles, websites, pages and communities though a smart dashboard and premium reports. With the growing sophistication of false and misleading content on open and closed platforms, it is imperative to understand how broad and pervasive are mis/disinformation campaigns in the opinion making process. In order to make better decisions, companies that require situation analysis, risk advice and a better understanding of how mis/disinformation have a role on public opinion and the political agenda would rely on Aos Fatos' products. Also, Aos Fatos expects a positive impact in its own mis/disinformation coverage.
In a world where the so-called fake news disseminates in a high speed, there is a limit in fact-check services capacity to deal with the situation. The association between journalism and computing has been studied as one of the ways to combat this disinformation ecosystem. Confere.ai is an automated fact-checking system that uses artificial intelligence to create a culture of fighting misinformation among the common citizen.
Despite the high interest in tax issues in Brazil, access to public information is difficult and relies on unfriendly interfaces. We want to create a single platform to offer all the information needed about past Carf decisions, as we were the first to collect and classify all information from Carf trials and court precedents. In addition, the platform will use machine learning algorithms to estimate the likelihood of victory or defeat in ongoing and future cases. Together with our data science initiative, we will have our editorial team adding insights that robots can't.
This project aims to improve political and electoral debate across universities, especially aimed at 18-24 youngsters, by providing up to 1 year of free subscription.
Agencia Publica
The proponent organizations view the urban youth as a potential audience that is yet to embrace the news industry in Brazil. Different from other relevant countries such as Mexico and the United States, the journalistic initiatives in Brazil geared towards the urban youth are few and small, and do not make intensive use of video, the utmost language that is being consumed by the youth.
City Life Observatory will specialize in gathering and analyzing data about important themes related to Curitiba - a city of 2 million inhabitants in southern Brazil. The project will be using scraping tools and other devices to collect information in official and non-official data banks that today are not explored by local media. After gathering the data, we will partner with local experts in the most crucial subjects (like education, heath care and environmental causes) to analyze and crunch the numbers. Our team of reporters will then produce stories that reflect the realities uncovered by this process. We intend by this to bring new and vital information to local public arena.
What the authorities publish - monitoring the public communication of the elected - will be Lupa's tool to monitor public channels on the social media of elected politicians in the 2022 election. In one platform, we will compile, in an automated way, content published by public authorities, with specific filters for themes linked to disinformation narratives.
Our mission is to positively transform people's lives, but do they realize that? If we want involved and engaged readers, they must clearly perceive value in our journalism. We believe that, by showing what happens after our publications, we might be able to become closer to our readers.
Poder Pro Monitor will be a platform that aggregates the news and analysis content to monitoring tools that gather, process and present in usable interface data from the Executive, Legislative and the Judiciary branches of the federal government.
Develop a pilot program in the Xingu Basin of the Brazilian Amazon for traditional forest communities to participate in story-telling workshops, ideas exchanges, training and reflection on traditional journalism. Provide technology and work with these forest communicators on content that will be published in a trilingual newsletter and online platform, Sumaúma. The goal is demonstrate an effective format that can be replicated across the Amazon Basin and other biomes.
NINJAapp is a collaborative journalism platform that facilitates content submission, production and organization. A space where the Media NINJA collaborators community - spread across the entire Brazilian territory - can register, participate in opportunities, interact with the editorial team and contribute by suggesting and producing journalistic topics in complete safety. The project also foresees the launch of several calls for special journalism coverages, face-to-face events and training activities.
The idea is to test the Reverta Protocol, a project developed during a Master's dissertation, to understand accessibility gaps and create a prototype plugin for Content Management System's (CMS). People with visual impairment have difficulty accessing news on digital networks because screen readers do not decode much information, these should be the responsibility of journalists in generating inclusive content. Acessibility to all, by all.
The Northeast Daily's Web 3.0 News Subscription Platform is a decentralized application (dApp) that doubles as a newsreader and crypto wallet and allows the newsgroup to tokenize subscriptions and daily editions of the "paper". Tokens will offer entry to the Subscriber's DAO, through which our readers will gain active voice over editorial decisions, support local artists through the purchase of art and the payment of royalties, as well gain access to exclusive subscriber-centric events and airdrops.
Matinal & Headline will create Austral, a local news project gathering independent journalists and digital news startups in Rio Grande do Sul, south of Brazil. Austral will offer content synergies, infrastructure, and tech solutions for local newsrooms in the Rio Grande do Sul. Based on Headline technology (CMS and payment gateway), we will combine local news outlets in one single news website (Austral) covering regional news. Each publisher will have access to pre-designed channels (templates) where they will deliver local information based on the readers' geolocation and behavior.
The creation of data intelligence through structured databases, machine learning, and ad hoc algorithms based on user habits and published content along all of Abril's 18 Brands. All behavioral data will be crossed to articles' metadata and subscription status (conversion/churn) generating recommendations and user segmentations. Our algorithms will engage readers through a predictive experience of relevant articles and tailor-made publicity.
We will build a web application for publishing and sharing clean, public, metadata-rich socio-environmental datasets. Ambiental Media will use the web app to publish our own Amazon-wide analyses, such as the Amazon Water Impact Index, and to document new APIs for accessing our data products. The premium tier of the Ambiental Media Data Market will include unique data analyses that reveal the impact of socio-environmental issues on businesses and organizations. We will also democratize access to existing information, by fact-checking and hosting the most trustworthy environmental datasets, including international datasets that could be relevant to our national context.
Every public act of parliament in Brazil must be published in an official newspaper to be legal. That is, published daily in printed or digital documents. Official journals rarely have APIs that allow data to be consumed by machines and there is no standardization.
This collaborative project brings together nine independent journalistic sites in the Northeast of Brazil and the largest community and non-profit University in the region, Catholic University of Pernambuco (Unicap), in the search for an innovative form of inclusion to offer quality and accessible journalistic content for blind e low-vision people in Brazil. The solution combines carrying out a survey to understand the demands and needs of this audience, technology to diagnose accessibility problems in journalistic websites and the offer of independent and quality journalistic content, accessible and tailored based on the demands identified in the research stage.
Create an ecosystem of communities of journalism startups based on a data-driven approach towards transparency, user collaboration and user engagement. Amplifica is a tool capable of tracking, analyzing and organizing social media posts from supporters, donors and other key people, seamlessly including them to the conversation.
Gazeta SDK is an economically effective bundle of state-of-the-art digital solutions to small and medium sized publishers. Our architecture includes a network of premium vendors, startups and proprietary software around a core CMS which was developed in-house, and in the context of GNI's Challenge, we will further develop innovative features aimed at optimizing multimedia production, editing and agile management on-the-go.
Facts-NFT seeks to launch and raise a new business model for journalism. In the upcoming months, Facts-NFT will convert some of the best journalism ever seen in Brazil into unique digital products that can be bought, collected, resold and/or serve as an investment. During its MVP, Facts-NFT sold content produced by four certified fact-checking organizations around the world and is happy to move to a broader community.
The Scoop project proposes to democratize technology and reduce editorial costs, by building a solution that will help in the identification of viral content, subjects of general interests and events announced by the press, notifying the newsroom for verification and production. Based on the use of artificial intelligence and integration with social networking APIs and Google, the solution can be customized by editorial sections and journalists can choose to receive alerts only on the topics they are scheduled to produce.
Agenda Transparente is the first oversight platform for journalists, NGOs, and Public Affairs to monitor in real-time what the Brazilian government is up to, who is influencing public policies the most, and identify which voices are marginalized from the corridors of power. This is a product that brings together open data and mainstream tools — such as email alerts, and dashboards — to provide a valuable way to monitor authorities' schedules and lobby in Brazil.
To better reflect Brazil's diversity and plurality, Folha wants to amplify diversity of voices in their publications. 'VOZ DELAS' is a monitoring project that will show how many women are interviewed and determine where they need more space in the news outlet. With the aid of machine learning and artificial intelligence, it will be followed by suggestions to the journalist on which specialists could be interviewed.
Globo[ONE] is about personalizing and delivering to each of our readers a unique, one-to-one experience. To do so, we will create and combine, with the help of AI tools, new editorial and marketing strategies that will better meet the needs of our consumers.
"Refinaria de histórias" presents a new business model for funding journalism while also taking piauí's stories to the millions of people that subscribe to Video on Demand platforms. A team of preeminent journalists and audiovisual professionals will adapt piauí's stories into "TV Bibles" for minisseries, fiction films and documentaries. These bibles mark the first step in the development of an audiovisual project: they contain format, tone, character guidelines, as well as script treatments for each story. The "TV Bibles" will then be sold to streaming platforms such as Netflix—thus generating a new steady income to finance piauí's journalism.
Conceived by the Desenrola e Não me Enrola, Alma Preta, Historiorama, Preto Império e Periferia em Movimento communication collectives, the Info Território project creates a media platform that distributes journalistic content in peripheral territories of the city of São Paulo where it is not yet available, connecting readers with offline and online information.
REC will be a web system open source for capturing audio and videos from tv or radio broadcasts. After capture, journalist can edit video and distribute the same media on any video platforms or social medias. Metadata management will also be unique!
Women in Progress will monitor how Brazilian Congress behaves towards women rights. The tool will develop databases to measure how the Congressmen and women have been voting since they were elected and the impacts of the bills they have proposed. We will monitor projects with the help of robots, data analysis and partnerships with NGOs. We will also create statistical parameters that assess whether parliamentarians have voted in favor of women's rights and rank them through data-visualization tools. A website dedicated to the project will gather this tools and provide special reports that will link investigative journalism, technology and data journalism. Newsletters will gather the information and data brought by these tools.
Radar do Congresso is an innovative tool that establishes a new viable business model for independent journalism, creating an array of services and exclusive content for those who desire precise, broad and up-to-date information about frantic Brazilian politics. This is a project put together by Congresso em Foco. Founded in 2004, it is the first news website in Brazil dedicated to cover the National Congress.
CruzaGrafos is an open-source graphing tool to allow crosschecks and advanced data investigations. Abraji (the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism) will use CruzaGrafos to expose the relationships between different entities (persons and companies), even if they appear in different databases in our data repositories. For example, it will be possible to explore visually all the connections between a politician and its campaign donors, companies owned by him, business partners, contractors paid with public funds etc.
Radar Aos Fatos is a service focused on companies, NGOs, universities and news outlets that need to understand and keep track of the evolution of misinformation campaigns on social media. Aos Fatos will scale its automation projects to tackle misinformation by providing premium access to two products: 1. a dashboard through which it will be possible to oversee, in real/almost real time, what are the most popular, engaging, shared and searched pieces of misinformation nationwide; 2. weekly reports on dis/misinformation trends and campaigns.
This project proposes to develop an easy to use automated fact check system, to be embedded in media outlets or other services, in order to give every citizen the power to identify whether a piece of content is true or was created to spread lies.
In Brazil, tax cases amount to US$ 1 trillion. With such high stakes, Brazil's tax appeals court (Carf) decisions affect citizens, businesses and the state itself. Besides, major tax reform is on the way. More than ever, Brazil is desperate for a predictable tax system.
The objective of this project is to attract young readers by offering a high engaging rewarding system of information consumption through a Gamification model. By using gamification, which could be a new way to engage users with content, we focus on helping the readers to further develop their knowledge and critical view of the world.
Reload is a shared video newsroom that uses content produced by Agencia Publica, Agencia Lupa, Reporter Brasil, Congresso em Foco, Ponte Jornalismo, Énois, Colabora, Marco Zero Conteúdo, O Eco and Nova Escola.
Grupo Copesa (La Tercera)
People struggle to get informed in the news ecosystem because of the excess information and boring format. Moreover, they are reluctant to share information with media outlets because they don't trust them or feel it wastes time. Consequently, audiences do not have relevant information while media outlets have trouble improving their content offer because they don't have enough information about their audiences.
BioBioChile
With the aim of creating a healthier environment for our readers, the "Bío Bío Community" project was born: a free subscription system that will encourage healthy interaction among users, offering them a series of benefits. Building a sense of community among readers can increase trust in the outlet and also improve our communication with them and encourage more constructive interaction in the comments section. In turn, knowing better the behavior of users at a statistical level will allow us to improve our editorial offer, better satisfying the needs of the public.
Subela Radio
Small-mid size media organizations face challenges in news production costs, insufficient content distribution, lacking user engagement and underperforming monetization strategies. Problems that are often faced in isolation, instead of implementing solutions designed systemically to tackle these problems. We propose the development of a collaborative journalism platform designed to reduce costs in news production by engaging with young journalists that are just entering the market, as well as independent journalists. To increase user engagement, the platform will enable interaction from our readers and viewers, whom will also be able to collaborate with our publications.
Obtaining and managing online memberships, donations and subscriptions in Latin America is a technological, financial and administrative headache.
The Match Project will be a tool or application to build games and surveys that allow media outlets to deliver relevant and valuable information to audiences while simultaneously allowing them to obtain information about their opinions, preferences, and behaviors. With this, we not only seek to increase audiences but also enrich, diversify and listen to them.
The Bío Bío Community is a free subscription system for BioBioChile users, the most read Chilean digital media. This project will allow the reader to be part of an informative community and access a series of benefits, as well as a personalized experience. Each user will have an individual profile, will be able to comment on news, save and bookmark their favorite articles, receive newsletters of interest, personalize their news feed, as well as access exclusive content and rewards, among other things.
The Súbela News Club is a collaborative journalism platform that uses wiki-based open source software tools to engage with participating journalists in 1) the definition of Súbela's editorial; 2) collaboration in editing or second drafting; and 3) crowdsourcing the production of news and additional sources of information. With the News Club, Súbela aims to innovate in the means through which news can be covered via collaboration amongst journalists, readers, and the ecosystem of local media organizations, with the ultimate goal to reduce the cost of content publication, while also increasing the quality of articles published via the News Club.
Reveniu helps to turn your audience and fans into paying donors, members, or subscribers; build a lasting community of supporters.
El Colombiano
Media outlets must make the digital subscription business model profitable in an environment where audiences are not used to paying for content and paywall technologies are expensive and not designed to engage audiences. With the dynamic paywall and its reward system, we will improve the user experience on our platforms, showing more value and interest in the audience so that they consume more information, and with more benefits, we will encourage payment for content.
Baudó Agencia Pública
Sustainability and indepence has always been a challenge for us. In this search, it's been necessary to expand our business model. We want to get to know our prospective customers for our membership model, and we also need to develop loyalty campaigns and generate a Navegantes membership model long-term. To do this, we've thought of developing an independent and innovative channel which will connect us with our members and allow us to link our community narrators as beneficiaries of the model.
Editora del Mar S.A.
As a newspaper we need to diversify our offer and focus on the digital subscriptions business model. We will count on technologies to know our audience, bring personalized experiences and better products, in order to attract and retain digital subscribers. UNI2 is a cost-effective solution, open source, with an easy and friendly management that integrates a customer data platform and content recommendation by Artificial Intelligence.
El Tiempo Casa Editorial
Developing a portal in which SMBs can access to ad acquisition in our portals is an opportunity to wide our market, improve the speed and effectiveness of our service and automating our delivery processes.
Galvis Ramírez y Cia
Children are now producers and consumers of content, but not news. Unrestricted access to media consumption and information requires they build critical thinking skills and the ability to discern between right or wrong; true or fake news. Understanding the responsibility of being accountable for their productions, along with its effects. The goal of the project is to create a safe and friendly environment where they can produce and consume real life contents understanding the reality they live in, while doing it in an engaging and age appropriate way, using their tools such as video, audio, text, comics or even games.
El Colombiano will implement a platform for digital subscriptions with a dynamic paywall that has a component of loyalty rewards for audiences, based on a system of points that are accumulated by interacting with our content. With the dynamic paywall and its reward system, we will improve the user experience on our platforms, showing more value and interest in the audience so that they consume more information, and we will encourage payment for content.
This project will strengthen our Navegantes membership model with technology for the knowledge and loyalty of our collaborators, alongside the development of an application with innovative interaction between the BaudóAP team, the community narrators of Chagra and its audience.
UNI2 platform will help our digital subscription business model by knowing our audience and personalizing user experiences. It will be a cost-effective tool with an easy and friendly management that will integrate Apache's UNOMI Customer Data Platform and CROMA-AI's Artificial Intelligence content recommendation. The Open Source, it will be available for any publisher in Spanish to adopt it and improve it.
With this self-service portal project, we want to offer our customers an innovative, agile, and automated way to acquire ads on our sites. Our goal is to meet the needs of advertisers and agencies through a single portal that provides payment gateway services, self-service ,and 24/7 ad monitoring.
Vanguardia Kids is a news multi-platform designed for kids, created by kids! A mobile, tablet or computer accessible platform for children to produce, consume, comment and share news articles in text, audio or video. Their voice in a safe and friendly environment, accompanied by professional and experienced journalists, to understand the world they live in, to demand the world's attention, to design their future. Vanguardia Kids is a product where an school assignment becomes a real product, with real impact, to create a sustainable and developed world.
Nicaraguan audiences need safe, free and curated digital experiences that stimulate critical thinking, free expression and public dialogue because structural conditions such as repression, poverty, and censorship hinder other forms of community building. Media platforms have the opportunity to provide safe spaces and amplify the voices of their audiences, but traditional membership models create additional barriers to audience engagement. We will transform our membership model by lowering entry friction while prioritizing community growth and engagement. This will enable us to foster critical thinking, free expression, and public debate with a large and diverse community, safeguarding democracy and amplifying public opinion.
La Voz de Guanacaste
This project will level the playing field for many small independent newsrooms who are trying to develop a product culture and make their flagship editorial products more cost-effective. We're building on well-documented, successful efforts and strategies. We're also building on our own successful track record and experience in local, national and international collaborations and adapting this to the current context of our region.
Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística
Grand corruption and unlawful private practices hinder economic growth, debase democratic processes and feed violence throughout Latin America. That's why CLIP is joining forces with the best Latin American investigative reporters and media to understand these problems beyond national borders. CLIP will create a Data Commons, a platform to facilitate and speed up data analysis for investigative reporters seeking to expose corruption and abuse of power beyond borders. Our team will collect, integrate, mine and publish data and public records to a single platform where journalists and other civic-minded organizations can rapidly connect names, addresses and other entities.
Fake news has been strengthened by social media and are one of the biggest threats to a country's democracy. #nocomacuento was developed as a countermeasure for this phenomenon, but even it has strong presence in Costa Rica's capital city, it doesn't have the same reach in other settlements, neither the speed to produce and distribute content as fast as fake news spread. If we can enable a collaborative ecosystem based on interaction and speed up the verification and distribution process, we will be able to augment our coverage and position our brand in areas where we have low engagement.
The initiative provides Nicaraguan audiences with secure, free, and curated digital experiences that mitigate the loss of civic spaces by repurposing traditional membership models towards a community-first approach that strengthens democracy and free speech in a context of repression and censorship. This innovative approach is built on listening systematically, enabling community participation and establishing common ground. It will contribute to building a gathering place for a plural community that keeps democracy alive by thinking critically, expressing their ideas and contributing to public dialogue. Our findings will be published as an open-source resource to enable other outlets to replicate this model.
Using machine learning and business intelligence to reduce operating costs, optimize our information-sourcing practices, streamline how we create, maintain and distribute news products and improve the granularity of geolocalized content to boost our membership program. This will diversify our sponsoring opportunities and deliver outstanding user experiences with every publication. A cross-border innovation sprint will train the trainers and advance product culture in Latin America.
CLIP wants to build a single digital platform with public and private donated data collected and mined by our team. This platform will allow reporters to connect the dots and find relevant stories by comparing information across borders and entities. It will prioritize the data collection according to public interest, potential impact and technical requirements. To fund our journalistic mission, aligned with CLIP´s ethics and independence, we will use public data analysis capacity to package and sell intelligence reports; and we will set up a "scraping store".
On 2018, La Nación started a new initiative focused on tackling fake news which threatened to manipulate the presidential elections in Costa Rica. It was named #nocomacuento, which means don´t believe in stories people tell you without investigating. To date, more than 400 fake news attempts have been neutralized, regarding issues such as Politics, Healthcare & Education. Project Catapult stems from the need to scale up #nocomacuento to guarantee national coverage and improve our reader engagement. It would develop a collaborative ecosystem to enable alliances with local media pages, so we can improve our reach and neutralize more fake news.
Fundación El Churo- Wambra Medio Digital Comunitario
In Ecuador there is a diversity of communication and journalism proposals produced from different territories, by various communities, groups and individuals; however, these have difficulties in having an impact on new audiences and greater reach in the media ecosystem. In Wambra, these communities tell their stories in the first person and from their perspective, but these contents need to improve their journalistic quality and have greater diffusion. The platform will strengthen the capacities of these communities, through the journalistic technical support of Wambra, who are part of the communities themselves and manage the feminist, anti-racist, intercultural and intersectional approach.
Wambra Communities is a digital platform and an app that seeks to strengthen the co-production of multimedia content of the communities that are part of the medium (composed of women, youths, Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples, and LGBTIQ+ groups) through the implementation of a digital toolbox for journalistic content, novel methodologies, information verification, and technical production. In addition, this is a digital space dedicated to the visibility, expansion, and reach of new audiences and territories through the effective and articulated mobilization of diverse and community journalistic content.
In Central America, independent journalists face censorship and many obstacles to obtain reliable public information. There are many risks for independent journalists of working alone and the difficulties can diminish the impact of our stories to counterbalance propaganda and disinformation from authoritarian governments. El Faro will have the first online platform in the Central American region to coordinate cross-border journalism projects through a safe platform to share ideas and information; tools to open, store and analyze non-structured or raw data improving the efficiency of workflows by using new technologies.
Asociación Juvenil Gato Encerrado Media
With the pandemic in 2019, misinformation about Covid-19, vaccination, and political corruption were added to the administration of the pandemic. The WhatsApp Chatbot seeks to be a verified and reliable information dissemination tool. Users will be able to ask the bot about the truth or falsehood of a rumor or information, and the bot will recommend verified and reliable information. Behind the bot will be a verifying human journalist attentive to people's questions.
The current social dialogue is extremely polarized and opinions and popularity are most valued in terms of likes, shares and retweets. In addition, the massive amounts of information online about the important issues make news consumption overwhelming and generate misinformation. The misinformation-polarization duo causes a very low quality conversation between citizens about the most important issues that our society faces. To tackle this problem, The Conversation Lab will generate tech tools that enhance both online and offline spaces to engage in high quality conversations where doubts and nuances are vindicated with the aim of fostering civic engagement in our readers.
El Faro´s Regional Intelligence Unit is a platform that will enhance the Central American journalism ecosystem through a search engine with libraries of documents; tools for data analysis and channels for encrypted communications to coordinate in-country and cross-border journalism projects
WhatsApp is one of the channels for which more false information circulates. It is also the most accessible free application in El Salvador. Therefore, we are going to configure a chatbot that helps users to verify whether the information currently circulating in the country is true or false, and will provide options for verified and reliable information, thus combating false information.
The Conversation Lab is an outreach effort within El Faro ́s structure that will be responsible of developing technological features in elfaro.net to foster high quality debates between readers about the most relevant and important topics that affect the communities El Faro serves.
Prensa Libre S.A
The strategy, based on the analysis, algorithms and AI, is to create user experiences that encourage content consumption through event-based CTAs. We aim to develop a platform to achieve conversions and retention through the creation of experiences (marketing and content, among others) based on the subscribers behavior.
NOPEVA, S.A. Nómada
We are in a new era of journalism consolidation and innovation, and building trust with audience members and engaging them in spaces where they gather to share values and experiences is a new way of interacting with them.
User Recovery's mission is to offer a robust platform for media that have already adopted a paywall model. The goal is to reduce the churn rate from users who leave their subscription due to lack of content engagement.
Diversification of income and the content agency Nueve allowed Nómada to find sustainability and produce journalism with independence and impact. After exploring different revenue shares far away from our core business, we are building an infrastructure for our readers to support journalism -with financial resources, knowledge and presence-, that at the end of the day belongs to them.
Promoting information access with IA in Latin America (PIALA)
The Freedom of Information platforms around Latin America are limited on their functionalities, this prevents journalists and researchers of making the most of the Freedom of Information Acts in the different countries. As solution, we will create a platform with better and improved features to enable journalists and researchers to go deeper on their investigations through access to public information.
Grupo Milenio
Readers don't engage with the news sites as expected. The universe of brand lovers is low and we want our audiences to be more active, so that we can further strengthen our journalism and our community of readers. We want to implement a loyalty program for our readers on our Milenio site and apps. Our users will interact with our content and products to accumulate points according to consumption and the actions they carry out on our news site. These points can be redeemed for benefits for readers.
Verificado MX
The aim of the project is to make the misinformation identification process easier and cheaper to media outlets. Our fact checking model includes a technological tool and a personalized training protocol for each media outlet, which allows them to have an automated trend analysis search tool and a personalized fact checking model to detect misinformation even more accurately and more relevant than ever. This dual model will allow teams not only to combat misinformation, but also strengthen their business models by allowing them to generate verified content based on automated search trends analysis.
Periodistas de a Pie
For decades Mexican journalism has depended on government money, which has implied political control of the media, a problem that is worst in the local context.
Editorial Martinica S.A. de C.V.
Verified local news are at risk of disappearing. More than ever, people are getting their news from social media but readers trust in them is lower than other sources, but community publications have not yet been able to adapt, as the economics don't make sense anymore.
Promoting information access with IA in Latin America (PIALA) will let the users create, submit, manage, organize and follow up all of their Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests that they send at the same time in an easy, quick and friendly way. Also, users will be able to receive notifications of the process and stages of their FOIA requests through different channels, so they can have a schedule of when the agencies have to respond and follow up the answers. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, we want to improve journalists, researches and with time, people in general, their capacity to submit successful FOIA requests.
A new gamification loyalty program, an innovative way to engage with readers and reward our brand-lover users. Welcome to Puntos Milenio. Being informed should be rewarded.
Temoa is a fact checking model based on a trend analysis tool of social media and search engines to detect false or misleading content. Its objective is to install fact checking units in the media outlets.
Develop a membership platform for local digital media of the Media Alliance promoted by the Red de Periodistas a Pie; we want independent journalism to be financed by critical audiences.
CodigoPostal.com is the place to find out everything that is going on near you – literally – at the post code level.
El Búho
We want to reduce the centralization of information and the exclusion of the issues of the inhabitants of extensive regions of the interior of Peru in the national information agenda. The project will also combat the lack of diversity and local perspectives in the information offered by the media in Peru. The needs of the audience in the interior of the country has not been satisfied by the local media and is weakened by the current situation of the media environment. The informative content produced by this new media network will have greater visibility and impact giving local audiences news that is relevant to them from a nearby source.
Asociación de Periodismo de Investigación Ojo Público
The Intelligent Journalistic Verification Platform is a digital tool that seeks to provide a solution to the two main challenges of local and regional media in Peru: the production of quality content with few resources and regaining the trust of their audiences by positioning themselves as leaders in the fight against misinformation. This tool will help local newsrooms to generate reliable and timely content, in various formats, for audiences in territories with vulnerable populations in the Andes and the Amazon. The project will promote the application of verification parameters, strengthen the capacity to produce quality content and foster the bond of trust with the audience.
Asociación de Periodismo con Lupa
The Vital Data Hub will be a tool to empower small newsrooms and independent journalists who want to tell ambitious, data-driven health stories. These smaller organizations often do not have data analysts who can facilitate the use of complex data in the reporting process. The Vital Data Hub service will also allow us to add another revenue stream for Salud Con Lupa, strengthening our organization's business model.
RPP - Radio Programas del Perú
A web base and app base platform that will identify our contributors and help our journalist sort out the cases. The platform itself can serve as a repository of cases so we can create a community where we can follow up on cases and solutions.
The SME and SOHO don't have an easy and affordable solution to advertise their products/services on news and content sites. This sector also has limited resources and they can't waste time because it is too valuable.
Asociacion Convoca
As more and more media outlets are operating on a tight budget, the likelihood of news organizations investing in innovative digital products, like video games, which will ultimately increase the scope of their content, are slight to none. Journal Games seeks to both create video games that do not demand a significant investment and increase the scope of in-depth stories that uncover facts of public interest.
Regional media outlets grouped in a network will gain visibility for their journalistic work through the simultaneous and joint publication of their work.The platform seeks to improve workflow efficiency, drive reader engagement, and improve distribution channels with automation.
The Intelligent Journalistic Verification Platform is a digital tool for generating journalistic content in multiple formats by combining a content manager based on verification parameters and an AI software for voice generation, in order to automatize and improve the process for small newsroom publishers.
The Vital Data Hub is the first digital tool of its kind, providing analyzed public health data in a variety of formats to journalists, newsrooms, and academic institutions. The Vital Data Hub will serve Latin American journalists and researchers with data analysis reports which combine multiple data sets and specialized sources and data visualization about highly relevant public health topics.
Rotafono 2.0 is the evolution of a news service that helps hundreds of citizens on a daily basis with everyday problems. RPP Noticias will develop a platform that will help serve a higher rate of information and create a community of citizen journalism. Through Rotafono today, we give voice to the people of Perú and help them solve problems that the authorities won't.</p><p>The challenge is to help our journalist sort out through the abundance of calls and messages we receive from our audience. Also give our audience a tool to categorize the type of cases they send us, that way we can give coverage to more content and solve more cases.
This platform will integrate various digital ad products into a single software where SME and SOHO can directly program their campaigns. With a great user experience the client will be able to implement the entire ad campaign including social media and our own media products with automatized processes. It also aims to make the SME and SOHO segments a profitable market for news media companies contributing on the sustainability of the industry.
Journal Games is an online platform to create personalized video games that seeks to expand the scope of investigative stories that reveal information of public interest. The platform will allow media outlets, news organizations, journalists and researchers to create video games in a short amount of time with no need of coding or programming skills.
la diaria
Problems: - Children have few spaces and opportunities to exercise their citizenship from a wholesome position. - The main difficulty that exists when thinking contents for children, is often the adults behind the idea and the baggage of preconceptions they carry. - There are currently no free and secure platforms for children's interaction. Solution: Co design, with active participation of children to create a truly appropriate space for children to consume journalism. When children appropriate a medium, they see better their possibilities of expression, communicative capacity and the decisions involved in making it, and will therefore be more accurate critics of the messages produced by others.
It is not a crisis of journalism, but of a journalistic business model. In short term, the subscription model is a powerful alternative; however, in the long term, it consolidates its exclusionary nature.
la diaria, ARF Studio and VeoveoLab will develop a safe and fun website. Children will be able to get access to reliable news and connect with each other and with the editorial staff of Gigantes, feedback on the content, suggest new ideas and become part of the conversation. The development team will carry out an iterative design thinking process integrating children's views and feedback and will design and build a web-based platform aimed at amplifying young people's voices in a positive and inclusive way.
la diaria will develop tools to empower and re-empower journalism, with a special commitment to community engagement.
El Pitazo
Digital news organizations will be able to add a new source of income without having to pay for expensive technological developments. To this end, our team will build in 12 months a software as a service (Saas) that can be implemented in the web of each digital media to allow the automated publication of classified ads.
The self-managed classified ads platform for entrepreneurs and small advertisers is a new monetization opportunity for digital media. Through our platform, news organizations will be able to offer outreach to their customers (advertisers) with the publication of commercial, job, legal and obituary ads on their websites. The transactional operations and validation of advertiser data will be supported by blockchain technology, to provide security and trust to all parties involved.
Our brand and content is highly relevant for all of our audience groups. Especially for handicapped users it requires a clear commitment from us, as a publisher, to make content consumable in additional ways to address everyone and grow inclusion in the entire industry. We will evaluate different technology providers for text-to-speech solutions, pick and build an MVP as well as test and train such solution under real circumstances for a high quality result.
This project is driven from a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) point of view, to give especially handicapped users (e.g. reading disabilities, visual impairments, speech impediments) a barrier-free access to relevant news. We, as Kronen Zeitung, commit to the goal of making news even more consumable in additional ways, by providing an audio version for our articles through an automated and well trained text-to-speech solution. Not only to broaden the audience, further more to follow our social responsibility to give barrier-free access!
Publishing house and newspaper Borba
The problem is the difficult transition that a regional newspaper like ours has to make from print to online edition in a very short time. We suggest that instead of small media trying to catch up with the big ones, they should focus on the regional news, which is their uniqueness, and seek a close relationship and two-way communication with the readers, using some useful practices from the print editions.
The project envisages the creation of three microsites for the main site of the Borba newspaper. Each of them is aimed at a certain audience - these are the groups that are least represented among our readership - teenagers, pensioners and residents of a nearby mountainous region. These microsites will have their own life and activity, but will still be subordinated to the main activity of the newspaper - coverage of life in the region. The goal is to continuously use some good practices from publishing the printed edition of the newspaper (the two-way relationship with the readers) and to apply them in the work of the digital edition.
There are two challenges we wish to tackle with this project: 1. make sure our fact-checking articles are delivered to the readers that need them the most. 2. kick-start our first-party data collecting efforts and be better prepared for the demise of third-party cookies.
We are building an easy-to-use widget where our readers can express their attitudes toward public personas and pre-selected topics. Then, we use AI for user profiling, identifying problematic pockets of users, and content personalisation based on their choices.
Trima News
The majority of publishers in the Czech Republic have started to withdraw from regions so more blind spots (news deserts) are starting to appear. Blind spots mean places which are not covered by news in any way. We see news as a critical infrastructure and at the same time as a protection of democracy, which is why our goal is to get news into as many blind spots as possible. By involving readers in the creation of news we will cover many more blind spots.
Our goal is to provide readers with free local independent news even in very small regions. We also noticed publishers leaving small regions and only focusing on central news. We want to create a mobile app which allows readers to participate at creating news by submitting their topics/articles directly to the publisher. This way we will be able to pay attention to very local topics and therefore help protect democracy. We also believe this app will motivate other publishers to do the same.
Føljeton
In the past year, media organisations across the globe have been experiencing a slow-down in subscriber growth. This is bad news for an industry that is reliant on direct reader revenue. With our project, we intend to turn our subscribers into members by engaging more directly with them, thus strengthening both retention and word of mouth in order to reignite growth.
The Followership is a project that aims to redefine the way in which Danish news media Føljeton engages with subscribers. Rather than thinking of subscribers in a traditional way as simply customers, we want to involve them more directly with our editorial processes and workflows on a custom built platform. We want to turn subscribers into members.
Les Jours
At Les Jours, we love to understand how systems, whether company boards, political parties, or lobbyist groups, are built, influence or are influenced within their environment. Our investigations imply many characters and/or organisations and the complexity of the links between them can be tough to fully digest. We want to create a visualisation tool and feed it with our content, to help our readers keep track more easily of our thorough investigations. This tool will provide a graphical representation of the main characters, companies, organisations, and the links between each of them in the context of our journalistic series.
By creating a DAO, we will include a new and younger audience in L'Humanité and contribute to recreate trust toward us by letting people decide the topics they want to address around Web 3. We will create a direct relationship with them, understand their needs and allow L'Humanité to pertain.
As a business, we need to transform the level of engagement of our users from passive users consuming our content on social media into active users using our website more often in order to develop consumer revenue but also to increase the loyalty of our users. These games will create the foundation of our community of members and so our new membership model.
Voxe Pulse addresses a 3 sided problem : 1) news readers are exposed to advertising but don't have a say about what they see, especially in newsletters. 2) advertisers paying for ads in written media have a hard time collecting exact and transparent data to quantify their ROI, especially in newsletters. 3) media companies waste time and resources collecting data from the brands, reassuring them and keeping them up to date with the publication process. But most of all, they struggle to retain their advertisers.
Africa Business+
B2B customers face a chronic lack of transparency and automation when dealing with news outlets regarding: pricing, associated services and interactions with marketing teams. They become distrustful of news organisations and are deterred from accessing the news leading to low adoption rates. With Kelibia, customers input employees' information and track consumption with targeted KPIs. After one year, they get a regularisation bill based on the real consumption of their employees with an adjusted and adapted renewal offer.
Wedodata
The challenge is the democratisation of 3D mapping video for the media ecosystem. We are working on a 3D video mapping tool based on the open source tool KeplerGl. Of course, it's not about taking screenshots from the online tool, but about using KeplerGl's camera movement features and creating an interface to manage the state of the view camera / viewport at the same time as the state of the data over time, by defining different keyframes, and interpolations / easing, pauses, etc... and to optimise the calculation process in order to have rendering cycles fast enough to be exploited in a daily media.
Digital subscriptions and paywalls are enduring monetisation models for the media industry. But as more readers subscribe to more news sources, subscription fatigue is likely to translate to lower engagement, higher churn rates, and unsteady revenue streams. PowerKey is a new sustainable monetisation model that cultivates our community's engagement in the long run. 35% of our current readership is willing to donate to Futura to ask us to cover specific issues, so we believe this model is the right one for our audience. We hope that PowerKey will contribute to greater sustainability of the subscription revenue stream for them, and benefit the news ecosystem at large.
Mytho!
Mytho ! stimulates brain and challenges minds via already debunked information. Our principle is to protect the precious and useful importance of truth and information with counter-attacks on social networks and media.
This project aims at enriching our investigations by helping our readers visualise the web of connections between important people and organisations. We wish to make complex investigations easier to grasp for readers. We will do that by building a set of tools to generate Influence Maps that will be freely accessible and shareable. An Influence Map is an interactive map of connections between important people and organisations, providing news consumers a way of understanding links between entities of power and summarising journalistic investigations in a playful, easy-to-understand and easy-to-remember way.
L'Humanité plans to launch a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that will be in charge of the creation and animation of the new website's vertical of L'Humanité.fr dedicated to Web3. This project will lead to set up a recruitment process for young tech-savvy, close to the values of L'Humanité, who will this way discover this news outlet, bring their knowledge and wishes to enrich the editorial offer, and get involved in the medium term strategy of L'Humanité concerning Web3.
This project is about creating the founding games of Konbini Games, a new section of our website dedicated to building cross-generational culture knowledge. We believe finding and building common knowledge about music, cinema and everything related to the pop culture is a part of our mission as a media organisation. We want to reunite our audiences around the cultural knowledge that they share. We want to build a playful content experience that can gather people from different age, colours, beliefs.
Voxe Pulse is the dashboard all newsletter media companies dream of : a CRM that make relationships with advertisers friction-free and more transparent and that allows teams to focus on what matters most : the reader's experience. In order to serve readers better, Voxe Pulse also collects wishes from the audience in terms of advertising.
Kelibia is an innovative B2B self-service manager. It acts as a subscription management platform where B2B customers are priced fairly based on the real consumption of their employees. It consists of the following: customer-facing dashboard, internal consumption dashboard, automatic pricing tool that adjusts prices based on usage. It's an innovative tool that's highly beneficial to our customers leading to: more transparency, fairer prices, greater trust in the news, high ownership of the subscription service, fast and hassle-free subscription processes
Cinedatamap will offer the opportunity for data-journalists to create 3D mapping videos, in a few hours, without being a specialist in video editing. For the first time, they'll have the c