Selected Projects

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.

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.