With more than 15 brands across formats and verticals, Medialivre’s history extends back to the 1990s. It was only in 2023, though, that the group rebranded to Medialivre – and with this rebranding came a new focus on digital media.

“Previously, our business model was based on print revenue, which you know is fading,” explains Medialivre Chief Digital Officer Isabel Rodrigues. “With our rebranding, we wanted to reinvent the news operation for the digital age and ensure the sustainability of the business.”

Having worked with the Google News Initiative (GNI) on innovation projects in the past, Medialivre enlisted their help when launching Project Alfa, a complete digital transformation that would restructure editorial products, create new areas of expertise, and redefine the business for a multimedia, digital-first audience. The first step of Project Alfa, they decided, would simply be getting their various brands on the same page through workflow automation.

To create a convergent model where employees could communicate across brands, Medialivre created Global Agenda, a workflow automation tool to streamline content production. After scoping out the project with GNI, they launched Global Agenda in July 2024.

“This wouldn’t have happened so quickly without GNI,” Rodrigues says. “Putting this together with the Google team allowed us to go to market and make adjustments based on their feedback, so the partnership was very valuable thanks to the exchange of ideas and GNI’s support.”

Global Agenda now enables knowledge sharing among employees regardless of media outlet or location. “With the Agenda, everyone knows who is in the field and which story is our priority,” explains Bernardo Ribeiro, Deputy General Editorial Manager. “You can clean out redundancies, even if it's just a small thing like which car is taking which journalists where. It’s a new world for us.”

Global Agenda also integrates with Medialivre’s other software, so that photography and videography are available on the platform in addition to articles. All the classifications, keywords, and tags are uploaded automatically when journalists create a story, simplifying archive management.