Selected Projects
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.
No Results
アメリカ合衆国
The Current
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.
Eugene Weekly
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
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.
THE CITY
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.
Documented
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.
Santa Clara University
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.
Local Media Foundation 2020
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.
MediaNews Group
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.
Northwestern University
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.
WBUR
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.
La Noticia
Challenge:
Michigan Radio
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.
Southern California News Group
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.
Okayplayer
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.
カナダ
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.
Le Devoir
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.
Ryerson University
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.
Winnipeg Free Press
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.
オーストラリア
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
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.
バングラデシュ
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.
香港
South China Morning Post
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.
インド
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.
EastMojo
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.
インドネシア
KBR
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.