JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative

Enabling publishers to experiment, implement and share best practices of AI technologies

While many, mainly larger and some well resourced newsrooms have benefited and seen the transformative power of AI, smaller newsrooms often face unique challenges in adopting this technology. A number of small and medium-sized publishers are already exploring the possibilities of AI technologies. The JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative, aims to fund projects/tools from these news publishers to help fight misinformation and disinformation, experiment with new formats across mobile, video and audio and identify ways to grow subscription and support diverse forms of revenue.

This nine-month long programme is designed by the JournalismAI team at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and supported by the Google News Initiative.

This new grantmaking programme will enable 35 news organisations around the world to experiment and implement solutions to enhance and improve journalistic systems and processes using AI technologies. By the end of the programme, selected organisations will also share outcomes of their respective projects, and best practices about using AI technologies in the news industry.

The grants will be awarded to organisations who seek to work on the following thematic areas:

Help fight misinformation and disinformation

Experiment with new formats to engage new and existing audiences

Identify ways to grow subscription and support diverse forms of revenue

Grants will be awarded as follows:

  • 10 ideas will receive $250,000 each

  • 25 ideas will receive $50,000 each

Selected Grantees 2024

Experimenting with new formats across mobile, video and audio

  • The Republic

    Country: Nigeria 🇳🇬

    Tool: MINIM: An AI voice converter

    The Republic’s AI voice converter tool, Minim, uses AI to help newsrooms and content creators translate their content into indigenous African languages and audio formats.

  • Agencia Mural

    Country: Brazil 🇧🇷

    Tool: Local Climate Alert

    Agencia Mural will develop an AI tool that leverages local public environmental data to generate personalised information and alert low-income and underserved communities in São Paulo, Brazil.

  • ICIR Nigeria

    Country: Nigeria 🇳🇬

    Tool: NativeAI for Newsrooms

    ICIR Nigeria is developing NativeAI for Newsrooms, an AI-driven tool that transcribes audio-visuals into text; with the ability to further translate texts into the three major Nigerian languages (Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba).

  • CINS

    Country: Serbia🇷🇸

    Tool: wAIting for health

    With the use of AI solutions, the Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CINS) will collect data and write engaging stories about one of the decades-old questions in Serbia: why aren’t citizens getting the necessary medical treatment on time?

  • Scroll.In

    Country: India 🇮🇳

    Tool: Factivo 2.0, a versioning platform

    Imagine a 2,000-word article as 'raw material.' Could this be adapted to a form (think decision tree, interactive game, calculator, FAQs or atomised summaries) that helps users find the information they want most? Scroll.in’s AI-based tool, Factivo 2.0 will do just that. It will repurpose news articles into information formats.

  • Nawaat

    Country: Tunisia 🇹🇳

    Tool: Nawaat AI

    Nawaat's AI-powered content platform enhances audience engagement with Tunisian history and current affairs. It features the Nawaat Time Machine for archive exploration and enables AI-generated formats, empowering users to gain deeper context and interact with content innovatively.

  • Raseef22

    Country: UK 🇬🇧

    Tool: Ask Aunty / اسأل خلتك

    Ask Aunty is a friendly AI chatbot for Arabic speakers to anonymously ask SRHR (Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights) questions. Styled as a quirky 'aunt', it offers quick, simplified answers from Raseef22 archives and trusted sources, using an informal tone to break taboos and normalise critical discussions in the MENA region.

  • Economía para la Pipol

    Country: Colombia 🇨🇴

    Tool: El chatbot de IA de Economía para la pipol

    Economía para la Pipol will create an AI chatbot that will help users contrast political statements with economic data and learn about economics for daily use. It will serve both the general public and journalists, fostering more accurate reporting and public discussions.

  • Babel NGO

    Country: Ukraine 🇺🇦

    Tool: Bridging continuity gaps in media with AI collaboration

    Ukrainian media, Babel, faces challenges in sustaining projects, specifically YouTube projects, due to potential personnel shortages at the organisation owing to war-related mobilisation and migration. They propose an AI avatar replicating the journalist's voice and appearance, ensuring seamless content production while allowing their continued contribution to the process.

  • El Surti

    Country: Paraguay 🇵🇾

    Tool: From Diglossia to Dialogue: Unlocking Guarani’s future with AI

    El Surti seeks to address the linguistic gap in AI systems for 7 million Guarani speakers by improving datasets for LLMs like GPT through collaboration with native speakers. They will develop a prototype on WhatsApp to train models and create a replicable method for media to serve oral-language audiences, fostering inclusive AI in the Global South.

  • The European Correspondent (TEC)

    Country: Switzerland 🇨🇭

    Tool: Vika, the Companion Editor

    The European Correspondent’s Vika is an AI-powered editor that acts as a companion supporting journalists in  thinking critically about their articles, helping align them with audience needs, and supporting the journalist in integrating relationship-building, interactive elements into their reporting.

  • CalMatters

    Country: U.S.A 🇺🇲

    Tool: Digital Democracy AI - US national expansion

    CalMatters built an AI-based tool, called Digital Democracy, that makes California's legislature -- with a US$300 billion annual budget -- much more transparent and accessible for the 39 million people who live there. With this grant, they will expand and scale the tool to serve other U.S. states.

Identifying ways to grow subscriptions and support diverse forms of revenue

  • Digitalhaus Franken GmbH

    Country: Germany 🇩🇪

    Tool: PULSE - Predictive User Loyalty System for Engagement

    PULSE aims to revolutionise Digitalhaus Franken’s subscriber management. They’re developing an AI-driven system to predict cancellation probability and recommend interventions. As soon as behavioural data of a customer indicates a certain probability of churn, they want to be able to counteract.

  • Sowt

    Country: Jordan 🇯🇴

    Tool: Leveraging AI to grow subscriptions and support diverse revenue streams

    Leveraging AI, this project aims to boost subscription growth by analysing customer behaviour, personalising marketing, and predicting churn. By optimising pricing, exploring new revenue streams, and enhancing customer lifetime value, Sowt anticipates significant increases in revenue and customer retention.

  • openDemocracy

    Country: UK 🇬🇧

    Tool: CopySwap:

    openDemocracy’s CopySwap is an AI-powered platform to help small news organisations expand audiences and boost revenue by matching newsletters with partners for content sharing. It supports sustainable growth and helps increase revenue from readers.

  • The Oglethorpe Echo

    Country: U.S.A 🇺🇲

    Tool: Creating sustainable AI use in local newsrooms and news-academic partnerships

    The Oglethorpe Echo will innovate tangible pathways for AI integration and local journalism sustainability for our news-academic partnership in rural Georgia (USA) and other local newsrooms by partnering with YESEO, a well-loved AI and Google Trends-powered product, so The Oglethorpe Echo’s reporters can gain effective and ethical workflow efficiencies to allow them to better serve their community.

  • La Silla Vacía

    Country: Colombia 🇨🇴

    Tool: AudiencIA:

    Imagine an AI hub for high-quality Spanish-language journalism: we generate personalised reports for subscribers, create intelligent story drafts, optimise Twitter threads, and perfect style correction, all on one platform. But, at la Silla Vacía, they’re not just improving our newsroom; they’re offering this power as SaaS to small and medium-sized media outlets, democratising AI in journalism. It's customisable, scalable, and includes training.

  • Gubbi Labs LLP

    Country: India 🇮🇳

    Tool: Using AI to amplify science communication

    Gubbi Labs’ project aims to create a user-friendly application that leverages large language models to transform research articles into engaging stories, enabling non-technical writers to efficiently generate high-quality science communication output and improve accessibility to complex research.

  • Makedonia

    Country: Greece 🇬🇷

    Tool: PNN (Personalised Notifications & Newsletters)

    Makedonia’s project leverages AI to analyse user behaviour, personalise content, and optimise notifications, enhancing engagement and reducing churn. By rebuilding our digital presence, we aim to grow a loyal audience, revitalise our brand, and prepare for future subscription models.

  • Daily Maverick

    Country: South Africa🇿🇦

    Tool: Revenue 360

    Daily Maverick’s Revenue 360 is an AI solution to a variety of problems faced by news media. Designed to increase reader revenue conversion; create a network effect with readers that will both allow them to engage directly with us and each other; and retain paying members via impact tracking of our journalism.

  • Mas Voces Foundation, INC

    Country: U.S.A 🇺🇲

    Tool: Harnessing AI technology to support a subscription-based product offering economic information.

    Mas Voces Foundation’s project will be a service providing real-time financial and economic data using AI to process information from social media, virtual spaces, and other unstructured sources. This product fills critical information gaps and serves as a new revenue stream for media outlets.

To fight misinformation and disinformation

  • Chequeado

    Country: Argentina 🇦🇷

    Tool: Empowering small newsrooms with AI: Enhancing verification to support democracy

    Chequeado’s proposal is to develop an AI-powered assistant for newsrooms that offers preloaded and customisable AI tasks like automated draft creation for debunks, source validation, or social media content generation aiming to help small newsrooms and fact-checking organisations respond more efficiently.

  • Full Fact

    Country: UK 🇬🇧

    Tool: Harnessing GenAI to hold the UK government accountable and combat misinformation

    Full Fact isdeveloping a GenAI-powered chat interface to support Full Fact’s Government Tracker, a project designed to provide the public with impartial and accurate information on the government’s progress and to hold the incumbent government accountable.

  • Science Feedback

    Country: France 🇫🇷

    Tool: Climate Safeguards

    Science Feedback is developing an AI-powered system to detect and analyse climate misinformation on broadcast TV and radio at scale, empowering fact-checkers, media, and regulators with actionable insights to expose and combat misleading climate narratives.

  • Newtral 

    Country: Spain 🇪🇸

    Tool: FactFlow AI

    Newtral is developing FactFlow, a multimodal AI tool combating misinformation on Telegram. It identifies disinformative behaviour and false content, offering fact-checkers a dashboard for real-time narrative detection and tailored alerts for NGOs and companies to address misinformation risks effectively.

  • Nest Center for Journalism Innovation and Development

    Country: Mongolia 🇲🇳

    Tool: Combating disinformation by liberating the news ecosystem to return the right to judgment to news consumers through advanced AI

    Nest will develop a plugin using AI language learning technology to identify biases, sentiments, and volume of coverage on certain topics and underreported areas in Mongolia’s public interest media sphere. The plugin will identify disinformation to a degree of certainty based on features of common disinformation. 

  • Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ)

    Country: U.S.A 🇺🇲

    Tool: ElectionWatch:

    CCIJ’s project leverages data journalism to develop a tool for monitoring, archiving, and analysing election misinformation on platforms like TikTok and Telegram. It identifies patterns, tracks narratives, and safeguards press freedom amid increasing attacks on journalists in West Africa.

  • Shomrim – The Center for Media and Democracy

    Country: Israel 🇮🇱

    Tool: SourceGuard: AI-powered credibility standard for journalism

    Shomrin sets out to develop an AI-powered, multi-tiered system for editors and journalists to verify the credibility of information. It will enable reporters to investigate and verify archival sources quickly and efficiently and provide editors with a tool to assess credibility.

  • Fogo Cruzado

    Country: Brazil 🇧🇷

    Tool: BulletData

    BulletData bridges Fogo Cruzado’s extensive gun violence database with public access, using AI to deliver verified, neighbourhood-specific information. By combining Large Language Models and conversational interfaces, it combats misinformation and fosters informed community responses, enhancing democratic public discourse.

  • Tama Media

    Country: France 🇫🇷

    Tool: Akili

    Tama Media’s proposal is to build Akili, a mobile app will be a mobile app dedicated to fight  fake news and misinformation in West Africa. Akili will be equipped with a chatbot that allows users to verify information and get instant responses thanks to artificial intelligence. But when the chatbot is unable to answer some questions, it sends an alert to proven journalists and fact-checkers who can verify the information. The app aims to make fact-checking accessible to everyone, even to illiterate persons in Africa by using voice messages in local languages.

  • Gênero e Número

    Country: Brazil 🇧🇷

    Tool: Uncovering gendered disinformation on YouTube

    Gênero e Número is developing a platform to track gendered disinformation on YouTube, focusing on how influencers promote narratives aligned with conservative agendas that undermine women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights. This platform will empower journalists, researchers, and policymakers with resources to protect vulnerable communities and foster inclusive, fact-based discussions on gender issues.

  • Verify Media Platform

    Country: Turkey 🇹🇷

    Tool: New era of fact-checking in Syria and MENA region

    Verify Media Platform aims to launch an enhanced AI-powered WhatsApp bot capable of verifying news through both a local database and trusted web sources.This advancement will strengthen fact-checking processes and ensure a long-term impact of truth and democracy in Syria and the MENA region.

  • Maldita.es 

    Country: Spain 🇪🇸

    Tool: AI assistant for fact-checkers

    Leveraging advances in text and image processing, Maldita.es will empower fact-checkers with an AI assistant that boosts efficiency by browsing through resources, finding content clusters, matching new claims with old, suggesting relevant debunks and experts, and describing formats of disinformation.

  • Verified News Network (VNN)

    Country: U.S.A 🇺🇲

    Tool: Indian Country Chatbot

    VNN’s Indian Country Chatbot will empower Native communities by combating misinformation with real-time, culturally relevant fact-checking. Developed by a Native-led team, this chatbot will strengthen media literacy, promote informed decision-making, and foster resilience against harmful narratives affecting Indian Country.

  • VERA Files

    Country: Philippines🇵🇭

    Tool: S-E-E-K by VERA Files

    S-E-E-K is a generative search engine within the VERA Files website built on its growing database of over 4,000 fact-check articles. S-E-E-K seeks to take the extra work out of searching, giving readers direct answers to their most pressing fact-checking questions.

Timeline

FAQs

For frequently asked questions, please see here.


The JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative, is organised by the JournalismAI team at Polis – the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and it is powered by the Google News Initiative.