2024 Innovation Challenge::

Country: Germany 🇩🇪

Tool: PULSE - Predictive User Loyalty System for Engagement

Newsroom size: 51 - 100

Solution: Digitalhaus Franken’s an AI-powered tool that predicts and prevents subscriber churn to improve retention and strengthen audience loyalty.

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Country: Jordan 🇯🇴

Tool: AI-Powered campaign performance predictions

Newsroom size: 21 - 50

Solution: Sowt an AI-powered tool that drives subscription growth by analysing personalisation strategies to boost revenue and retention.

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Country: U.S.A 🇺🇲

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

Newsroom size: 10 - 20

Solution: The Oglethorpe Echo created a Slack-based AI tool that helps small newsrooms boost efficiency, reduce repetitive tasks, and strengthen local journalism.

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Country: UK 🇬🇧

Tool: CopySwap

Newsroom size: 10 - 20

Solution: openDemocracy’s AI-powered platform automates content sharing between newsrooms, helping them expand their audiences and boost reader revenue.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Country: Brazil 🇧🇷
Tool: Local Climate Alert
Project: Local Climate Alert
Newsroom size: 10 - 20

Agencia Mural developed an AI-powered alert system that delivers concise, location-based climate risk updates to help communities make safer, faster decisions.

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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.

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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).

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Country: UK 🇬🇧

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

Full Fact is developing 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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Country: France 🇫🇷

Tool: Akili

Tama Media’s proposal is to build Akili, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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