Meet 12 publishers awarded AI innovation grants
These publishers will, over the next nine months, develop AI based products that boost audience intelligence and revenue growth, through the JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative
The 12 publishers selected for the 2025 JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative programme.
We’re pleased to announce the 12 selected candidates of the 2025 JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative. Each of the grantees will receive either $50,000 or $100,000 to foster AI literacy and implementation through targeted innovation and experimentation. This grant funding is made possible through the support of the Google News Initiative.
The organisations represent 11 countries from across the world: Taiwan, Slovakia, Portugal, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, United States, Spain, Italy, and Brazil. They will spend the next nine months working on projects that revolve around audience intelligence and revenue growth.
"We're excited to see what comes from the broad range of innovative ideas proposed by these 12 winning publishers," said Matt Cooke, Head of Ecosystem Investment Programs, Google News Partnerships. "Since it was founded, we've collaborated with JournalismAI at the London School of Economics to help promote experimentation, understanding and share best practices to the ecosystem.”
“For great journalism to thrive it needs revenue and this Innovation Challenge is all about using AI for that goal. We have a dynamic dozen news organisations from around the world who are going to be creating pathways for others to follow,” said Prof Charlie Beckett, Director, JournalismAI, LSE.
We received a significant number of applications from around the world, 372 to be exact, and the finalists were selected by an independent panel of four experts in the field together with the JournalismAI team.
Selected candidates’ project ideas range from a tool to make climate journalism more accessible to audiences, to predicting churn risk, and improving impact communications.
Meet the cohort
This second cohort follows the inaugural JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative which awarded 35 publishers from 22 countries grants. Read about their projects in this report and watch this video about the programme.
