2025 Innovation Challenge::
Meet the 12 JournalismAI Innovation Challenge grantees and explore their projects
The second JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative, awarded 12 news organisations from 11 countries grants of $50,000 or $100,000 to help them experiment, implement and share best practices of AI technologies.
Each grantee spent nine months building a prototype and integrating AI into its newsroom workflows. Each project focused on one or both of two areas:
Grow revenue: strengthen subscriptions, memberships, and other forms of reader revenue
Improve audience intelligence: understand readers better and serve them more relevant journalism
Explore the 2025 Grantees Journeys
The 2025 Innovation Challenge Report, Prompting Sustainability, collects case studies from all 12 grantees and reveals their journeys, challenges, and opportunities.
Read about their experiences, discover best practices, and find inspiration in their innovative approaches to integrating AI into journalism.
Retention and churn reduction
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Denník N
Country: Slovakia
Tool: AI-powered churn predictio
Newsroom size: 101 - 200
Solution: Automated daily scoring model to rank subscribers by churn risk and trigger targeted retention tests
Read the case study
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Civio
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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Malaysiakini
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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The Reporter
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.
Audience engagement and personalisation
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Rappler
Country: Brazil 🇧🇷
Tool: Local Climate Alert
Project: Local Climate Alert
Newsroom size: 10 - 20Agencia 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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Medical Dialogues
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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Observador
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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Amazônia Real
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?
Civic transparency and impact tracking
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Religion News Service
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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Public Policy
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.
Data infrastructure and monetisation
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Ambiental Media
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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Tempo
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.
The JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, is organised by the JournalismAI team at Polis – the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and it is supported by the Google News Initiative.
