The International Press Institute (IPI) today announced the first three winners in its News Innovation Contest. The three winning projects, which will receive more than $600,000 in total, operate across Mali, Turkey, France, the Netherlands and the UK. The winners were chosen from the more than 300 applications received since February of this year.
The contest is sponsored by Google, who provided a grant of $2.7 million to the IPI. The contest focuses on projects in online innovation and training being carried out by or for journalists in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. This is the first round of the contest. In 2012, IPI will consider a new set of proposals and award the remainder of the grant.
The contest aims to support journalism projects for the digital age. The IPI considered projects building platforms for delivering high-quality journalism to communities; training projects to help journalists ride the ‘Internet wave’; and projects exploring new economic models for the future of online.
“The contest, a first of its kind for the 61-year-old IPI, is in line with the organization’s commitment to defending press freedom and promoting the quality of journalism worldwide,” said IPI Executive Director Alison Bethel McKenzie.
“The goals set forth by the IPI for the contest resulted in the attraction of a diverse and vast group of applicants,” said José Otárola-Silesky, IPI’s grants officer. “We faced three regions with different realities in terms of Internet access, press freedom and technological development. In addition, innovation and new technologies are not the topics over which some populations are used to competing for funding.”
A panel of experts from Europe, the Middle East and Africa reviewed the 26 finalists, chosen from more than 300 applications. The IPI invites new applications, as well as applicants who did not succeed in this round of funding, to apply for the IPI News Innovation Contest 2012.
The IPI News Innovation Contest 2012 will call for applications in February next year. It will change slightly in structure – but not in essence. The Contest will be held over a shorter period, and will provide revamped guidelines for participants.
The 2011 winners are:
Project Name: Voice-Based Citizen Journalism
Organization: World Wide Web Foundation
Area of execution: France, Netherlands and Mali
Description: The project will design, implement and validate a novel voice news platform that is suitable for rural regions in developing countries, and that combines Web platform facilities with spoken content and associated voice services accessible and manageable through simple mobile phones. This platform enables voice-based citizen journalism to gather and deliver news from and to people in rural regions through community radio as well as their own mobile phones, independently of their language, education level, type of phone, and Internet connectivity.
Project Name: Big Picture Digital Journalism
Organization: Internews Europe
Area of execution: Ivory Coast, Uganda, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Kenya
Description: This project will focus on three core areas: a Crowdsourced Journalism Training Program; Crowdsourced Journalism Project Support; and a Crowdsourced Journalism Practitioner Platform. The project seeks to improve journalism excellence by increasing the availability of expertise in crowdsourced journalism approaches and increasing the number of journalists with the skills to leverage crowdsourcing approaches to contribute to press freedom and democracy.
Project Name: The Media and Digital Enterprise Project (MaDE)
Organization: Journalism Leaders Programme, University of Central Lancashire
Area of execution: United Kingdom and Turkey
Description: The Media and Digital Enterprise (MaDE) project links several key activities that are critical to the success of news innovation activities – specific training in cutting-edge data journalism skills and the fundamentals of digital business using an innovative combination of face-to-face workshops and online learning support; tailored support from software developers and business incubation experts for high-potential enterprises; on-going networking activities for all participants; critical reflection and reporting on the project and process in order to disseminate learning to the wider journalism industry.
For more information on the winners or the Contest go to www.ipinewscontest.org, or follow us on Facebook, via our Twitter feed: @ipinewscontest or on LinkedIn (ipinewscontest).
