IPI’s call for applications to our Local News Accelerator 2025 is now closed. We thank everyone who took the time to apply. Each year, we witness an amazing global group of local and niche media striving to find new avenues for innovating, generating revenue, and, at the core, better serving their communities.
The 2025 Local News Accelerator is part of IPI’s media innovation programme, which supports digital innovation in local news around the world, assisting each media’s near and long-term viability through editorial innovation, and operational and business development. We see media innovation and viability as a key pillar of press freedom, essential to growing threats facing the industry all around the world.
In this application cycle, we had the pleasure of learning about a wide range of project focuses, including growing audiences and improving reach through newsletters and social media, building strategies for organizational collaborations, using tech for revenue diversification, designing hyperlocal products, building memberships and more.
This year, we received a record number of 143 applications from over 59 countries and territories: Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Bangladesh, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Burundi, Canada, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Liberia, Libya, Malaysia, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Peru, Philippines, Romania, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Türkiye, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
With the third iteration of this programme, our Media Innovation team is excited to see the growing interest from local and niche news organizations.
What’s next?
In the next few weeks, the jury will convene to thoroughly review all applications, and all applicants will be informed of the outcome by mid-September. A public announcement of successful newsrooms will be made at a later date.
The format is based on IPI’s innovation learning journey, piloted during the 2023 Local News Accelerator, in which publishers from around the world achieved measurable impacts such as growth in readership, doubling of subscribers, building new onboarding tools and engagement channels and launching membership models and crowdfunding campaigns.
The programme will follow a five-month learning journey designed to support local newsrooms in defining their product-market fit, building new editorial and revenue products with the support of experts and innovation methods to identify and deliver solutions that will advance their projects toward financial and editorial sustainability.
In the next weeks, IPI’s in-house experts will conduct a comprehensive one-on-one needs assessment and set up a curriculum that provides guidance and personalized advisory services to the selected applicants, setting them up to maximize the benefits of the programme.
By the end of the Accelerator, the participants will have the opportunity to extend mentorship and will remain involved in the IPI Local News and Innovation Network.
IPI’s Local News Accelerator is made possible with support from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
