Editor’s note from Ludovic Blecher, Head of Google News Initiative Innovation: The GNI Innovation Challengeprogram, is designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas for the news industry. The story below by Dina Aboughazala, founder of the journalism marketplace Egab, is part of an innovator seriessharing inspiring stories and lessons from funded projects. The third Middle East, Turkey and Africa Innovation Challengeis now open for applications.

When I spoke to people in my home country of Egypt, they were actively avoiding the news. Many young people in their 20s and 30s wanted to leave because it was full of problems. As someone with an editorial, journalistic background, I was annoyed and felt moved to act. I wanted to show people that there were solutions, we just don’t hear about them.

I joined a startup accelerator to learn about business and tech for news, and explained my idea. One of the mentors stopped me and said, “So you are fixing a problem for yourself?”

At this point I realized I was basing my idea on what I wanted rather than what the users or the audience needed, a common mistake that many journalists who want to start their own media ventures fall into.

It was then that I remembered the dozens of messages I received on Twitter and LinkedIn from young aspiring journalists about how to join the BBC – my former employer – or how to get published there.

I finally understood that, instead of launching yet another media outlet, Egab could be a platform to support young and budding journalists to pitch solutions journalism stories and get published in international media. At the same time, the platform would act as a marketplace for international media editors to be able to select from the pitches, giving them access to unique content.

But one main question remained: Would people pay to have this need fulfilled? I was able to find out the answer and more, thanks to support from the Google News Initiative, as a recipient of the second Middle East, Turkey and Africa Innovation Challenge.

From the start, I envisioned Egab to be a for-profit business. I’ve read about several promising media initiatives that ceased to exist because of the lack of funding. I didn’t want that to happen to Egab if I were to solely rely on grants, which are neither sustainable nor guaranteed.

So, I went on to answer two more questions: Are my targeted users already paying money or exerting a lot of effort to fulfill this need? And what’s the difference between what’s available now and my offering?

At this point I wasn’t ready to build Egab’s platform. The last thing I needed was to put a lot of money into building something that may not be used. So we started with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test the concept in the simplest form.

We started with a landing page and a Google Workspace account. This is how Egab has been operating for a year and a half. We receive journalists' pitches via email; we organize Egab’s team’s work processes using Google Drive. We review pitches and prepare feedback, and when a pitch is ready, we circulate it to editors via email.

Through this very simple process, we were able to gather a lot of useful information. We were able to track our processes against our sales and adjust to become more efficient. We were able to understand our users better – both journalists and media outlets – and understand their needs, as well as the challenges to our model.

The process has not been a straight line. I’ve learned building a product is all about experimenting; testing, gathering data, adjusting and repeating. We now have close to 120 journalists from across 24 countries in the Middle East and Africa using our platform and 13 media outlets using our service. The number of media outlets grows by one new media outlet every month but it’s not all about the numbers.

The quality of the stories we facilitate is very important to us, and we are glad that many of our stories are being well received. As an example, one of our stories from Libya published on The National News was the first story to be added from the country to the Solution Journalism Network's story tracker.The story was also featured in SJN's best stories of 2021.

A year and a half into this experience, we are still testing and experimenting like day one, and I don’t think we will ever stop.

Last month we announced new opportunities for student journalists to develop their reporting skills, and new resources for news organizations to grow their digital business. World events reminded us of the importance of a free press, and in many areas of the world, we expanded on efforts to combat misinformation ahead of elections. Read on for February updates below.

Combating misinformation ahead of elections in Asia and Europe
In collaboration with Meedan and Rappler, we launched #FactsFirstPH, a coalition of more than 100 groups — news, civil society, business, religious groups, academia and legal communities — to create a whole-society approach to attack disinformation ahead of the Philippines election this May. The event will be headlined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate and journalist Maria Ressa.

In France, together with our partner AFP, we announced the 21 members of “Objectif Désinfox,'' a coalition to fight misinformation ahead of the French presidential election.

The Google News Initiative India Training Network, in partnership with DataLEADS, ran PollCheck 2022, a digital training series designed to support journalists reporting the upcoming state polls in India. Topics included data verification, fact-checking, mobile journalism, data visualization and digital safety.

Expanding support for Indonesian fact-checking coalition
The Google News Initiative was a founding supporter of CekFakta, a fact-checking coalition based in Indonesia, when it launched in 2018. We announced an additional 11 billion IDR ($815,000 USD) to bring more local news organizations into the network, expanding reach around the country.

Introducing the Google News Initiative Student Fellowship 2022

In partnership with the European Journalism Centre, the Google News Initiative has made 30 fellowships available across 14 European countries with a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. The 30 successful applicants will receive a full time, paid, eight-week internship in a leading newsroom. For more information and to apply see journalismfellowships.eu

Giving European publishers tools to grow their reader revenue

This month we announced the return of the GNI Subscriptions Academy for Europe, in collaboration with INMA and FT Strategies. The eight-month program is designed to help European publishers strengthen digital subscriptions capabilities and grow reader revenue. Applications are open until March 14.

Helping news organizations to grow their digital business

The Google News Initiative Digital Growth Program has helped more than 5,000 news organizations around the world to grow their business through free business trainings and digital resources. Last month, we developed a free workshop series on how news organizations can collect, analyze and use data to increase their audience size and earn more revenue. The workshops are available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

In North America, we kicked off the 2022 Ad Transformation Lab, a four-month program to help 15 Black- and Latino- owned publications in the U.S. and Canada advance their advertising strategies and grow digital revenue.

We sponsored the News and Information division of the inauguralNext Challenge, which is run by the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media Group. Three of the finalists are former graduates of the GNI Startups Boot Camp:Shasta Scout ('20),Queerency ('21) andAZ Luminaria ('21).

Growing the next generation of journalists

As part of our ongoing efforts to humanize news for younger consumers, we partnered with Baruch College on a program promoting journalism education, school newspapers and news literacy in underserved New York high schools. The program aims to help launch at least 25 school newspapers by the end of 2023.

We announced a new fellowship piloted by Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) to deepen audience engagement and increase staff diversity in the nonprofit newsrooms. The six-month fellowship will connect INN member news organizations with recent college graduates to focus on community engagement, digital marketing, digital communications or audience growth projects.

Engaging audiences in Latin America with web stories

We launched a Storytelling Innovation Program for Latin America featuring more than 70 digital publishers across Argentina, Colombia and Brazil. These publishers partnered with Google and Fundación Gabo, to receive training, and technical guidance to experiment with Web Stories. More than 1,000 stories have been published with impressive preliminary results: some publishers saw traffic increase by 30%.

Promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in Latin American newsrooms

To promote more diverse, inclusive and equitable reporting, and also to support the creation of more inclusive workplaces for journalists, we launched the course "How to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in Latin American journalism" in partnership with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. The course covers topics such as gender, race, human rights and diversity and is led by four prominent Latin American journalists.

Adapting, growing and challenging subscription products

We partnered with Gruner+Jahr, one of Europe’s leading premium magazine publishers, to support the implementation of special-interest digital subscription products across their portfolio. This helped them to grow subscriptions more affordably and develop new subscriptions products more quickly. and more quickly than before.

That’s all for February. Stay in touch on social and through the Google News Initiative newsletter for more updates.

It matters who reports the news — it’s why the Google News Initiative is so dedicated to diversifying who’s a part of this industry. In honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we spoke with a handful of the incredible female news entrepreneurs we partner with in our various GNI Startups Labs around the world.

Here are five female founders in news you should know about:

Kara Meyberg Guzman, California, USA – CEO/Co-founder of Santa Cruz Local and board member of Tiny News Collective

In 2019, Kara Meyberg Guzman helped launch Santa Cruz Local's newsroom to help fill a need for deep, accurate news about local government. Prior, Kara Meyberg Guzman was the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s managing editor — the first woman and first person of color to hold the position. A notable move she oversaw was helping to produce 2020 local election guides in English and Spanish to better serve the people in her community. “I'm driven by two questions that I think are related: How do we make local newsrooms sustainable? How do we serve communities that are not normally heard by local media?” Kara says. About 700 Santa Cruz County residents now support Santa Cruz Local with a paid membership. “I feel very lucky to serve the community I love. I have the opportunity and privilege to build a newsroom on our values and principles.”

Micaela Arbio Grattone, Argentina – Co-director of Feminacida

Micaela is a photographer and journalist who co-directs Feminacida, a website focused on news tailored to women she and co-founder Agustina Lanza launched in 2018. “The most challenging thing about being Feminacida's founder is having created this media from scratch. We didn’t know how to do it, we were only two people,” Micaela says. “Feminacida was born in the corridors of a university and today it reaches people all over the country.”

“We do this work with the strong conviction that we are fighting for equality and to improve people’s lives. The most exciting thing is to see how Feminacida directly impacts people’s notions of current issues.”

Carolina Oms, Brazil – co-founder of AzMina

Carolina, along with co-founders Helena Bertho and Thais Folego, are focused on fighting gender inequality via AzMina, a news site and support network. “In Brazil, women have always been entrepreneurs out of necessity. But they have done it without the network that men do — having to work from home, without access to finance and with more chances of seeing their ventures die for lack of income,” she says.

What drives Carolina is seeing the difference AzMina makes on the daily lives of Brazilian women. “We started with volunteer work and now we employ 20 women full time, have multiple sources of revenue and a solid and innovative business model. All this is really a source of pride. We need women to see this can work and feel inspired to create their own formats.”

Bhanupriya Rao, India – founder of BehanBox

Bhanupriya has been an independent researcher and journalist writing on gender, government and social justice in India. “I have long believed that news excludes women and gender diverse persons, both in the content and the production of it,” she says. Bhanupriya founded BehanBox in 2020 to center the voices and issues of women and gender diverse persons and make them equal participants in India's democracy. “Our critical in-depth, data-driven and evidence-based reportage, from local to the national level, is shining the spotlight on various forms of inequity and inequality, which is forcing mainstream media and policy-makers to take notice.” The biggest challenge? “Convincing naysayers that reporting on gender issues is newsworthy and needs sustained investment,” she says.

Masuma Ahuja, United Kingdom – founder of Girlhood

In 2021, Masuma, who’d previously worked for CNN and the Washington Post, wrote a book documenting the lives of teenage girls around the world. This became the launching pad for Girlhood, a community-powered site by girls that tells their stories. “This kind of space didn't exist when I was growing up, and I hope more girls can see themselves reflected in the stories we publish on Girlhood,” Masuma says. “ I think a lot about the power of narratives, and of stories — the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape our cultures and communities, the stories that are codified in our textbooks. There is so much space, so much potential and so much need for girls' voices to be included in all of these spaces!”

The hardest part of her job is that she doesn’t see a lot of models out there. “As a woman of color, as an immigrant who's building something that's inherently international and centers girls and as a startup founder in general, I don’t necessarily have a well-trodden path to follow.”

To learn more about the Google News Initiative’s work and our news partners, visit newsinitiative.withgoogle.com.

As Irene McKisson learned in launching AZ Luminaria, a non-profit, community-centered newsroom in Arizona, building a news business from the ground up is a daunting undertaking. “Before our news startup even had a name — when it was still just an idea — we knew that there were eight million things that we needed to do, we just had no idea what order to do them in,” she says. Like all journalism founders, she had what seemed like an endless list of big decisions to make: What will we report on? Who will our audience be, and how can we reach them? And, of course, how can the business earn enough revenue to sustain and grow?

The Google News Initiative Startups Playbook, published last year in close partnership with LION Publishers, was designed to help early-stage news entrepreneurs answer these questions and begin building their editorial, distribution, and financial operations.

“The Playbook helped us step back and really assess our market, our audience needs and our revenue plan,” McKisson told us. “When you’re building something from scratch, it’s so helpful to have a place to start or inspiration from other organizations you admire."

Today, GNI and LION are introducing the second edition of the Startups Playbook, which has been built on feedback from many of its 17,000 readers to date. The first edition thoroughly outlined how to build and launch a digital news business, but it largely skipped the why. Why go independent? Why take on the risk of being an entrepreneur? To help would-be founders with these important decisions, we’ve added six founder profiles including the shared motivations that pulled them into news entrepreneurship.

We built the Startups Playbook primarily for aspiring news founders working on an idea, but we also heard from established publishers who said the Resources section was particularly useful. This section has been expanded to include an array of important documents, from business plans to media kits to founder agreements. Recognizing that the industry is in a constant state of change, we’ve also added best practices and case studies centered around the biggest challenges and opportunities facing independent publishers today.

With these updates in place, we hope that the Startups Playbook can continue to be useful to founders like Alicia Benjamin from North Carolina, who used it in founding The Charlotte Voice.

“The Playbook helped me understand the importance of testing the viability of our product,” she told us. “By talking with and surveying people in the community, I was able to learn their information needs, which, in turn, allowed me to identify my target audience and the information needs I would try to solve for them. The interactive exercises also challenged me to define what success would look like in the medium term, both financially and journalistically.”

Launching a news business is rarely a straightforward endeavor, and there will never be a silver bullet for success. But through our programs and research, GNI, LION and our partners are learning more all the time about the activities and choices of successful founders, and the revamped GNI Startups Playbook represents the latest in our shared understanding.

We are committed to keeping this resource up-to-date, so that it can continue to guide journalism entrepreneurs as they take their first steps. Over the coming weeks, we look forward to publishing the Playbook in additional languages, which will join the already-live English, Spanish and Portuguese editions. Additionally, anyone interested in launching their own news business to check out the GNI’s how-to workshop series, while also signing up for LION’s News Founder Challenge: a six-week newsletter series that pairs content from the Playbook with a weekly challenge designed to help aspiring founders refine and test their news business idea.

Editor’s note from Ludovic Blecher, Head of Google News Initiative Innovation: The GNI Innovation Challengeprogram, inspired by the European DNI Fundwhich went before it, is designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas for the news industry. The story below by Sacha Morard, CTO of Le Monde Group, is part of an innovator seriessharing inspiring stories and learnings from funded projects.

Le Monde’s founder, Hubert Beuve-Méry, used the pen name “Sirius” when writing articles about the French resistance during World War II. The name is believed to have originated from a misspelling of the word “serious.” So when our team at Le Monde, one of the main French national news outlets, needed a content management system to handle the creation of both print and digital content, we gave a nod to our history and launched Sirius: a serious platform to take the newsroom into a digital future.

The editorial staff of Le Monde conceived and designed Sirius after they discovered there was no software on the market that would truly fit their needs to manage content internally for both a print newspaper and digital channels. The editorial staff then worked with our team of 100 developers to create the new system with funding through the Digital News Innovation (DNI) Fund, a part of the Google News Initiative.

As software development isn’t generally a day-to-day part of the newspaper’s mission, we’ve ended up with something like a startup within the newsroom. The team is composed of a product manager, two product owners, a technical lead, a designer and several developers. Also, for each project and each feature, we identify editorial experts. As a result, members of the newsroom participate in all the development phases of Sirius, from story mapping of a feature through the validation of mock-ups and user testing.

News organizations don't buy a content management system like one would buy milk at the grocery store. It requires a lot of thought, and above all, it requires the organization to be ready for change. Sirius helps editorial teams make their digital transition, because it allows them to organize editorial staff around both print and digital products in a content agnostic way.

Word soon got around about what we were building, and that sparked interest from within the Le Monde Group and now L'Obs, Télérama and Courrier International also use Sirius. We have also developed partnerships with several other news organizations, such as with the Swiss newspaper Le Temps and the sports paper L'Equipe.

Our partnerships start with us meeting the editorial staff to study their processes and tools. The objective is to understand how to set up Sirius to meet the needs of the client's editorial staff. Then we accompany the editorial staff in the configuration, and the creation of technical interfaces between the different systems (print, web, mobile, push, social networks). Once everything is set, we proceed with the training, a crucial step to get everyone on board.

Sirius also includes other tools like Forecast, a data collection system for editorial use. Forecast delivers, for example, information about the likelihood that an article will be read and whether it will potentially lead a reader to become a subscriber. Capping is another feature that allows the publisher to limit how many people can share subscriber accounts, thus increasing the value of the digital subscription.

The development of Sirius is an essential engine for our digital growth and is also a system that has proven itself across several different publishers. Thanks to the data present in Sirius, the marketing team can analyze publication times, traffic and conversions generated, and make recommendations. When marketing and editorial worked together on the best timing for publication, the average traffic per article jumped 154% between 2018 and 2021. We have also significantly raised the number of people who become subscribers per article within this timing publication section, with a 356% increase.

Hubert Beuve-Méry could never have imagined how the name Sirius would live in the future when he signed articles during World War II. But our news staff resurfaced it to honor the newspaper’s past, while bridging a path forward in the digital age.

Editor’s note from Ludovic Blecher, Head of Google News Initiative Innovation: The GNI Innovation Challengeprogram is designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas for the news industry. The story below by Kelsey Ryan, founder and publisher of The Beacon, is part of an innovator seriessharing inspiring stories and lessons from funded projects.

When I first started thinking about launching a digital news startup for Kansans and Missourians after getting laid off in 2018, I envisioned an investigative-only outlet. But that’s very different from how The Beacon looks today. Now it’s better, and here’s why.

After spending most of my career in for-profit newspapers, I thought “audience” was just about clicks and search engine optimization. It felt lacking in meaningful community connection. So when I was in the early phases of designing The Beacon — and building the confidence to do it — I grabbed coffee with a former colleague, who gave me the right advice at the right time: Stop talking to other journalists and start talking with people in the community about what they want in local journalism.

It sounds so obvious now, but suddenly it clicked. If we were to create a sustainable and public-serving news organization, we needed to talk to our community early and often. So we did. And that person who told me to stop talking to other journalists, Jennifer Hack Wolf, became The Beacon’s first employee, made possible with funding through the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge.

Our work to define and engage our audience for long-term sustainability includes a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, and an experimental approach.

What we have learned in this process is you can’t be all things to all people. But you can meet the news and information needs of segments of people in your community who want more than what they’re getting now. Here are some ways to do this work:

• Tabling at community events: Set up a booth or table with information about who you are and have an interactive activity where people can engage with you or provide feedback on a specific concern or topic. Candies or treats encouraged.
• Surveys: There are lots of free survey tools, including Google Forms. Try to keep surveys short and to the point, and don’t use leading questions. Always have an open-ended section where people can put their own feedback.
• Community listening sessions: In-person or virtual events with a third-party facilitator allow people to discuss two or three open-ended questions, spending 15-20 minutes going deep on each one. It’s important to just listen — don’t get defensive or try to pitch people about who you are or what you’re trying to do.
• Meet people where they’re at: Explore collaborating with other community partners on things like focused private online groups or pop-up text messaging campaigns to connect with new people in new ways and expand the pool of perspectives.

It turns out when we started talking to people, they told us they didn’t just want investigative reporting, like I had initially envisioned. Investigative journalism was important to them, but not the end-all, be-all. We found a big opportunity in solutions journalism and data journalism when people told us they wanted context: How did we get here? What are the trends? And they wanted to be more civically engaged: How can we get involved? How can we make change? How are other communities solving similar problems?

We had nearly 1,000 respondents to our initial surveys and found those people who attended our events (in person or virtual) were far more likely to become subscribers to our newsletter. By partnering with or interviewing people from established organizations with their own large audiences, we were able to grow our subscriber base because those organizations shared the event. 25% of our current 7,000 subscribers learned about us through this activity. We also found about 10% of our newsletter subscribers in the first year of publishing went on to become paying donors, with either one-time gifts or recurring monthly gifts. For recurring donors, $15 a month is our most popular level of giving.

After more than a year and a half, we feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface. But we’re already applying these concepts to our second newsroom in Wichita, Kansas, building on what we’ve learned and exploring ways we can take this work even further so we can truly be a sustainable, community-oriented news organization for years to come.