This March, IPI kicked off our first Global AI Accelerator for Media. The accelerator offers eight months of funding and advisory support for small- to medium-sized independent media from Global Majority countries. It is designed for organisations seeking to experiment with AI and new technology, and to invest in the medium- and long-term viability that ensures the freedom to do journalism independent of outside influence.
We received a record number of 205 applications from 62 countries. Each application underwent a rigorous selection process, and a global jury selected 15 media to receive eight months of expert-led training and workshops, personalised advisory services, access to networks and future sources of support, and $14,000 in funding.聽
鈥淐onsumer-facing AI development is advancing at breakneck speed. It puts pressure on how we monetise journalism and shapes how users search for or discover our content. Keeping up-to-date necessitates awareness of the tech and how to deploy it, the ethical boundaries, all on top of big picture thinking of the market and information environment. We鈥檝e designed our Accelerator to build a bridge across these themes and co-create ways forward.鈥� – Ryan Powell, IPI Head of Innovation and Media Business.
In the next months, IPI will work directly with participants to design a roadmap for AI adoption that reflects changes in consumer markets and business opportunities and doubles down on security, ethics and credibility concerns.
The curriculum balances innovative methods, ethics, and leadership strategies with ways to build data systems, embed into audience research and understanding, and monetisation strategies. Workshops, prototyping sessions and demos are complemented by 1:1 coaching throughout the eight months.聽
The programme furthers IPI鈥檚 commitment to a thriving independent media ecosystem enabled by innovation and new technologies, while upholding human-made journalism as a guarantor of truth in the public interest.
Meet the grantees
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BehanBox, India
is a media platform grounded in deep storytelling and long-term visionary thinking, focusing on the intersection of gender, marginalisation, and public policy, a feminist journalism organisation reporting on structural inequalities at the intersection of data, law, and policy, with an explicit anti-caste lens. In their approach to develop ethical use-cases for AI, they will move their editorial workflow towards a larger knowledge infrastructure with vernacular reach at the core. AI will help their newsroom better leverage their editorial investment in English, close the access gap by creating vernacular, platform-appropriate journalism that makes rights-based information usable for everyday decisions as a small newsroom.
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Chequeado, Argentina
is the leading fact-checking organisation in Argentina, operating for 15 years and serving as a regional reference in Latin America. The team joined the accelerator to develop an AI-driven audience intelligence platform to analyse public conversations and debate around Chequeado鈥檚 journalism, supporting editorial insight and faster, audience-centred decisions.
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CONFIDENCIAL Nicaragua, Costa Rica
is a 30-year-old independent Nicaraguan newsroom now operating in exile, serving audiences inside and outside the country who rely on our journalism for verified, independent reporting on Nicaragua. Their approach to technology adoption is human-centred, prioritising tools and processes that strengthen editorial judgment and sustainability under conditions of political pressure and limited capacity. The accelerator will help the team develop an AI-assisted membership decision system in order to leverage their existing first-party data.
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Cuesti贸n P煤blica, Colombia
is an investigative outlet founded in 2018, focusing on politics and abuse of power in Colombia through data and research. Their speciality is in building databases and telling stories rooted in public data. As seasoned AI developers, they are now seeking to leverage the latest developments in AI to scale their work with public data and turn this into an audience-centric, user-facing strategy tied to retention and strengthening direct relationships with potential donors and reduce dependence on grants to cover their bottom line.
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Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), Thailand
is an independent media organisation with a long history of serving people in Myanmar and the Burmese diaspora through political change, conflict, and systematic information blackouts. In the Accelerator, DVB seeks to leverage AI to bridge access and conversation across their dispersed, large audience and create a plan to move their existing user needs model into a plan for direct consumer revenue to pursue greater independence from an existing dependence on institutional donor revenue. Food For Mzansi Group, South Africa.
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Food For Mzansi (FFM), South Africa
is an award-winning newsroom serving South Africa鈥檚 emerging commercial farmers, who generate 30% of national agricultural income yet are unrepresented in the media. FFM鈥檚 revenue is diversified across events and native advertising, and is now seeking to increase the share of direct-consumer revenue, leveraging its existing first-party data collection strategy to inform content and promotional strategy. Part of this is maintaining continuous innovation in distribution strategy to ensure they鈥檙e reaching their addressable market and ultimately leveraging AI to embolden agripreneurs to scale, foster nation-building and drive food security.
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FYT Media (Lyf Solutions, Inc), the Philippines
is a media and civic-tech ecosystem from the Philippines, built by journalists who believe technology should strengthen public-interest reporting. Fyt produces solutions-oriented stories with young people and local communities, while Lyf builds platforms and data systems for climate change, disasters, and human rights documentation. The team will build on their database of reporters, producers, citizens and action-oriented volunteers across the country to drive smarter, conversational storytelling that wraps their investigations in impact.
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International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), Nigeria
The is an investigative outlet focusing on transparency and accountability in Nigeria. In the accelerator, they will develop a product roadmap responding to the needs of their audience,聽 including an AI-powered tool for transcription of English audio-visual content and translation to the three major Nigerian languages. The objectives are to increase loyalty with users and design industry-leading responses to accessibility gaps.聽
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iToim (Khukh Akh NGO), Mongolia
is a Mongolia-based analytic newsroom building a sustainable, audience-first model for independent journalism. They serve highly engaged Mongolian news consumers across web and mobile, and they adopt technology through small, testable iterations. The accelerator will help the team prototype and launch Mongolia鈥檚 first AI-assisted hybrid paywall in a competitive media market.
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Minority Africa, Uganda
is a digital publication using data-driven multimedia journalism to cover minority groups across Africa, focusing on the publication of new voices. This model requires a well-designed pitching method, which Minority Africa will focus on in this accelerator, developing the second phase of an AI-assisted pitch review tool built to help its editorial team manage a high volume of pitches on underreported stories from across Africa.
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Ojoconmipisto, Guatemala
is a watchdog newsroom in Guatemala focusing on local government and municipal procurement since 2013. To bring their investigations and data analysis, they regularly adapt their product to serve consumers where they are to hold local governments accountable. In the programme, they will focus on building an AI system that can process municipal contracts, detect red flags, and deliver prioritised investigative leads to journalists.
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PolitKlinika (Zhebe LLC), Kyrgyzstan
is an independent media outlet in Kyrgyzstan, producing investigative journalism, fact-checking, and data journalism, specialising in exposing corruption, flagging false information, and propaganda. One challenge they are working on is financial sustainability. They target a relatively wide audience, including nd residents of regions where access to quality information is comparatively limited. The accelerator offers an opportunity to focus on their value proposition in order to drive revenue experiments and improve workflows.聽
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Raseef22, Lebanon
is a newsroom serving 22 countries with a target audience of Arab youth seeking independent, progressive journalism. The accelerator serves as an opportunity to develop an existing strategy of ethical AI deployment, and focus on content accessibility and personalisation challenges and a way that enables tools and technology to feed into the development of their long-term direct-to-consumer revenue model.聽
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Teyit, Turkey
is a fact-checking organisation based in Turkey. The team realized in the growing complexity of information pollution and the state of misleading content, verification alone is not enough to intervene in misinformation. In response, the team seeks to leverage AI to further drive their capacity to verify and communicate fact-checked information to the public. Part of this will be rooting their work in the ethics and values that ensure trust in their output, and they will combine media literacy articles with a strategy to scale their work.
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Wattan Media Network, Palestine
is an award-winning, multiformat media organisation operating for 30 years in Palestine. The organisation oversees a multimedia ecosystem: Wattan TV, Wattan FM, and Wattan News Agency, alongside a fact-checking division. To improve the quality and scale of their capacity to fact-check, 鈥� they will work to adopt new technologies, like AI, rooted in their context of resource constraints.鈥� Specifically, they will focus on using AI to strengthen their independent fact-checking initiative Daqeeq.
The Global AI Accelerator for Media is made possible with support from .