Building Journalistic Innovation Ecosystems

BUILDINGOPEN INNOVATION

ECOSYSTEMS

Partnership

African Media Initiative

AMI is Africa’s largest network of ‘legacy’ media owners + executives. More a union than NGO.

Represents 800+ of Africa’s most influential media companies & journalism organisations.

Focuses on the ‘business of news’ by giving the tools, technology, knowledge & skills necessary to build a strong & independent media that produces quality journalism.

Digital Programmes

Journalism is in crisis globally. Advertising & audiences shifting online - disrupting media’s business model & causing collapse of iconic brands.

AMI’s strategy is learn from pain & mistakes in Global North, so Africa can leapfrog the coming economic disruption.

AMI is building an innovation ecosystem to help African media get beyond web + mobile, so we can be platform agnostic + data-driven.

Ecosystems & Pipelines

Creating Community

www.SouthAfrica.DataBootcamp.org

www.Code4Democracy.org

www.AfricaOpenData.org

https://opendata.go.ke

www.Code4Kenya.org

AMI Prototype Fund

www.AfricanNewsChallenge.org

Creating Prototypes

$1m African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC) offers seed grants of between $12,500 - $100,000, plus engineering & business development support.

2nd tier niche grant programmes: WAN-IFRA mobile news grants, AMI rapid prototype grants, Mozilla Open News code sprint grants, Google data journalism grants, etc

Access to venture capital (VC) funding through MDLF digital ventures fund, sovereign VC funds.

Creating Capacity

Code4Kenya + Code4Ghana + ODADI initiatives to embed coders in newsrooms, supported by an external jLAB dev team to scale news apps.

IMAGE platform to create a marketplace for digital news skills, projects, money & resources.

DataLiberation scraperthons, Code4Democracy hackathons + d|bootcamps, and annual TechCamps to give technical skills via weeklong crash-courses in data scrapping, data analysis & data visualisation for media.

African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) transnational journalism projects.

www.AfricanMediaInitiative.org

www.AfricanNewsChallenge.org

@JustinArenstein