Startups with innovative solutions for newsrooms can apply to global programme until 8 January

Credit: Screenshot from Startups for News

Applications for the Startups for News competition are open until 8 January, seeking to hear from startups with innovative products and services that could help media organisations work more efficiently.

The programme is organised by the Global Editors Network in partnership with Journalism.co.uk. After the application deadline, the international jury will select 16 startups to participate in online pitch battles.

Eight finalists will then be selected to pitch on stage in front of around 750 media leaders at the GEN Summit in Lisbon, where the winner of the competition will be chosen.

The programme is aimed at startups founded no earlier than 2014 and that have received less than $1m (£763,125) in external funding.

The winner will receive exhibition space at GEN Summit in 2019, worth €7,000 (£6,188), as well as private mentorship sessions with the Global Editors Network board members.

The international jury includes members from Advance Digital, Al Jazeera, BBC, BudgIT, ESPN, Financial Times, Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation, Grupo Octubre, HuffPost South Africa, India Today Group, PRISA News, Rappler, Washington Post, as well as Journalism.co.uk.

"I've judged lots of startup competitions and the quality of startups in this contest is top notch. It's quickly becoming my favourite startup competition to watch. The competition is global, but everyone is focused on the news, which means the quality is really strong,” said David Cohn, senior director at Advance Digital.

Alumni of the Startups for News programme include Storyful, SAM, Datawrapper, Trint, Valossa, and Flourish.

Flourish, the winners of the latest season of the programme, enable non-coders to quickly produce and share visual and interactive stories based on flexible templates.

Previous finalists also include London-based news agency Urbs Media. The team is applying automation to local journalism aiming to create more data-based stories for communities affected by declining budgets in local newsrooms.

In an interview with the Global Editors Network, Urbs Media chief executive Alan Renwick and editor-in-chief Gary Rogers explained their take on automating local journalism: "We’re trying to find the best story for a particular newsroom in the way that a reporter would. This is what makes our use of NLG (natural language generation) more complex: we’re not just trying to turn words into data and give everyone a version, but we’re trying to do a very journalistic job around the data."

To apply or find out more about the programme, check out the Startups for News website.

This article was first published in November and updated to include a new deadline.

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