THE International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) has been selected as one of 35 news organisations globally to receive a JournalismAI Innovation Challenge grant.
Supported by the Google News Initiative (GNI), the grant, according to a notice of selection by the organisation, aims to empower newsrooms to explore innovative uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism.
The JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, an initiative of Polis at the London School of Economics, awards grants of $50,000 or $250,000 to the chosen organisations to help them experiment, implement and share best practices of AI technologies.
As one of the two Nigerian organisations to receive the grant, The ICIR’s project will focus on experimenting with new formats across mobile video and audio.
Beneficiaries were selected from 22 countries, namely Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Jordan, Mongolia, Nigeria, Paraguay, Philippines, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States.
According to the head of Ecosystem Investment Programmes, AI & Misinformation at GNI, Matt Cooke, the programme highlights a growing interest in responsibly integrating AI into journalism.
“We’ve worked with JournalismAI for six years to help develop industry research and share best practices with news organisations. We’re excited to build on that partnership by supporting this new programme to bolster small and medium-sized news publishers’ AI innovation efforts. We look forward to learning more about the selected projects, which we hope will inspire journalists and publishers around the world.”
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The organisation noted that this year’s selection process was highly competitive, having received over 700 applications from across the globe.
While speaking on the challenging task of selecting 35 organisations from the list, the director of Strategy & Innovation at NPO and advisor to the programme, Ezra Eeman, stated that each selected project showed promise in advancing how newsrooms could responsibly leverage AI to serve their communities.
“The depth and creativity shown in the proposals demonstrates both the clear need for AI innovation in journalism and the industry’s readiness to thoughtfully experiment with these technologies. Each selected project shows promise in advancing how newsrooms can responsibly leverage AI to serve their communities,” he said.
Mustapha Usman is an investigative journalist with the International Centre for Investigative Reporting. You can easily reach him via: musman@icirnigeria.com. He tweets @UsmanMustapha_M