News and information media continue to embrace apps, AI, audio, visual platforms and other new technologies to reach new audiences. Many of our clients have joined other forward-looking media in pushing boundaries for new online tools and experimenting with new ways to better connect with their communities. They have used tech to increase their impact and better inform audiences, for example by mining valuable data before elections, empowering podcasters from low-income areas and giving a voice to underrepresented members of society.
Here are some examples of our clients’ experiences of harnessing tech to better serve their audiences.
Hukumonline launched Ask Humonline.com, Indonesia’s first “domain specific GPT implementation”. The virtual assistant platform leverages Hukumonline’s extensive legal expertise and law-related content to provide its users with an easy way to ask questions about various legal issues and carry out their legal work more efficiently, as well as contributing to the general development of legal literacy. The product is currently in its Beta testing phase, and Hukumonline is actively seeking feedback to further enhance its capabilities.
Asiaville, an Indian media tech company, partnered with Spotify to train and onboard 500 creators onto their Anchor platform. Through workshops, the aim is to empower podcasters from lower income cities and towns and allow them to learn from industry experts on the essentials of podcasting and storytelling, culminating in the chance to produce their own exclusive podcast series on Spotify.
Colombia/US-based technology startup Datasketch has a data journalism app, which helps journalists to find, organise, collect, analyse and present data at low cost. The number of users is growing fast and includes journalists from North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Datasketch graphs often appear in publications during elections and other pivotal moments, simplifying and explaining often complex issues.
Indian OTT platform Arré launched a voice app for women and those who identify as women called Arré Voice. It’s a women-first audio platform where users can record and upload 30-second pods, host jam pods for discussions and create content around any subject. Since its launch, more than 15,000 women and 900 creators have joined the app. The team is ironing out the product features with a new app update every month and continues to experiment with content categories and user-onboarding strategies. Having started in Hindi, Tamil and English, the app will soon offer multiple Indian and global language options for creating audio content.
Josh Talks, an Indian video-focused media platform, added a new line of business called the Josh Creator Network to bring important topics to young people, via creators that they relate to. The free platform helps high-potential creators grow on YouTube and maximise their earnings. It does this by evaluating creators’ content, running multivariate tests and optimising the content for YouTube to build a data-backed strategy for growth. On top of this, it helps creators build additional revenue streams from existing content. The Josh Creator Network had 1.5 million subscribers at the end of 2022 and is growing. Josh Talks logged over a billion views in total in the first 8 months of the 2022-23 financial year.
Nigerian media and data analytics company Dataphyte ran an election portal which was one of the largest repositories of data in this year’s Nigerian elections. They provided a ‘one-stop shop’ for voting data, from national to subnational level votes. It included data on political players and their previous performances at the ballot box, as well as a map linking political history to present-day players, providing users with important voting information.
Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading independent daily, has been exploring ways to use AI in the newsroom, particularly ChatGPT. They formed a special group of 61 people to analyse various artificial intelligence tools daily and regularly discuss developments. Its members are journalists, editors, programmers and IT specialists. The company has also been using ChatGPT as a tool for brainstorming but prohibits its use as a tool to write text or as a source of information and also prohibits using it to share confidential content. However, Bolesław Breczko, a Gazeta Wyborcza journalist, recently ran an experiment on readers and editorial staff where he published an article written by ChatGPT in the newspaper and only revealed this fact two weeks later.
Scroll, a digital news platform in India, sought to transform its extensive written reports into various formats, identifying video as the most effective means to engage a broad audience. To achieve this goal, they created a URL-to-MP4 tool capable of extracting multimedia content from text articles and empowering journalists to distill lengthy English and Hindi articles ranging from 500 to 2,000 words into succinct 30-second videos. Users can supplement the extracted media with additional visuals, resulting in a polished MP4 video ready for distribution across social platforms—all accomplished in under three minutes.
Rappler, a Philippine news organization, launched TLDR, a spin-off brand catering to Gen Z and millennial audiences. Named after the “too long; didn’t read” slang, TLDR aims to deliver concise and visually engaging content for younger media consumers. Leveraging AI, the project helps creating short-form, shareable content for social media, like text summaries, graphics, and videos. The tool introduces AI-powered workflows, simplifying the process for journalists with limited creative exposure and freeing up time for producers and artists to focus on high-quality content creation.
This is just a small selection of the innovative steps our clients have taken to harness technology to make a real impact in their communities. With the pace of technological change continue to increase, this is surely only the beginning.