The weekly pitch battles of the Startups for News competition have started today, 1 March, with the winners of each battle moving on to the final round of the programme.
Startups for News is a programme highlighting and rewarding startups providing innovative services and solutions that help newsrooms work more efficiently, organised by the Global Editors Network in partnership with Journalism.co.uk.
Sixteen startups have been selected from 100 applications by the Startups for News jury to take part in the pitch battles, the semi-finals of the programme. Each week, two startups will go up against each other, with the public able to vote for their favourite.
The winner of each battle will then move on to the final stage, where eight startups will pitch in front of the jury and hundreds of delegates at the Global Editors Network Summit in Portugal.
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.
The winner of the programme 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 first pitch battle centres around "cracking the paywall code", with video applications from Poool and The Playwall.
The programme is aimed at startups founded no earlier than 2014 and that have received less than $1m (£763,125) in external funding. Previous participants include Storyful, SAM, Datawrapper, Trint, Valossa, as well as Flourish, the winners of the previous season of the programme.
The Global Editors Network has also released a report highlighting some of the startups that took part in previous seasons of the programme, giving an insight into their place in the media ecosystem.
The report features the top startups from categories including information gathering, mobile journalism, visual and interactive journalism, monetisation, analytics, artificial intelligence, delivery, and personalisation. You can access the report online for free here.
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