Deadline: 17-Mar-23
The Media Blend Hackathon brings together media experts and managers, journalists and technologists from newsrooms and startups around Europe to explore tech-powered solutions to improve and enhance journalism operations, production, monetization and storytelling. If you consider yourself one of those people, you are welcome to apply alone or with an established team!
Benefits
- They will provide:
- Ideation support before the event;
- Cosy location in Vienna to work with your teammates and mentors on your dream project;
- Mentorship support for product development; business, action, promo-plan creation; and presentation of the project;
- Kick-off grants of €5,000 to support project ideas based on Hackathon competition results;
- Networking opportunity with the most innovative media startups from all over Europe.
Geographical Focus
- Applicants must be based in one of the following countries: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Ukraine.
Eligibility Criteria
- You can participate as a team working in the field of creative journalism and media startups. They expect the teams to generate new ideas and develop innovative solutions into working models or prototypes for the pan-European media market within these workstreams:
- Analytics and monetization: this year the key focus for many publishers will be looking to hang on to new subscribers gained during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and COVID-19. That’s why they encourage the participants to tackle this challenge and use technologies for improving subscriber retention.
- Media research and data analytics: there is a negative trend of lost trust in the media, accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic. The main reason for that might be the spread of fake news and messages from the sources of information. Therefore they identify countering fake news and verifying the information as their second challenge.
- Content production and distribution: growing news avoidance among audiences seemingly keeps many newsrooms up at night. During this hackathon, they’d like to focus on people under 25, who due to their news consumption behavior are less interested in traditional news subjects and don’t have a strong affiliation with specific media brands. So their last objective is to find a way to make Gen Z users engaged and instantly aware of the information that matters most to them.
- Please note that they offer you a main challenge within every hackathon category, but you are also welcome to suggest solving another one іn your application!
- Teams / individual participants are welcome to apply if they have:
- A vision of a challenge they want to approach/opportunities they want to create;
- A rough plan on how to develop a solution to the challenge/problem addressed;
- A project idea within the main categories:
- Analytics and monetization;
- Media research and data analytics;
- Content production and distribution.
- An ability to travel to Vienna in May (travel costs will be covered once your participation is confirmed).
What should my team look like?
- The team consists of 2-4 people focused on the media sector;
- Your team has to include at least one company decision-maker and one IT specialist as team members;
- At least two people from two different countries have to be part of the team;
- If there are people in your team representing different companies they’ll consider this an advantage.
For more information, visit IPI.