Research and innovation projects
As part of our mission to connect research, new technologies and the media industry, we work together with a variety of stakeholders in the academic, journalism, and technology fields. Topics vary from new technology tools, future of European data spaces, research or coaching and funding programmes supporting innovation.
These are the ongoing research and innovation projects that WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation is currently involved in.
Taktak: January 2024 – December 2025
The Taktak project aims to create a donation solution that will generate a new revenue stream for European news media and independent journalists. It will trigger readers’ donations on a per article basis, that will be split between actors through user-friendly technological and marketing tools.
For two years, five European digital news outlets and their network of independent journalists from Spain, Bulgaria, France, Portugal and Ukraine, two news associations based in France and Czech Republic and one technology provider based in Greece will develop this innovative donation solution.
More on taktak.media
TEMS: October 2023 - September 2026
The TEMS project – which stands for Trusted European Media data Space – is a joint undertaking of 42 organisations representing hundreds of stakeholders from 12 countries in the cultural and creative sectors. The TEMS consortium includes:
- broadcasters, publishers, news agencies, producers, audiovisual national archives, innovation clusters and standardization bodies
- IT infrastructures companies with proven experience in data space design and operations.
The TEMS partners will together contribute to developing the requirements, designing, and developing the data space common blocks, integrating concrete use-cases, defining and setting-up the governance and business models, and disseminating to all subsectors and growing the ecosystem.
More on tems-dataspace.eu
Stars4Media – 3rd edition: October 2022 - October 2024
Stars4Media NEWS is the third edition of the programme and welcomed projects in 2 main areas: Newsroom Transformation and Business Transformation;
14 Projects have been selected to enter an EXPLORE Phase: experimenting innovation ideas, with a benchmarking partner in another country. 9 of these 14 projects have been selected to continue in a BOOST Phase: deeper and wider in the development and implementation of their ideas. All projects selected (in both phases) have been able to benefit from ad-hoc and in-depth coaching from recognised experts in the newsroom and business transformation
More on stars4media.eu
Past projects
Stars4Media – 2nd edition: February 2021 - February 2022
The second edition of the Stars4Media exchange and coaching programme is now open to young media professionals who seek to develop new editorial products or test innovative ideas. The call for applications is open to European journalists and news organisations until 1 July 2021.
More on stars4media.eu
QUEST: February 2019 - July 2021
How can we define, measure and support effective scientific communications? What are the tools and guidelines that would help improve its quality? Can we support the creation of a community of science communication stakeholders?
These and many other questions will be examined as part of the new Horizon 2020 project QUEST – QUality and Effectiveness in Science and Technology communication.
During the two-year project, researchers and experts from the QUEST consortium will investigate science communication in three strands – journalism, social media and museums – through three focus areas: climate change, vaccines and artificial intelligence.
More on questproject.eu
CPN: September 2017 - February 2020
Europe is scattered with media companies, large and small, representing an enormous amount of cultural diversity. Millions of news content items have to find their way to millions of users.
The CPN project (“Content Personalisation Network”) will tackle the challenge by developing a new approach to personalisation of digital content, allowing both large and small media companies to better target content to media consumers.
For media consumers, CPN aims to enable a better delivery of news, insights and informations in the right format at the right time and in the right context to each media consumer. User data will be used and combined with content metadata through the use of advanced mapping technology in order to create better information distribution, while at the same time respecting user privacy at all cost.
More on projectcpn.eu
INJECT: January 2017 - June 2018
On 1 January 2017, WAN-IFRA initiated its partnership with the INJECT consortium (“INnovating Journalism: Enhanced Creativity Tools”). The project is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 framework for Research and Innovation and includes 14 European partners (from media, academia, startups and tech).
The INJECT consortium is developing an inspiration tool to help improve the creativity and productivity of journalists in the digital world. It leverages powerful search algorithms that surface articles, individuals and visuals related to stories to trigger new and original ideas quickly.
WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation has joined the project to connect these new techniques to its network of media professionals that could benefit from it.
More on injectproject.eu
Media Innovation Mapping: May 2016 – Ongoing
Media Innovation Mapping research seeks to understand innovation and the organisational structures that exist with news publishers, content producers, research institutions and clusters and technology providers.
It is a collaboration between the the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers’ Global Alliance for Media Innovation, the Media Innovation Studio at UCLan, Ubilab at PUCRS university in Brazil, Norway’s NxtMedia innovation cluster and Stibo Accelerator based in Denmark.
The project ‘maps’ innovation labs, clusters and a selection of projects globally to establish insights into a number of factors. These include how the media labs are structured, and why they were created, what type of methods they use to innovate, their products and services and stories of their successes and failures.
Read about 40+ Media Labs