Media Blend Hackathon Programme

• Eligibility Criteria:
  – Individuals or teams working as media experts and managers, journalists and technologists from newsrooms and startups around Europe.
• Type of funding: Programmatic
• Target countries: Europe
• Application language: English

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. It is a three-day offline event in Vienna gathering media professionals and innovators from around Europe.

The chosen format, a hackathon, ensures 72 hours of creative problem-solving through collaboration between experts and media professionals followed by a pitching session of workable solutions to a problem.

Media Blend expects 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. Participants are encouraged to tackle this challenge and use technologies to improve 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. Media Blend identifies 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, the focus is 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 the last objective is to find a way to make Gen Z users engaged and instantly aware of the information that matters most to them.

See here to learn more and apply.

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