TheCable has been adjudged one of the winners of the 2022 Google News Initiative (GNI) Innovation Challenge.
The project seeks to empower news organisations to pioneer new thinking in online journalism, develop new paths to sustainability and better understand their communities.
TheCable, Nigeria’s leading independent online newspaper, was selected for its Disability Inclusion News App (TheCable DINA) – an application designed to assist people with visual impairments, auditory challenges and other forms of disabilities.
The newspaper is on course to build Nigeria’s first disability-inclusive news application, which will be a sought-after platform for persons with disabilities and those without any form of disability.
Announcing the selected projects for this cohort, Google News Initiative said 227 winners were selected from 47 countries in Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, Turkey, Africa and North America.
“Every Innovation Challenge project we support represents the best of the best ideas in advancing digital news media. Applications undergo a rigorous and competitive assessment process,” GNI said in a statement on Thursday.
“When a project is selected for funding, a wide group of Google employees and industry experts have agreed on a high potential for meaningful impact and inspiration.”
In total, five projects were selected from different newsrooms in Nigeria.
HumAngle seeks to build a platform for unlimited access to conflict, humanitarian and development reports with data inserts, explainers and highly interactive reports while the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ) — owned by ‘Fisayo Soyombo, former TheCable editor — aims to undertake a News Impact Project (NIP) to create a help desk for members of the public facing social injustice, such that they can have direct access to the newsroom.
The Republic’s project is ATLAS — a digital platform which seeks to help newsrooms source and license quality images from photographers and photojournalists while Dubawa was selected for its plan to build an automated radio fact checker application that uses an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to collate claims for human fact-checkers.
Source: Top Stories
