Bolstering Local Journalism to Strengthen Democracy

A free press is essential to healthy democracy, and local journalism is a critical component of a free press. Microsoft’s Democracy Forward initiative works to preserve, protect, and advance the fundamentals of democracy by safeguarding open and secure democratic processes, promoting a healthy information ecosystem, and advocating for corporate civic responsibility.

Four years ago, we launched a journalism initiative to explore ways in which we could help address the growing crisis facing independent local news organizations around the world. Two years ago, our Vice Chair and President Brad Smith and USAID Administrator Samantha Power announced our plan to partner with Internews to build a Media Viability Accelerator (MVA). We were thrilled to officially launch this tool during a panel event at the UN General Assembly last month.

The Media Viability Accelerator is a free web analytics platform built by Internews and Microsoft Azure. Funded by USAID and Microsoft’s Democracy Forward initiative, the MVA aims to strengthen independent journalism by helping participating organizations achieve financial sustainability. Using Azure AI, the MVA harnesses the power of big data and machine learning to provide performance insights while ensuring that participants retain control over their own data. Through the MVA, media outlets can access a multilingual tool that visualizes performance data and receive actionable insights to improve performance.

More than 250 media outlets and over 500 journalists used the platform during the MVA’s initial pilot phase. Our goal is to empower over 1,000 more media outlets and thousands more journalists over the next two years, reaching audiences of hundreds of millions of people. Strengthening local journalism helps strengthen democracies around the world by ensuring that communities and voters have accurate, credible information about what’s happening around them, including and especially elections.

Strengthening journalism globally can also help turn the tide on rising authoritarianism. One of the guests on the panel we cohosted to launch the MVA was Juan Holmann, the publisher of Nicaragua’s longest-running newspaper, La Prensa. Holmann, who spent a year and a half in one of Nicaragua’s most notorious prisons, later said of his experience:

“I left jail with a stronger conviction that I have to continue fighting for freedom of expression. The most important right is the right to live, to be born, and to be. And the second most important is the right to free expression. The first right is useless if the second is taken away from us. Freedom of expression is the greatest because it is what makes us what we are. Freedom of expression is the right to be educated, the right to learn, to know, and to discern.”

We’re grateful to have La Prensa as a participant in the MVA, and we’re grateful for the tremendous work Internews has put into building and running this platform. We look forward to supporting its continued growth in the years to come.

As part of our efforts to strengthen democracy around the world, we have announced projects with a number of organizations designed to help journalists and newsrooms deploy AI responsibly in newsgathering, as well as bolster business practices to help build sustainable newsrooms. These ongoing partnerships include:

• The Institute for Nonprofit News is leveraging AI to curate stories from the Rural News Network and connect rural residents with the stories most relevant to them via SMS messaging. Up to 30 newsrooms are also receiving stipends to produce and distribute voter information guides.
• The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY brought 25 experienced journalists to a tuition-free program to explore ways to incorporate generative AI into their work and newsrooms in a three-month hybrid and highly interactive program. The AI Journalism Lab has added two new upcoming cohorts, one focused on adoption and another focused on leadership.
• The Online News Association launched programming to support journalists and newsroom leaders as they navigated the evolving AI ecosystem. ONA’s AI in Journalism Initiative offered a menu of opportunities addressing what is possible across the newsroom through AI and offered workshops to experiment with tools and learn about best practices. More than 2,000 journalists have been reached through in-person and virtual programming this year.
• The GroundTruth Project, which sends local journalists into newsrooms around the world through its Report for America and Report for the World programs, added an AI track of work for its corps members through the AI in Local News initiative to explore tool adoption. The project helped local newsrooms work together to explore use cases for AI in newsgathering.
• Semafor harnessed AI tools to assist journalists in their research and source discovery with Semafor Signals, which helped journalists provide a diverse array of credible local, national, and global sources to their audience. They also created an elections display to show connections between different countries in a massive global election year.

As the media landscape continues to evolve in response to new technology, we are doubling down on our efforts to provide journalists with the tools they need to deliver timely, accurate information to their communities. In doing so, we can help ensure that the “fourth pillar” of democracy remains robust and resilient.

We expect to have updated impact data on the above partnerships soon and will update this post once this information is available. News outlets or other organizations interested in joining the Media Viability Accelerator can visit www.mva.net to learn more.