AMI's strategy for supporting digital innovation in Africa's legacy media.

1. BUILDING
OPEN INNOVATION
ECOSYSTEMS

2. Partnership

3. African Media Initiative
AMI is Africa’s largest network of ‘legacy’ media
owners + executives. More a union than NGO.
Represents 800+ of Africa’s most influential media
companies & journalism organisations.
Focuses on the ‘business of news’ by giving the
tools, technology, knowledge & skills necessary to
build a strong & independent media that produces
quality journalism.

4. Digital Programmes
Journalism is in crisis globally. Advertising &
audiences shifting online - disrupting media’s
business model & causing collapse of iconic brands.
AMI’s strategy is learn from pain & mistakes in Global
North, so Africa can leapfrog the coming economic
disruption.
AMI is building an innovation ecosystem to help
African media get beyond web + mobile, so we can
be platform agnostic + data-driven.

5. Ecosystems & Pipelines

6. Creating Community

7. www.SouthAfrica.DataBootcamp.org

8. www.Code4Democracy.org

9. www.AfricaOpenData.org

10. https://opendata.go.ke

11. www.Code4Kenya.org

12. AMI Prototype Fund

13. www.AfricanNewsChallenge.org

14. Creating Prototypes
$1m African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC) offers
seed grants of between $12,500 - $100,000, plus
engineering & business development support.
2nd tier niche grant programmes: WAN-IFRA mobile news
grants, AMI rapid prototype grants, Mozilla Open News code
sprint grants, Google data journalism grants, etc
Access to venture capital (VC) funding through MDLF digital
ventures fund, sovereign VC funds.

15. Creating Capacity
Code4Kenya + Code4Ghana + ODADI initiatives to embed
coders in newsrooms, supported by an external jLAB dev
team to scale news apps.
IMAGE platform to create a marketplace for digital news
skills, projects, money & resources.
DataLiberation scraperthons, Code4Democracy hackathons
+ d|bootcamps, and annual TechCamps to give technical
skills via weeklong crash-courses in data scrapping, data
analysis & data visualisation for media.
African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting
(ANCIR) transnational journalism projects.

16. www.AfricanMediaInitiative.org
www.AfricanNewsChallenge.org
@JustinArenstein