Finally! After more than five months reviewing 115 entries, interviewing 58 teams and choosing 18 finalists, Media Factory has selected three teams to make up its first class of entrepreneurs.
The winners are: ElMeme.me from Argentina, GKillCity from Ecuador and El Cambur from Venezuela. Each will receive an investment of US$75,000, plus mentorship from digital media outlets worldwide.
Media Factory, which I launched as part of my Knight International Journalism Fellowship, is a startup accelerator focusing exclusively on online news and journalism. The program is supported by North Base Media, Media Development Investment Fund, NXTP Labs and the International Center for Journalists.
Four partners, Sasa Vucinic of North Base Media, Syed Karim of MDIF, Ariel Arrieta of NXTP Labs, and I, made the final selection. On May 26, the winners will come to Buenos Aires for three months, during which they will take their projects to the next level.
The teams we chose are focusing on content projects that have the potential to grow into successful, long-term content businesses. In additional to the financial investment, we’ll work with the teams on editorial efficiency, audience growth and revenue generation. We’ll also advise them, through our network of mentors and investors, on emerging trends and the best practices of successful digital news outlets from around the globe.
The winners are:
-
Argentina: ElMeme.me ElMeme.me is a platform that distributes content about the news, pop culture and entertainment. It wants to build a strong brand and broaden its audience’s size and loyalty, while taking advantage of what it sees as a great future for the mobile content business. Its main goal is to build a professional, agile and modern newsroom, produce quality content and develop its business.
-
Ecuador: GkillCity.com GKillCity is a digital, countercultural citizens’ communication project. Since its founding in 2011 in Guayaquil, it has published 152 editions with contributions from more than 290 collaborators across the globe. New media in Ecuador are almost unexplored, and GKillCity wants to become the iconic digital media of Ecuador. It aims to create more audio content and mobile applications, and also make use of digital TV channels.
- Venezuela: El Cambur El Cambur is a network digital media and services enterprise committed to the political center, which is ignored by the mainstream media. It presents media made up of quality information presented in short texts based on data, graphics and audiovisuals. The team wants to create essential content to generate debate on ideas and create different products in the area of communications and political sociology.
Knight International Journalism Fellow Mariano Blejman is an editor and media entrepreneur specializing in data-driven journalism.
This post was originally written in Spanish and translated into English by Andrea Arzaba.
Global media innovation content related to the projects and partners of the Knight Fellowships on IJNet is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and edited by Jennifer Dorroh.
Image courtesy of Sumall.com.