Meedan is developing new software that will help newsrooms strengthen relationships with their audiences through AI-powered mobile messaging. We are embarking on this new stream of work with funding from Press Forward, a U.S.-based national initiative to reimagine local news.

The funding is part of Press Forward’s Open Call on Infrastructure, which is providing $22.7 million to 22 projects that address the urgent challenges local newsrooms face today.

Our newsroom-operated chatbots will deliver succinct answers to readers’ questions, solicit their tips and ideas, and offer them a pathway to reading full-length articles. Every response delivered will be drawn from the newsroom’s archive and public data sources and provide citations with links, allowing readers to learn more about the issues. And none of the information that we produce will be fed back into the systems of commercial AI giants like OpenAI or Google.

We will pilot this new software in partnership with three independent newsrooms that are experimenting with innovative new ways to serve their audiences. They include:

• Mississippi Today, winner of a 2021 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, is one of the largest newsrooms in Mississippi. Founded in 2016 as a statehouse watchdog, Mississippi Today now covers education, public health, justice, the environment, equity, and sports.
  
  
• Verite News, founded in 2022 and based in New Orleans, elevates voices from communities that have been historically dismissed or ignored to create thoughtful, solution-based coverage of education, housing, health care, criminal justice, the environment, and politics.
  
  
• Epicenter NYC, an award-winning multiplatform community media organization, delivers meaningful connections and impact to its partners and life-changing information and experiences to diverse audiences.

Check, our award-winning open source software, has given us a 10-year foundation from which to build this new infrastructure. Check allows organizations to gather questions, observations, and information from community members through closed messaging apps and analyze that data to reveal trends. And it already enables organizations to structure their data to train chatbots that help scale news distribution and reader engagement. 

Our new product will do all this and more, incorporating public data and other key resources that we believe can radically change the way organizations engage with their audiences and the way people in every community access and exchange information. 

To learn more about our ideas for this new chapter in Meedan’s story, read our teaser post.

We’re honored to receive this grant alongside more than 20 other newsrooms and journalism-supporting organizations in our field. The full list of grant recipients is available online.

For press inquiries, please write to press@meedan.com.

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About Press Forward

Launched in the fall of 2023, Press Forward is working to reimagine local news nationwide. Press Forward’s growing coalition of funders has committed to invest more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms, close longstanding gaps in journalism coverage, advance public policy that expands access to local news and scale infrastructure the sector needs to thrive. Press Forward is housed at The Miami Foundation. For more, visit pressforward.news.