The first phase of the programme which started in March 2025, ended in May with the selection of three Finnish media organisations. In order to be selected, each media had submitted a challenge they aimed to solve in collaboration with a tech partner.
Today, we enter the second phase of the programme and launch an open call to find those tech partners !
From this call, open until 11 July 2025, three startups or tech companies will be selected in order to kick-off a six-month collaboration phase which will start in October 2025.
The programme will also assist participating teams with additional ad-hoc coaching by external industry experts in change management and tech innovation.
By the end of the programme in March 2026, participating teams will present a proof of concept at a public event open to the whole Finnish news media industry.
Applicants can select one of the three following challenges:
Challenge #1: Scaling impact beyond article centric publishing
Legacy media revenues are shrinking faster than digital growth can compensate. This media organisation’s lifestyle brands remain trusted, yet their revenue still rises and falls with the number of articles they can afford to commission—an equation that no longer scales.
Pain points
- Non linear cost curve – Every article requires a writer, editor, visuals, and distribution budget, while platforms capture most advertising revenue.
- Non breaking news cadence – As a lifestyle and service journalism publisher, we seldom benefit from the urgency of breaking news. Interest peaks are seasonal and often depend on referral traffic, so building daily habits demands different engagement loops.
- Untapped Finnish open data – Finland’s world class public datasets have barely been converted into audience facing products.
- Missing habit building services – Personalisation stops at article recommendations; we need utilities that become part of users’ daily routines.
- Short content life cycle – Most of the articles lose relevance quickly. Evergreen experiences that gather first-party data, deepen membership, and enable B2B licensing are essential.
Problem: How can a media product move beyond the short life cycle of individual articles or pieces of content? Could we leverage open data, gamification, or content reformatting to create more engaging products that are not dependent on continuously producing new articles?
Hypothesis / Opportunity: Open data + generative AI + gamified UX = evergreen “service journalism products” that deliver daily utility and loyalty without expanding headcount.
The ideal partner would offer:
- Data engineering & AI
- Use and enrich large public datasets (open-source, geospatial, environmental, etc.) to utilize the data in our needs.
- Build robust pipelines and APIs that integrate seamlessly with our existing stack\
- Apply rules-based or generative models to turn raw data into personalised micro-narratives, alerts, and recommendations
- Engagement & gamification
- Design progression loops, challenges, and reward systems that convert one-off curiosity into daily habit
- Product growth & commercialization
- Shape monetisation models (subscriptions, freemium tiers, in-app purchases, B2B licensing)
- Run data-driven growth experiments—A/B testing, funnel optimisation, lifecycle marketing
- Leverage analytics to maximise customer lifetime value
Challenge #2: Automating the transformation of phone interviews directly into article drafts
One significant and recurring challenge is the time-consuming and manual process associated with phone interviews — a core tool in everyday journalistic work.
Journalists often conduct dozens of phone interviews weekly, each requiring careful note-taking, transcription, content distillation, and story writing. This process is not only resource-intensive, but also prone to human error and information loss, especially under tight publishing deadlines.
This Finnish newsroom aims to solve this by automating the transformation of phone interviews into article drafts. The core idea is to enable a journalist to conduct a phone interview and, immediately after (or even during the call), receive a structured article draft based on the conversation.
The envisioned system would need to:
- Record the interview securely, complying with all legal and ethical requirements.
- Automatically transcribe the audio to text in real-time or post-call, with high accuracy.
- Use natural language processing to identify and highlight key points, quotes, and themes.
- Generate a coherent draft article that can be further refined by the journalist in their content management system.
- Optionally, link the audio of original quotes to enrich audio versions of news articles, offering audiences a more immersive and trustworthy experience.
Problem: can we facilitate the daily journalistic work by automating the transformation of phone interviews into article drafts?
The ideal partner would offer:
- Speech recognition
- Natural language processing
- AI-driven content generation
Ideally, the partner would have experience building real-time transcription tools, language models capable of summarising and structuring complex conversations, and secure solutions for audio data handling.
Challenge #3: Increasing/Maintaining public trust during political campaigns by tackling misinformation.
Media is facing a critical challenge in maintaining public trust in reporting elections and other political issues. With the spreading of misinformation and the complexity of political promises, our audience struggles to distinguish between realistic policy proposals and unrealistic campaign rhetoric.
This Finnish newsroom has attempted to address these issues through traditional fact-checking articles, but they remain reactive rather than proactive, and don’t scale effectively during intense campaign periods. They miss the opportunity to provide their audience with real-time, accessible analysis of political promises and struggle to engage younger audiences.
Problem: how can we use technology to provide real-time analysis of political content and republish this fact-checked content seamlessly, using attractive formats including for younger audiences ?
The ideal partner would offer:
- AI-Powered speech recognition: Technology that can transcribe and analyze political speeches and debates in real-time, with high accuracy for Finnish language content.
- Knowledge database integration: Systems to connect statements with verified information about jurisdictional authorities and factual data from official sources.
- Machine learning development: Experience in training models to improve identification of checkable claims versus opinions.
They would like to offer a collaboration with Lumi AI supercomputer and are already in discussions with them.
Eligibility conditions to apply:
- You are an established company registered in your country (in Europe)
- You have a functioning tech solution relevant for a media company and capable of solving one of the 3 challenges exposed
- You are a team of at least 2 people and you are able to deliver a Proof of Concept and are ready to experiment with an established Finnish media company over a period of minimum 6 months
- You are capable of working in English 100%
- You are available between September 2025 and March 2026 to collaborate with a Finnish media company
- You are available to join in-person meetings that will take place in September or October, January and March in Helsinki (costs covered by the programme)
Contact and Inquiries
Stephen Fozard, Project Director at GAMI, WAN-IFRA – stephen.fozard@wan-ifra.org
➽ More details about GAMI Incubator #Finland, why apply, eligibility criteria for publishers, focus areas of the programme, and timeline can be found in this Fact Sheet.
About the programme:
GAMI Incubator #Finland, a programme initiated by WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation (GAMI), will enhance partnerships between media organisations and technology companies, driving positive change in the Finnish media industry and supporting the future of professional journalism.
In a fast-changing digital environment, the media industry must embrace new technologies, products, and business models. This requires fostering collaboration among various stakeholders driving innovation within the sector and supporting transformation and change in news media organisations.
To address these challenges, WAN-IFRA has developed a structured programme and framework to help bridge gaps between media organisations and startups or tech companies with new skills and potential solutions.
The GAMI Incubator #Finland programme aims to:
- Facilitate collaboration between legacy media and startups/tech companies
- Support new skills uptake and technology adoption in Finnish newsrooms
- Create opportunities for promising international startups/tech companies in the Finnish media landscape
- Share best practices and lessons learned across the Finnish media industry