And the winner of Startups For News 2017 is… Flourish!
The 8 finalists for Startups for News were invited to pitch in front of the 750 participants of the GEN Summit. Whether about monetisation, automated journalism or audience engagement, the competition highlighted tools and services that will accelerate newsrooms.
The Global Editors Network is thrilled to announce that the votes are in: The winner of the Startups for News competition at the GEN Summit 2017 is Flourish!
Flourish is a powerful and flexible platform to quickly and efficiently produce high-quality interactive content, including data visualisations, maps and explainers. It is a solution for non-coders allowing them to produce interactive visuals, stories and interactives based on flexible templates, but also for newsroom developers, allowing them to come up with their own templates.
As part of the winning prize, Flourish is invited to the GEN Summit 2018 in Lisbon, where they will be showcasing their product at the GEN Expo.
Duncan Clarke and Robin Houston from Flourish said of their win:
“We really were not confident we would win the competition. Thank you very to everyone rooting for us to be here in Vienna, collecting this award now, especially with all the great startups we were competing against. The Startups for News and the final at the GEN Summit were incredible… And this win means we’re coming to Lisbon next year!”
Jury member Catalina Albeanu from Journalism.co.uk said of this year’s competition and of Flourish’s win:
“It was a very tough decision, picking a winner. This year we have gone from 100 startups at the beginning, to the 16 selected for the online pitch battles, to the 8 finalists invited to the GEN Summit in Vienna, and we had a very long deliberation process. We picked a great winner with Flourish. It is a great startup that can help newsrooms of every size, with various levels of skills. Their platform is a tool that journalists can use to include data in their stories whether or not they have worked with data before.”
The runner-up is Urbs Media, an editorial agency that combines human-authored data journalism with automation to deliver data-driven stories daily and on a large scale. By exploiting the growing supply of open data, this startup uncovers strong local news stories, combining journalism with technology to deliver these stories on a scale that could not be achieved through human effort alone.
The 8 finalists for the competition pitching on the main stage at the GEN Summit were Blockthrough, Croma, Flourish, Muuze, Politibot, Populate, PushApps and UrbsMedia.
The Startups for News jury, who picked the startup as the winner of the competition, is presided by Jeff Jarvis — CUNY and Buzzmachine and composed of Angela Oduor Lungati- Ushahidi, Catalina Albeanu — Journalism.co.uk, David Cohn — Advanced Digital, GEN’s Evangeline de Bourgoing, Kalli Purie — India Today, Maria Ressa — Rappler, Mohammed Haddad — Al Jazeera English, Ricardo Corredor Cure — Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation for New Journalism, Turi Munthe — North Base Media.
Startups for News is an international competition that rewards early-stage startups working on high-impact and daring solutions for the news industry.
Every year, the Global Editors Network, in partnership with Journalism.co.uk selects the best startups that address newsroom challenges through dynamic and innovative products or services. This season, GEN and Journalism.co.uk partnered with Slush, Vivatech and Media Lab Bayern.
The Startups for News 2017 finalists came from Argentina, Spain, Canada, United States, Israel and the United Kingdom to pitch on the main stage at the GEN Summit in Vienna, 21–23 June.
