KTH’s contribution will significantly strengthen WAN-IFRA’s research and development capacities, and will facilitate the exchange of good practice and know-how on a scale hitherto unseen in this relatively new environment of news publishing media labs.

“The media industry requires a reliable flood of new technologies, products and business models. Indeed, we see the future of news media being invented right now, all around the globe, by hundreds of different companies, universities and entrepreneurs, but their separate efforts, research, prototypes and roll-outs get inconsistent attention and analysis” said Vincent Peyrègne, CEO of WAN-IFRA. “Many good ideas fail only due to lack of development support. Others get hyped beyond their real value. Vital lessons and examples are not being widely enough or rapidly enough disseminated”.

GAMI’s role is to connect these initiatives, facilitate collaboration across the industry and across disciplines, and rapidly advance the best innovations and talents to the market. The core of the initiative consists of harnessing a constant flow of information between WAN-IFRA news publishing members and a group of leading academic centres who focus not only on their education mandates but also on their capacity to develop meaningful and purposeful technology transfer capacity to better serve the needs of business corporations. This unprecedented collaboration between news publishers and expert in innovation from the academic ecosystem opens perspectives and new opportunities in the challenging area of digital technology innovation. GAMI is already engaged in several international projects involving technology entrepreneurs, news organisations and universities, especially within the European framework for research and innovation, Horizon 2020.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology will contribute to the strategic roadmap of GAMI and will contribute to its programmes in Research and Innovation, dissemination of best practices, and training through it’s School of Computer Science and Communication. KTH becomes one of the 10 international research institutions who are part of GAMI’s international network of affiliated research and innovation centres.

“We are very much looking forward to establishing more international contacts within this area of research and collaboration, and hope that we can achieve many great things during the coming year”, said Malin Picha Edwardsson, project manager and researcher at KTH.

“News publishers need to evolve from a culture that is insular, guarded and top-down in its decision making to one that is collaborative, intellectually curious and data-driven in its decision making. A collaboration like the one signed with KTH helps opening eyes on new ways of partnering with the invaluable assets and talents available in academic centres », said Vincent Peyrègne. “KTH has been a longstanding and remarkable partner of WAN-IFRA in many joint innovation projects during the past few decades. It is a privilege to have them aboard our Global Alliance for Media Innovation» added Peyrègne.

ABOUT KTH School of Computer Science and Communication

CSC is one of Sweden’s most advanced and successful research and education institutions in Information Technology. We work with education and research in Computer Science, Media Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, Speech Technology and Music Acoustics at KTH and at Stockholm University (SU). About 300 people work in this dynamic environment, 100 of whom are graduate students. Currently, 1500 undergraduate students are enrolled in our education programmes. The school is responsible for education in Computer Science and Media Technology in most of the Master of Technology programmes at KTH, and also in Bachelor and Master programmes at KTH and at the Science faculty at SU. About 11000 students participate in our about 300 courses, ranging from basic level to research level each year.

ABOUT GAMI

GAMI is WAN-IFRA’s integrated innovation incubator founded in 2014. It supports an international network of media innovation labs, research centres, innovation clusters and tech entrepreneurs GAMI's guiding principle is « Research excellence with quality journalistic and engaged media consumption relevance ». A not for profit initiative launched by WAN-IFRA, its goal is to rapidly advance new technologies and talents to the market and lead to better economy of scales for news publishers and tech companies in developing/acquiring tools they need. The growing international network of partners brings scale in expertise and disciplines and allows GAMI to offer a coherent platform for publishers to find support and coordination capacities to their R&D projects, and innovation management thinking and practices. A number of WAN-IFRA members are already affiliated to the programme together with major institutes including EPFL (Switzerland), NTU (Singapore), PUCRS (Brazil), NTNU (Norway), Stibo Accelerator (Denmark), iMinds (Begium), Unine (Switzerland), Texas University at Austin (USA), UCLAN (UK)

WAN-IFRA based in Paris, and Frankfurt, with regional offices in Chennai, Singapore, and Mexico, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000 print and online publications, and serves over 3,000 member companies in more than 120 countries. Its mission is to defend and promote press freedom, and help independent news publishing companies to succeed in their transformation process, increase their business, and perform their crucial role in open societies. WAN-IFRA is a leading global resource for publishers, editors, chief technology officers, digital business executives, news publisher associations, technology suppliers, service providers and research centres with three focus areas : innovation and business development - regulation and global media policy - press freedom. Learn more about WAN-IFRA at http://www.wan-ifra.org/who-we-are

Contact - Inquiries

Stephen Fozard – Project Director

WAN-IFRA, Paris

Mobile: +33 6 76 81 40 52

Email: stephen.fozard@wan-ifra.org

WAN-IFRA Press Corner

www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases