How can media outlets build trust, when so many people doubt the credibility of news? This is one of the most pressing questions journalism faces today, and it has far-reaching implications not only for the industry but for our civic health. Addressing this and other urgent issues requires prodigious creativity, as well as the time and support for innovation – something few newsrooms have.

That’s why ICFJ has developed Leap, a news innovation lab. Our goal is not innovation simply for its own sake. We designed Leap to give newsrooms across the world the space to explore the most essential challenges confronting journalism today and to shape its future. We want to ease the risk and costs that inhibit innovation, especially for small and mid-sized independent news organizations.

ICFJ’s Leap will provide guided, focused experiences for news teams and technologists to explore, design and develop solutions that address specific problems. It will also support individual innovators to work on projects that can help journalism best serve the public.  

We aim to fill a demand we hear from so many journalists in our network. How do they report, edit, connect with communities and run a newsroom in an era of rampant disinformation, skeptical audiences and declining business models? How do they respond to these tectonic forces with small staff and limited resources? With Leap, we want to harness the power of our network to help one another discover innovative ways to tackle these issues. The odds of success are much greater if we all do this together.  

Leap will support journalists and newsrooms with: 

• Solution Challenges: Small news teams, led by expert mentors, will develop products and processes that solve for a specific challenge during these 10-week sprints. The first cycle, in partnership with Trusting News, will focus on building trust and transparency. 
   
• Hackathons: Journalists and technologists will meet and invent together. Our first hackathon will be August 25-27 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with participants from Media Party, the largest media innovation event in Latin America, co-founded by former ICFJ Knight Fellow Mariano Blejman. The focus will be on developing tools that harness the power of the next generation of the internet (Web3) – especially decentralization features that can enable more collaborative, diverse and community-oriented journalism. Join us there.
   
• Fellows: Leap Innovation Fellows will receive financial support and guidance from ICFJ to work on tools and products that are helping journalism reinvent itself. Our 2022 fellows are Sérgio Spagnuolo of Brazil and Tinshui Yeung of Hong Kong. 
  
  Spagnuolo, a former ICFJ Knight Fellow, is addressing the challenge of how to effectively monitor the information – and disinformation – that political campaigners share on social media. In the run-up to midterm elections in the U.S., his PULSE US tool will look at how information spreads, with a focus on local and state politics. Yeung is studying whether emerging internet technologies could offer new forms of protection for journalists facing authoritarian threats. Applications for 2023 Fellows will open early next year.

We are immensely grateful to the dozens of individual donors who have made this initiative possible by contributing to our It Takes a Journalist campaign, which we designed to help journalists meet the most urgent issues of today. Their support allows us to flexibly deploy resources where they are most needed.