Vote: 2025 RJI Student Innovation Competition

There are many challenges facing the journalism industry today but one of the fastest growing is news avoidance. According to the Reuters 2024 Digital News Report, 4 in 10 individuals globally (39%) sometimes or often avoid the news. This is compounded by a huge percentage of individuals who get their news through social and aggregation platforms that also offer entertainment and other types of information, making it easy to avoid the news and information they need.

This year’s challenge was for student teams to create something to help journalists and newsrooms tackle the increasing rates of news avoidance to get vital information to the communities they serve. Is it changing the way we present, produce or create news? Is it the method, the delivery or the content? They decided what worked best for their communities.

Watch each team’s presentation below to see the SMS systems, widgets, tools and products they built to address news avoidance! Then vote for which team you think should win the $10,000 first prize.