With the news and media landscape in Indonesia becoming increasingly dynamic and diverse over the past 20 years, digital transformation remains one of the toughest challenges for media companies, especially for the small and medium ones. In this scenario, the Google News Initiative (GNI) Startups Lab is a pioneering project from Google in collaboration with Echos Innovation Lab to support news media startups in Indonesia that are at an early stage of development and contribute to the acceleration of the news ecosystem in the digital environment.

As part of the Echos team, I helped ten selected news media startups by providing them with workshops and mentorship on topics such as audience-centricity, crafting digital products, business models, marketing strategy, community building and fundraising.