British and Scandinavian news publishers lead media innovation in Europe at the Digital Media Awards
WAN-IFRA is proud to announce the European winners of the Digital Media Awards. The laureate projects reveal a continued shift in the industry, where AI is no longer just an editorial experiment but also a driver of revenue growth, hyper-personalisation, and high-value B2B opportunities. They also highlight the growing importance of engaging audiences as active participants in building a solid, trustworthy journalism and promoting media literacy in an increasingly challenging environment.
For the second consecutive year, we celebrate news publishers across two divisions: one for national and international media organisations and another for local and regional outlets. We extend our gratitude to all participants and to our expert jury for their rigorous evaluation. We look forward to showcasing these projects in London this October at Digital Media Europe. Winners in both divisions will compete for the global title to be revealed this June during the World News Media Congress 2026 in Marseille.
WINNERS
Best News Website or App Relaunch
Project: Crime World
Company: Irish Independent, Ireland
To future-proof its journalism amid declining print sales, the Sunday World has undergone a digital transformation by rebranding its online presence as Crime World. This specialised, paywalled “app-first” platform leverages its most successful podcast to drive subscription revenue based on the topic that drove most traffic to the original website: crime. According to the jury: “…this product demonstrates that it understands its engaged audience, especially how to market to it, and the appeal of true crime in Ireland. The site design does a terrific job with brand and visual identity.”
Project: Rheinpfalz App
Company: RHEINPFALZ Verlag, Germany
In 2025, DIE RHEINPFALZ successfully executed a rapid six-month overhaul of its mobile app, transforming it into a high-performance, unified platform designed to deepen engagement for its 60,000 monthly active users. By prioritising speed and reliability – even in rural areas with poor connectivity – the new app introduced automatic downloads, personalised feeds, and a “registration-first” strategy that has already driven them a significant boost in page views and edition opens. The judges emphasised that this transformation is “a terrific example of the effective and innovative use of personalisation to drive engagement.”
Best in Countering Disinformation
Project: La Buloteca
Company: Maldita.es, Spain
La Buloteca by Maldita.es is a collaborative digital platform that mirrors a library of truth, transforming audience-submitted doubts into public “investigation cards” that serve as its cataloged content. By moving beyond traditional, slow-form fact-checking, this project documents the entire verification process in real time, integrating reader expertise under strict editorial moderation. This approach has scaled the newsroom’s capacity, resulting in a 30 percent increase in verifications and a 63 percent rise in web traffic. The jury praised La Buloteca’s impact and scalability, noting that it provides “a highly credible verification model that turns citizen questions into transparent, professionally governed investigations.”
Project: Augsburg checkt’s
Company: Günter Holland Journalistenschule & Augsburger Allgemeine, Germany
Augsburg checkt’s is a collaboration between the Augsburger Allgemeine, the Günter Holland School of Journalism, and the City of Augsburg, designed to bring media literacy directly into the public sphere. Journalism students upload verified fact-checks to the Augsburger Allgemeine website, which citizens access via QR codes placed on public transport screens, in schools, community centers, and public offices. By meeting people in their daily routine spaces, the publisher reaches new audiences beyond traditional newspaper readers while building public trust and training the next generation of journalists in cross-functional collaboration. For the judges, the project “…has potential to transform the relation people have with reliable information…”
Best Emerging News Provider
Project: Children United
Company: Children United, United Kingdom
Soft-launched in November 2025, Children United is a platform dedicated to providing children aged 7-14 with truthful, age-appropriate, and balanced information. Children are central to the platform’s operations, participating as contributors, reporters, and presenters who voice daily news summaries and lead investigative documentaries. Furthermore, a network of school News Clubs allows students to pitch stories, provide feedback, and record vox pops, often resulting in child-led reports distributed through their own web channel and social media. The jury recognised the child-as-reporter model as a key differentiator.
Best Reader Revenue Strategy
Project: Di +Pro
Company: Bonnier News, Sweden
Di +Pro is a premium, AI-powered subscription service from Dagens Industri and 16 specialised publications designed to transition the brand from a traditional news source into an essential decision-support tool for business professionals. By using AI to classify and match content to users in real time, the platform delivers a tailored experience based on specific professional roles. Their revenue strategy focuses on upgrading existing subscribers and securing new ones through continuous pricing and packaging experimentation. This approach, combined with a simple onboarding process, has successfully driven an average revenue per user (ARPU) three times higher than standard subscriptions. The jury underlined it as “an innovative product that taps into the latest technology,” praising its trust-preserving personalisation and enterprise angle.
Project: Winning the young ones
Company: NTM, Sweden
To capture a younger generation of readers, Swedish media group NTM launched a strategic “under-25” initiative offering free, unlimited digital access until a user’s 25th birthday. Using a verified registration through official registers, NTM successfully removed the financial barrier typically associated with traditional news. This offer is powered by an automated onboarding process and a newsroom-wide editorial shift toward TikTok and youth-led reporting. The strategy has proven highly effective in boosting the acquisition of young readers across NTM’s portfolio. The judges highlighted that this initiative has “.. an important strategic shift in editorial voice and [is] adopting a completely new social media approach.”
Best AI-Driven News Product, Format or Strategy
Project: EqualVoice-Assistant
Company: Ringier AG, Switzerland
The EqualVoice-Assistant is an AI-powered editorial tool that uses Generative AI and Natural Language Processing to analyse text in real time, helping users identify gender visibility gaps and eliminate stereotypes before publication. By detecting gender patterns and stereotypical phrasing directly within the CMS, the assistant provides journalists with high-precision feedback and actionable improvements without disrupting their workflow. In 2025, the project underwent a major expansion, evolving from an internal newsroom tool into a standalone, browser-based version available to organisations in more than three countries. The jury praised the initiative as “a meaningful contribution to both journalistic integrity and responsible AI development.”
Project: AINews
Company: Journalism Resource Center – JRC, Georgia
Led by the Journalism Resource Center, AINews is a secure, AI-powered infrastructure designed to sustain Georgia’s regional media amid political pressure and severe staff shortages. The initiative restores editorial capacity by automating international news curation and debuting the country’s first AI-generated anchors, which protected at-risk journalists while ensuring pluralistic election coverage. The project has also helped them to secure new business clients, proving that ethical AI can preserve independent journalism and financial resilience in hostile environments. In the words of the jury: “This project deserves special recognition for demonstrating AI’s potential to protect press freedom and democratic information flows in challenging environments – a powerful model for media resilience globally.”
Best Newsletter
Project: The AI Shift
Company: Financial Times, United Kingdom
The AI Shift is a premium newsletter from the Financial Times that provides rigorous, data-driven analysis of how artificial intelligence is reshaping the global labor market. By pairing the expertise of two of the most popular FT columnists, the project aims to cut through sensationalist headlines to offer subscribers deep reporting and contextualised datasets in an intimate, interactive format. Since its launch in October, the project has achieved record-breaking success, becoming the FT’s fastest-growing premium newsletter. The initiative has successfully fostered deep engagement through live Q&A sessions and community-driven reporting, establishing itself as a benchmark for high-quality, specialised journalism. As the jury noted: “The conversational tone, while unusual in a newsletter, is clearly striking the right mark with readers.”
Project: Eroi del clima
Company: Il Giornale di Vicenza (Gruppo Athesis), Italy
Eroi del Clima redefines environmental journalism by spotlighting ordinary citizens – nominated by Il Giornale di Vicenza readers – as “climate heroes” to shift the narrative from global catastrophe toward local, actionable solutions. The weekly newsletter utilises a creative gamification strategy: print editions feature silhouettes that mask the heroes’ identities, driving readers via QR codes to a full digital reveal. Over ten months, this initiative has cultivated a loyal community with a remarkable 50 percent open rate and a vibrant WhatsApp group dedicated to grassroots action. By transforming traditional reporting into a community-building tool, the project proves that celebrating individual commitment fosters both environmental stewardship and sustained organic growth. This impact was echoed by the judges, who praised the project as “a really smart way of bringing local journalism to life, and a great focus on actions rather than the usual climate doom.”
Best in Audience Engagement
Project: Ask an Expert
Company: Financial Times, United Kingdom
Through Ask an Expert, the Financial Times has transformed passive readers into active contributors by hosting weekly, one-hour live sessions where subscribers engage directly with its journalists. Via a dedicated digital interface, readers submit questions and watch answers appear in real time or revisit the curated discussions later. By providing access to star columnists, the FT has achieved exceptional engagement, including 5,000 live visits per session and a surge in first-time commenters. This initiative demonstrates that making expertise accessible is a powerful driver for subscriber retention. As the jury noted: “Ask an Expert successfully transforms expert journalism into an interactive experience that strengthens trust, transparency, and subscriber loyalty.”
Project: From Transaction to Trust: Leveraging Single-Article Sales for Audience Loyalty
Company: Erna Media, Sweden
Erna Media launched a first-of-its-kind single-article sales model across 14 regional newspapers, creating a frictionless entry point for previously anonymous readers. This initiative successfully moved visitors into a transactional relationship, generating over 25,000 individual sales since February 2025. By turning immediate content needs into data-driven relationships, Erna Media has reached record subscription levels and established a pipeline for long-term growth. The jury committee praised this initiative, “…puts user needs and habits at the forefront of the strategy,” by proving that even the less-engaged audiences can be engaged.
Most Innovative Digital Product
Project: Reimagining video for premium journalism
Company: Verdens Gang (Shibsted), Norway
VG is using video as a strategic gateway rather than a standalone format, integrating it into the core of its premium journalism to solve the problem of high-quality content losing visibility on a fast-moving front page. By utilising an AI-supported workflow that streamlines production while maintaining editorial control, VG converts long-tail stories into vertical “Stories” and curated playlists that act as a visual bridge to deep-dive articles. This innovation meets the mobile-first habits of younger audiences and significantly extends the lifespan of evergreen content. Through this initiative, VG has increased completion rates on visual-first stories and continues to drive long-term discovery, engagement, and value for paying subscribers.
Project: News Connect: Same journalism. New Interface. AI Native.
Company: Ippen Digital, Germany
News Connect is an innovative infrastructure for “Agentic Publishing” that bridges the gap between high-quality journalism and AI discovery platforms. As audiences migrate from search engines to conversational AI, this project transforms static articles into interactive, native “Apps” within ChatGPT’s context window, establishing AI as a distinct distribution channel. Even in its pilot phase, News Connect is securing technological sovereignty for publishers, turning conversational AI into a scalable, high-value tool for building reader loyalty and maintaining the relevance of human editorial craft in a “Silicon” intelligence era. The jury underlined that News Connect “ is clearly built for the AI future in a smart and flexible way – a very ‘strategic’ innovation rather than just a product.”
Best Use of Audio
Project: Escoltas: la sombra que me protegía de ETA
Company: ABC, Spain
ABC documented the lives of the “invisible” bodyguards who protected public figures during decades of ETA terrorism in Spain, highlighting their transition to unemployment following the group’s 2018 disbandment. The project utilised a fragmented collage aesthetic to mirror the era’s social rupture and featured a high-fidelity audio format optimised for instant playback within a seamless, “one-page” digital architecture. By integrating full transcripts and intuitive navigation, the series drove deep audience engagement, significantly increasing dwell time and attracting new subscribers. The jury characterised the project as “a model example of how audio can serve journalism and connect listeners with that historical reality.”
Project: Black Circle: The Shocking Story of Norwegian Black Metal
Company: Bergens Tidende (Shibsted), Norway
Svart Sirkel (Black Circle) is a five-part documentary that explores the evolution of Norwegian black metal from a violent underground scene into a global cultural phenomenon. The project’s innovation lies in its original, synth-based soundscapes that highlight the genre’s electronic roots without imitating existing works. At the same time, the series was also an opportunity for Bergens Tidende to revisit its own archives and examine how the publisher contributed to shaping the public image of black metal during the 1990’s. The jury celebrated the project’s technical execution, stating that “the approaches, changes of pace, and careful sound design of the production are to be applauded.”
Best Use of Video
Project: Dana: La vida y la muerte en cien metros
Company: ABC, Spain
To commemorate the first anniversary of the flash food in Valencia, ABC produced a multi-format feature that integrated high-perspective drone cinematography with raw mobile footage captured during the crisis. These visuals, paired with video interviews, effectively bridged the gap between the initial magnitude of the tragedy and the residents’ current reality. The jury underscored how the video served as a structural tool, blending effortlessly with graphics and text to support the broader narrative. They described the work as “a meticulous, human-centered visual narrative that excels in both design and reporting.”
Project: Le Touriste, Le Parisien’s video series
Company: Le Parisien, France
Launched in April 2025, Le Touriste is a native digital video series that investigates the scams and inconveniences of Parisian life through the perspective of an “embodied” tourist. The format combines rigorous field investigation and hidden-camera footage with a humorous tone specifically tailored for social media algorithms. The project has surpassed the outlet’s standard metrics, including achieving a 50 percent average watch rate and helping propel Le Parisien, for instance, to become the leading news media on YouTube in France. The jury praised the series’s creativity and original angle, noting that “it remains a masterclass in adapting traditional investigative entertainment for massive digital success.”
Best Data Visualisation
Project: A new, mobile-first election coverage
Company: Verdens Gang (Schibsted), Norway
To cover the 2025 Norwegian Parliamentary elections, VG developed a suite of three interconnected products: a redesigned voting advice application (“Valgomat”), real-time opinion poll trackers, and a live results engine, all produced for a seamless mobile experience. The primary challenge was navigating a new national election law that eliminated early media access to vote counts, forcing all data processing and publication to occur instantly at 21:00. To manage this massive traffic surge, the team utilised layered visual hierarchies that provided instant comprehension on mobile screens while maintaining depth, urgency, and accuracy. This approach allowed VG to significantly overperform with the 25-34 age demographic. The judges remarked, “Breaking new ground in electoral results coverage is a rare achievement, and this project does so brilliantly, offering users visualisations that are elegant, engaging, and powerfully functional.”
Project: Stranded at sea: A decade after EU’s migrant crisis, hundreds still dying in the Mediterranean
Company: Reuters, United Kingdom
Reuters reconstructed the journey of a dinghy carrying 57 migrants and was stranded in the Mediterranean to expose the human cost of Europe’s shifting deterrence policies. To visualise this crisis, the project used a sophisticated mix of 3D modeling and detailed cartography, accurately scaling the overcrowded vessel against the immense, perilous waves it encountered after losing power. By layering classic data visualisations – such as timelines and maps derived from satellite data and email records – within these immersive 3D scenes, the piece connects the specific ordeal of 57 passengers to a broader decade-long analysis of 22,000 deaths along the route. This “micro-to-macro” approach bridges individual testimony and policy analysis, revealing how restricted rescue zones and diplomatic deals have created a landscape in which irregular crossings may have decreased, but the risk of disappearing at sea has intensified. The jury described the piece as “visually stunning and genuinely innovative in its storytelling.”
Project: SOS Montseny
Company: Diari ARA, Spain
SOS: El Montseny s’ofega is a multimedia investigation that exposes the loss of nearly 900 hectares of forest in Montseny Natural Park in Spain over the last two decades. The project’s primary challenge was to visualise a counterintuitive thesis: the forest is collapsing not only due to drought but also because of uncontrolled growth and a lack of forest management. To deliver this complex data, the team used a high-precision dual-satellite approach validated by postdoctoral researchers to map forest loss with granular accuracy. They also engineered a mobile-first scrollytelling experience featuring interactive sliders and accessible color palettes for colorblind users. Setting a new standard for localised environmental data journalism, the project was praised by the jury for being “visually strong and creative.”
Best Marketing Campaign for a News Brand
Project: Every Goal Counts
Company: GOLAZO.ro – Golazo Publishing Group, Romania
The sports news outlet GOLAZO.ro introduced Every Goal Counts, a campaign to differentiate itself in Romania’s competitive sports media market. Rather than focusing solely on elite professional sports, the campaign centered on everyday fans and utilised well-known journalists to celebrate their personal milestones. This inclusive approach extended to editorial coverage of amateur and semi-professional soccer leagues, creating a unique connection with the audience. Through a coordinated presence across TV, radio, digital out-of-home (DOOH), and social media, the publisher achieved a 155 percent increase in pageviews and a 31 percent boost in time spent on-site year-over-year. Reflecting on the multichannel rollout, the jury remarked: “While the creative concept of celebrating the fan is a known trope in sports marketing, the execution across such a complex, coordinated multichannel ecosystem sets a new standard for operational efficiency in the industry.”
Project: The P&J – Your voice of the North
Company: The Press and Journal (DC Thomson), United Kingdom
The Press and Journal’s “Your Voice of the North” campaign was a mission-led brand repositioning aimed to transform the 275-year-old legacy title into a modern, indispensable civic voice for Northern Scotland. Facing a market reluctant to pay for digital news, the campaign moved away from transactional marketing to focus on emotional relevance, proving its value through a “show, don’t tell” strategy that highlighted real-world journalistic impact. The initiative successfully drove brand consideration to a record 31percent, convincing audiences that a subscription is not just a transaction, but an investment in a news brand that serves as an advocate for its community – a success the jury described as “a remarkable example of how to measure and prove brand value in a local context.”
