Ten Latin American Newsrooms to Participate in New AI-Powered Next Gen News Sprint
Next Gen audiences (ages 18–28) discover news on platforms, not through a homepage, and build trust through relevance. Yet at most news organizations, they currently account for just 2–5% of subscribers or revenue. They are also the only generation that won’t simply “age into” legacy news habits. That makes investing in Next Gen audiences more than a marginal growth opportunity. It’s a sustainability imperative and an opportunity to shape the product and monetization models that will define the next 10–15 years of news.
That's the challenge at the center of the AI-Powered Next Gen News Sprint LatAm, a new eight-month program from the News Product Alliance (NPA), developed for Grupo de Diarios América (GDA) with the support of the Google News Initiative (GNI). Participating newsrooms will research their next-gen audiences, build an AI-powered product through a virtual design sprint, and work with expert coaches to take this product from prototype to implementation.
The cohort is made up of leading national newsrooms from ten countries, all GDA members:
La Nación (Argentina)
O Globo (Brazil)
El Tiempo (Colombia)
La Nación (Costa Rica)
La Prensa Gráfica (El Salvador)
El Universal (Mexico)
El Comercio (Peru)
El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico)
Listín Diario (Dominican Republic)
El Nacional (Venezuela)
The program kicked off on August 26, 2026, with participants expressing curiosity, enthusiasm and an eagerness to learn about their next-gen audiences.
Each newsroom features a four-person team – an executive sponsor, an editorial lead, a product/AI lead and an audience lead – reflecting the program's core premise: this is not a single department's project, but a cross-functional initiative that requires both executive backing and internal alignment.
“We’ve seen the impact this program can have through our initiative with top local newsrooms in the U.S., and we’re excited to bring those lessons to Latin America. We’re looking forward to seeing how these ten organizations apply state-of-the-art product practices to open up new audiences and markets,” says Felicitas Carrique, Executive Director at News Product Alliance.
"For GDA's member newsrooms, understanding next-gen audiences in each one of their countries isn't optional — it's central to our media network's long-term sustainability. This program gives our teams a structured, research-based way to move from insight to a real product, and we're grateful to the News Product Alliance and the Google News Initiative for making this regional learning collaboration possible," says Lyng-Hou Ramirez, Content and Operations Director at GDA.
“Through initiatives like the Next Gen News Sprint, at Google we aim to provide training and resources to help news organizations develop the skills and strategies they need in a changing media environment, and in this particular program, to understand and address the news consumption habits of new generations”, says Haydée Bagú, News Partner Manager, LatAm, at Google.
From Research to a Live Product
The program's foundation is the Next Gen News 2 study, published by FT Strategies and the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, which represents one of the most comprehensive looks yet at how next-gen audiences relate to journalism.
Each team will run original audience research in its own market, translate what they learn into a working prototype during a week-long virtual design sprint, and then turn that prototype into a live product – with coaching and support from product and AI specialists along the way.
NPA developed and tested this journey earlier this year through its GNI × NPA AI-Powered Next Gen News Sprint with 12 U.S. local newsrooms. In that first iteration of this initiative, newsrooms have been able to build and launch new experiences based on direct feedback from audiences 18-28, while increasing their internal AI news product management capacity.
Follow the Next Gen Sprint LatAm as it unfolds, and learn more about NPA's work at newsproduct.org
