Pricing Culture, the company I co-founded with Bhargav Shivarthy, has been nominated as a finalist for the 2025 Next Challenge for Media & Journalism.
The award, funded by the Knight Foundation, is part of a national competition that seeks to identify for-profit and nonprofit startups helping to reinvent media in the coming decade.
There are a total of six categories with 27 startups vying for cash prizes totalling $200,000.
We were one of ten finalists competing for up to $50,000 in the NewsTech category.
The NewsTech prize is awarded to “a startup building digital tools to address the critical tech needs of journalists and local news organizations.”
The recognition felt great, especially coming a year since our pivot from a data to content company that leverages AI to create machine-generated insights.
If you aren’t familiar with Pricing Culture, we built an engine that helps writers by providing data-driven insights that make them more efficient when they produce stories.
Our tools help them scour vast amounts of data while still preserving an essential role for human news judgement.
Here’s how it works: we ingest data sets that are too large to be easily monitored and use AI to identify anomalies. We then deliver a feed of “story prompts” that include essential background data any reporter would need to look up.
Two examples of feeds we’ve built for clients include fluctuations in real estate prices and the weather – two of the most common but cumbersome genres articles reporters have to cover. Our system helps identify trends faster.
We believe journalists will increasingly rely on technology to spot possible trend stories and that Pricing Culture can help play a role.
Congratulations to all the other finalists in the NewsTech category:
– Gigafact
– GlueLetter newsletter analytics
– Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
– Outpost Publishers Cooperative
– Plucky Works
– Rewrites
Ted Merz 