Last Saturday, the Media Innovation Lab of the media group Wiener Zeitung organized a hackathon under the motto “Put News Archives to Life”. In cooperation with AIM (AI Impact Mission) and the Austrian Startup Summit, a total of 24 participants came together – including eight teams and two individuals.
The aim of the hackathon was to develop innovative AI solutions for dealing with historical news archives with the help of Large Language Models (LLMS). The participants received access to an extensive data record, more precisely 87,000 articles from 1998 to 2023, the Wiener Zeitung – the oldest daily newspaper in the world up to two years ago.
The teams worked on various media -relevant challenges such as personalized news formats and workflows to promote democratic discourse. By extracting and processing the existing data records, complex topics could be made more accessible to younger and various target groups. Suggestions on the topics of Fact Checking, Semantic Classification of Biased and Non Biased News as well as information mapping for investigative research were also central.
The best three teams “Nexus Group Ai”, “The Pollis” and “Venom Boys” convinced the jury with their technically high -quality and democratic -elavant concepts. You may have your solutions on Austrian Startup Summit am 1. April present and also look forward to cash prices between 500 and 1,500 euros. The winning team also secures its own stand at the Austrian Startup Summit 2026 including access to investors.
The evaluation of the developed solutions took over a specialist jury consisting of Verena Krawarik, Head of Innovation APA & APA-Medialab and Member of Ai Advisory Board Digital Austria, Petronela Altrichter, Ex-Coo Microsoft, Felix Krause, Data Scientist at Timetoact and LLM expert Texterous and Digicust as well as Alexandra Folwarski, Team Lead Media Innovation Lab and herself media founder.
With the hackathon, the Media Innovation Lab sets a groundbreaking sign of the interlinking of tech and media worlds.
OTS original text press release with the exclusive in terms of content of the sender – www.ots.at | WRZ