Prothom Alo is the biggest media of the country. Prothom Alo is at the top of readership in Bengali language in nearly two hundred countries and regions of the world through print and online. A large part of this popularity is urban-centric. Therefore, Prothom Alo has taken a special project to deliver news, information and analysis of their daily needs within reach of people in villages and small towns. The project has been selected for Google News Initiative’s (GNI) Innovation Challenge 2022. Now Google will fund and support this project of Prothom Alo.

Since 2019, Google has been supporting creative-innovative projects to bring new ideas, sustainable development and media closer to readers in global online journalism through this event. For the first time, a Bangladeshi media has been selected in this competition of Google for the creativity of news and technology.

Prothom Alo’s news technology project, titled ‘Kankshit Khabar Aak Kate’, will mainly work on how to more effectively reach the readers of different regions of the country with their interest and useful news.

About the news technology project, Prothom Alo editor Matiur Rahman said, ‘We always promote local news with special importance in Prothom Alo. Local news is most useful and useful for respective regions. We have been publishing regional editions of print newspapers for over a decade as part of delivering useful and essential news, information, analysis, opinion to our readers. In continuation of this, we have a separate initiative to serve local news online. Prothom Alo online we regularly publish department, district and even upazila based news. But our project is to deliver that news better according to the location and preferences of the reader. This project got a new dimension with the help of Google News Initiative.

Thanking Google, Matiur Rahman said, “I believe, this type of news technology initiative will show the way to the future for the media.”

The names of the selected projects were published on the website of GNI on Tuesday morning Bangladesh time. GNI’s Innovation Challenge is held in five regions—Asia and the Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Middle East-Africa.

19 projects from 10 countries in the Asia and Pacific region have been selected for GNI’s Innovation Challenge this year. A total of 37 countries including Bangladesh are included in the Asia and Pacific region. Among the countries in the region, three Indian media have been selected as the highest. Two media outlets from Australia, Indonesia, South Korea and New Zealand have been selected. One media each from Bangladesh, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore has been selected.

As a member of GNI, Prothom Alo has been getting help from Google in various matters since 2020.

In 2020, Prothom Alo’s two digital projects received awards in two categories at the South Asian Digital Media Awards organized by ONE-IFRA, an international media organization. Google was the sponsor of this award.