Global Project Oasis is led by SembraMedia with support of Google News Initiative and a growing list of partners.

SembraMedia has been mapping independent digital media since 2015. That ongoing project has become the foundation of a community of media entrepreneurs that includes more than 900 digital media outlets and news content creators in Latin America, Spain, and the Spanish-speaking market in Canada, and the United States. 

In 2022, SembraMedia launched Project Oasis Europe, which features more than 500 media outlets from 44 European countries. In collaboration with the European Journalism Centre, the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC), International Media Support (IMS), and the support of Google News Initiative, it features a report with the key findings on the sustainability, innovation, and impact of the independent native digital media ecosystem in Europe. 

Project Oasis in the U.S. and Canada was launched in collaboration between LION Publishers, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Douglas K. Smith and the Google News Initiative to map and showcase the growing number of locally focused digital news publications in the region and to share information about the choices they have made along their pathways to sustainability, as well as the most relevant research in this space. SembraMedia began leading the project in this region in 2025, following previous work conducted by LION Publishers. 

For Brazil, AJOR implemented SembraMedia’s research methodology to survey media outlets among their members and add 164 news organizations.

For Australia, the Local & Independent News Association (LINA) and Digital Publishers Alliance (DPA) helped us create 173 media profiles for the Project Oasis directory. In addition, SembraMedia’s research team identified 14 other digital native media organizations in Australia that meet our criteria, and created profiles using publicly available information in order to include them in the directory. For New Zealand, a group of researchers did the outreach to an initial list of 21 media outlets meeting our criteria of inclusion. In some cases, we accepted media sites even though they are not technically digital natives. This exception was made because they are digital-first, and they were deemed to be of significant value in the news ecosystem.

For Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa, our partner Code for Africa identified 763 news organizations and creators that meet our criteria. The team surveyed each organization and provided a pre-filled, editable form for validation.

As the lead organization, SembraMedia’s team manages all partners and researchers working on Project Oasis, as well as the data collection, analysis, and  systematization to make the data more comparable across the many regions where we conduct research.

SembraMedia was in charge of systematizing all the information to make the data comparable.

Find out more about our mapping methodology and the teams for each region in the About the study.