Journalism beyond competition

In order to create a larger role for aid recipients in conversations about how success and failure are defined for international aid, the What Went Wrong project was founded. People use mobile phones to contact the journalists about a failed aid project, and the journalists gather information about the project, publish reports on social media, and share their findings with the people who originally reported.

Readers on the BBC website can now find out more about select stories through “Appy Helper,” a module that provides background about an ongoing, complex story. The module works through both a chat-style interface that readers navigate via prompts or a more linear timeline display.

Publishing various perspectives fosters civic discourse. In Poland, Projekt Spiecie addresses the challenge of ideological isolation by creating a network of magazines across the political spectrum that all agree to publish each other’s work. By providing their readers with competing points of view on topics of national debate, these publishers aim to reduce the opacity of individual media bubbles and to lessen polarization.

Getting away from daily publishing helps local newspapers focus on serving their audience. The Quoddy Tides, a family-owned newspaper in Eastport, Maine, publishes only twice monthly. Publishing less frequently allows the newspaper to include more local stories, which are of interest to their community of readers, many of whom either live in, or have ties to the community. By avoiding the 24-hour news cycle, the newspaper can focus on local discourse and civic engagement.

With COVID19 putting the majority of us in self-isolation or quarantine, LA-based photographers have found unique ways to capture this moment. Without coming into contact with individuals – which is often a fundamental part of their job – they use peoples’ windows to frame the photo, capturing the glare of the outside world as well.

In the midst of a pandemic, access to accurate information can literally be a matter of life and death. To ensure this access one UK charity called Full Fact has rapidly increased their capacity to meet the monumental information challenge posed by COVID-19. With an epidemiologist on their team, Full Fact conducts extensive research and interviews with experts, presenting the information clearly and without bias or sensationalism.

Crime-tracking mobile apps give millions of Brazilians crowdsourced data on urban violence, alerting people to dangerous places and filling gaps in government data on shootings, robberies, and other risks. But apps such as Fogo Cruzado (“Crossfire”) and Onde Tem Tiroteio (“Where There's a Shooting”) offer statistically crude glimpses of crime, distorted by media and racial biases that one expert blames for myths about the risks people actually face.

In Nigeria, nonprofit organizations are helping to organize and deliver virtual journalism-related training to university students who can't attend classes as normal due to the coronavirus pandemic. Although some students have said that the organizations aren't always transparent about the price of the webinars, many have reported that their writing has improved and they have made connections with others.

Research has shown there are concrete steps journalists can take to thoughtful cover mass shootings in a way that doesn’t spur the motives of potential copycats. These include reducing the amount a shooter is named, running articles without including a picture of the shooter, and avoidance of certain words to describe the event.

The Udeme project trains student journalists to track government constituency projects and write investigative reports holding officials accountable when planned projects are stalled or poorly executed. The participants, called U-monitors, also meet with local community members to inform them about the budget process and help them track constituency projects themselves.