Reporting
Missouri School of Journalism’s Watchdog Writers Group announces first fellows and student reporters
Authors and students will produce books and articles on criminal justice reform, the farm crisis gripping rural America, and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Can obituaries help save local news?
Years ago when asked what will save local news, Steven Waldman had two answers: national service and obituaries. You might know Waldman as the co-founder of Report for America, a Peace Corps-like model that pairs emerging journalists with local newsrooms to cover critical issues to those communities. After years of talking with journalists about what … Continued
Getting started as an independent journalist
Hannah Yoon, independent visual journalist, Mason Trinca, documentary and editorial photojournalist, Sarah Fritsche, independent food writer and editor, and Maddie McGarvey, independent photographer, joined our discussion on how to succeed as an independent journalist. We talked about healthcare, building your client base, making time for personal projects, invoicing & contracts, how to prepare for slow months … Continued
Facing the pressure to unpublish
This project represents my commitment to helping the industry solve a problem that editors say is rising in importance: how to respond to requests by members of the public to “unpublish”—typically meaning deleting or significantly altering—online news content that identifies them in a way that they would rather forget. Often, but not always, the request … Continued
Redefining local journalism: What is news?
Since the advent of the Internet, many people have increasingly wondered: What is “news” in a universe of infinite information? What is a journalist’s role when anyone can publish a story and report the “Truth”? David Caswell, Executive Product Manager of BBC News Labs, asks the most urgent question of all: “Does society still need news publishers … Continued
How racism and discrimination affect Latino journalists
As human rights activists and journalists, we have worked for several decades to defend freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Latin American countries experiencing authoritarian regimes. We have struggled to overcome these challenges and gain fundamental rights and freedoms. Our RJI fellowship, an institutional fellowship with our organization, Fundamedios, in Washington D.C. … Continued
The promise of environmental data journalism
Over the course of this RJI fellowship, I’m working with the nonprofit environmental magazine Grist to think through what it’d mean to build out a national environmental data-journalism unit—and, in turn, to take what we learn at Grist and translate these lessons into guides for other small or nonprofit newsrooms that might find themselves interested in similar work.
RJI Fellow explores how to expand WhatsApp publication reaching immigrant population in New York
Team plans to talk at industry events about what they’ve learned about connecting with audience via WhatsApp and people’s relationships with mobile devices
Iffy.news: An index of unreliable sources
When the conversation turns to estimating how many online sites there are that deliver news articles with made-up facts, out-of-context assertions and purposefully misleading information, also known as dis- and mis-information, most folks shrug and say: “Too many.” But that wasn’t good enough for former RJI fellow Barrett Golding, who was aiming for a more … Continued
Let’s improve the diversity in your reporting
Creating a hands-on, in-person diversity training program to help newsrooms make their reporting more representative of the communities they serve