New offerings include online courses and an international reporting fellowship, thanks to Luce Foundation grant
A new, $300,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation will bolster ICFJ’s religion programs and help improve U.S. and global reporting. The funding is part of the Foundation’s Initiative on Religion and International Affairs, which seeks to deepen understanding of religion as a critical but often neglected dimension of national and international policies and politics.
This support will enable ICFJ to offer two distance-learning journalism courses in 2012 and 2013, capitalizing on the success of previous religion reporting courses. The upcoming courses will be administered through ICFJ Anywhere and will feature a dual-language curriculum featuring online lessons, weekly exercises, one-on-one mentoring and spirited conversations on best practices in religion reporting. The new courses are “Coverage of Religion and Global Politics” and “International Coverage of Gender, Health, Education and Religion.”
In addition, Luce funding will support six U.S. and six international journalists for international joint-reporting projects, which have become a hallmark of ICFJ projects seeking to bridge divides. ICFJ will bring the reporters to Washington, D.C. to pair them for cross-border reporting projects and link them with academics, policymakers and government officials in preparation for their projects. Together, the paired reporters will shape their story idea and work together during three-week reporting trips. *** Reporting on religion can be a dangerous task in many regions of the world, and rarely has it been more critical for journalists to get their stories right than in today’s shifting global landscape. Since 2008, ICFJ has been leading the way in reducing journalistic bias that can often exacerbate religious conflict, through a series of religion-related reporting programs, conferences and online courses.
The newly launched International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ), the world’s first global association of journalists who cover religious issues, is the most recent example of ICFJ’s efforts to advance discourse on this loaded issue. Leading reporters from 23 countries came together at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy, for the inaugural IARJ meeting on March 23.
The work of the new IARJ is being overseen by an elected eight-person international Steering Committee. Maria-Paz López, who covers religion for La Vanguardia newspaper in Barcelona, was elected chair of the committee. “This will help to build a network of journalists with similar standards of profession and skill. … Also, [it will help us] gain respect in front of other journalists who cover other issues, and who tend to look at religion coverage as a ‘ghetto,’” said Lopez. The new chair has already welcomed more than 300 journalists from 50 nations as members in the new association. More than 100 more have applied.
The IARJ will launch its new website later this summer, which will include examples of quality religion journalism and a membership directory. The site will also link to valuable reporting resources that journalists can tap, such as the Association of Religion Data Archives; the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion; the Center for Religion & Civic Culture at the University of Southern California; the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures at the University of California-Davis, among others.
“We are living in a global society and our understanding internationally of religion is weak,” said long-time U.S. journalist and IARJ executive director David Briggs. “With the association, journalists now have contacts in various countries and can work together.”