Participant Story

Local Newsrooms Must Watch Out for False Claims, Fake Photos This U.S. Election Season

As the U.S. election season gears up, journalists at local news organizations should prepare for an onslaught of misinformation aimed at distorting polling results, says ICFJ TruthBuzz Fellow and fact-checking expert Matt Riley.

Indonesian survey explores the spread of misinformation on WhatsApp

Misinformation is more common than ever in Indonesia today as its spread has become increasingly diversified and difficult to suppress. In April alone, when the country held its general election, Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology identified 486 pieces of misinformation shared across several online platforms — 209 of them politically-related. The ministry noted that this number surged leading up to the April 17 election, and has only continued to increase after. 

To Reach a Wider Audience, Expand Fact-Checking to Broadcast News

Fact-checkers don’t just have a misinformation problem. They also have an audience engagement problem.

What Today's Newsrooms Can do to Spark Innovation For Tomorrow

Back in September, I partnered with The Express Tribune, a leading English-language newspaper in Karachi, Pakistan, as part of my ICFJ Knight Fellowship to work on news innovation. The main focus was working with the Tribune Labs team and helping them build up their capacity in order to work on visual and interactive content on their own, without the need for a developer.

To start off, we brought a developer on board as an Innovation Fellow. Our first task was to help Labs with a system where they could develop interactive features on their own and in the shortest possible time.

ICFJ Knight Fellow's Regional Hackathon Follows Funds

Fourteen distinct chapters of Hacks/Hackers across Latin America and Miami gathered participants on June 7 to work on projects that attempt to answer one basic question: Where does my money go?

The hackathon brought journalists and coders together to follow where and how Latin American governments and corporations direct their funds.

CGNet Swara Report on Faulty Bridge Exposes Corruption

Using CGNet Swara, a mobile news service developed by Knight Fellow Shu Choudhary, citizen journalist Prakash Gupta reported on a faulty bridge built in a rural area of Chhattisgarh, India. The report, picked up by CNN-IBN, also exposed an attempt to bribe Gupta to remain quiet.

ICFJ Trainee Releases Lebanese Detainees From the Prison of Silence

A Lebanese participant's multimedia website that documents torture of detainees won the top prize in a competition among ICFJ participants. The site began with a course on ICFJ Anywhere.

France's 'Burqa Ban,' One Year Later

Radio producer Arwa Gunja traveled to Paris as an International Reporting Fellow to examine the impact of France's "burqa ban." The law, instituted one year ago, is a restriction on Muslim women covering their faces in the traditional burqa or niqab.

Widely supported in France, the ban was meant to free women of gender enslavement and help Muslims better integrate into French society.

Haitian Journalists Show How Temporary Solutions Create Permanent Problems for Refugees

As hundreds of non-governmental organizations begin to pull out of Haiti, their departures are causing problems in a nation still struggling to recover from the 2010 earthquake. Several journalists chosen to take part in the Fund for Investigative Journalism took a close look at one of those problems.

Occupy D.C. Protesters Hold Mock Committee Hearing

Mussadaq is currently a guest reporter at the McClatchy Washington Bureau as part of the U.S. - Pakistan Professional Partnership in Journalism. This story appeared on McClatchy's website.

WASHINGTON — Sitting under the open air on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, Occupy D.C. protesters held a mock hearing on how to create a fair economy for most Americans — a contrast, protesters said, to Capitol Hill hearings that they said work to enrich the nation’s top 1 percent of earners.