Participant Story

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.

Reporting From Iraq: The Toughest Assignment

For the past six weeks, I have worked as the bureau photographer for The New York Times in Baghdad. This was my first visit to Iraq, and although I have worked in Afghanistan, Gaza and Yemen, I have found Iraq to be among the most difficult places to do my job. The fear is what makes working here difficult.

Reporting From Iraq: Why It Still Matters

During Frederik Pleitgen's business visit to Iraq, he was faced with daily unpredictable obstacles that hampered the effectiveness of his reporting. The country's economic development is moving, but there are many still many social and political issues surrounding the Iraqi populace. The next weeks will be telling as the political powers attempt to form a government. And we must remember that more than 90,000 U.S. troops are still on the ground here, seemingly on their way out, but not home yet.

Post-Copenhagen: Innovative Local Approaches to Climate Change

In January, a month after the world climate summit in Denmark, a diverse group of nearly 50 journalists, experts and entrepreneurs traveled to Berlin, Hamburg and Copenhagen to discuss climate change, energy and their global economic impact. Most of them were alumni of transatlantic exchange programs like those sponsored by the Bosch Foundation, the Rias Berlin Commission, the German Marshall Fund and Fulbright Commission. Four were Burns alumni.