U.S. Journalists Strengthen Their Work Through the ICFJ Network

By: 05/10/2023

The power of ICFJ’s network across 173 countries isn’t only in its scope. It’s about what is made possible when journalists connect with one another to collaborate and learn across these borders: better, stronger journalism.

You don’t have to look further than the U.S., where ICFJ is based, to see this impact. In our interconnected world, events abroad deeply affect people and policies here. And there is much to learn from media leaders outside the U.S., who are so often innovating in the face of enormous challenges.

Here are just a few examples from U.S. journalists who have enriched their work as part of the ICFJ network:

  • Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian’s first experience working as a foreign correspondent was in Germany, where she reported as an Arthur F. Burns Fellow. Afterward, “I felt like I had really matured as a journalist, that I had come into my own,” she said. Today, Allen is the China reporter for Axios in Taipei: “I write sometimes about the China-Europe relationship, and because of the Burns Fellowship, I have some sense of domestic European politics and how European democracies function.”
     

  • Darryl Holliday hosted a media entrepreneur from Brazil and later spent time in her newsroom as part of ICFJ’s Emerging Media Leaders program. The co-founder of City Bureau, a civic media lab in Chicago, Holliday said the experience was important for his career: “International travel and relationships with my colleagues overseas have given me a larger sense of the world that I routinely apply to my work.”
     

  • Susannah Locke and her former colleagues at Vox were among nearly 40 other journalists across the world who took part in ICFJ’s Leap Solutions Challenge focused on building audience trust. “Seeing such a wide variety of audiences and how different their needs were…really reminded me to be open minded, truly open minded, about who my audience is, who my audience could be, and what their needs are,” she said.
     


On behalf of all the members of the ICFJ network, thank you for supporting our efforts to bring journalists together to do better journalism.

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