News

Why Indonesia’s Farmers Are Using Cell Phones to Report the News

When a company in Indonesia reduced a passable village road to a pool of mud, local farmers reported the damage by text message to a local TV station, and the company was forced to fix the road.

Until recently, incidents like this usually went unreported by the media. The country's farmers were frequently forced off their property due to violations by hundreds of plantation companies, environmental journalist and media trainer Harry Surjadi told The Jakarta Post.

A Tribute to Sputnik Kilambi

Sputnik Kilambi, a tireless and passionate journalist and former Knight International Journalism Fellow, died on July 6 after a battle with liver cancer. She was 55.

A veteran broadcaster, Sputnik had worked in Africa, Asia and Europe covering wars and humanitarian crises. She also trained teams of reporters dedicated to journalistic excellence and promoting peace in countries wracked by violence and poverty.

How Newsrooms Can Use Data to Meet Community Needs

To cultivate a loyal audience in today's media environment, newspapers must do more than simply churn out stories.

Editors and their newsrooms should create usable products, like data-driven news and information tools, to serve their readers, said Knight International Journalism Fellow Justin Arenstein at the World Editors Forum in Bangkok during his master's class for editors.

How Costa Rica’s La Nación is Telling Stories Visually

When U.S. President Barack Obama visited San José, Costa Rica this spring, he brought along the biggest security operation in the country’s history.

Costa Rica’s La Nación newspaper knew its audience would be keenly interested in the logistics of a visit that would affect traffic throughout the city that day.

To Plan a Successful Hackathon, Start with “Why?”

The key to organizing a hackathon is to start with “Why?”

As Simon Sinek says in "Start with Why", great leaders inspire action because what motivates them is the meaning of a situation, not what to do or how to do it.

Sinek explains how the Wright brothers, young farmers who never finished high school, became the first to build a machine that could fly, although their main rival for that claim had financial support from the U.S. War Department and was beloved by the New York Times. Why did the Wright brothers succeed?

How Newsrooms Should Respond to the Data Revolution

With consumers searching less frequently for stories and expecting the news to find them, newsrooms must adapt their distribution strategies, ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow Justin Arenstein told workshop attendees at the recent World Editors Forum in Bangkok.

His "data revolution in your newsroom" workshop highlighted this and other trends that news outlets should be aware of, and advised newsrooms how they should change in response to the new focus on data.

Transforming Global Journalism with Open Data

Knight International Journalism Fellowship projects are transforming global journalism through the use of data.

Knight Fellows Gustavo Faleiros, Jorge Luis Sierra, Justin Arenstein, Miguel Paz and Mariano Blejman specialize in finding ways to convert raw data into information that's usable by and useful to journalists and citi

The Unstoppable Ascent of Data Journalism in Latin America

Not only will the upcoming DataBootCamp of Bolivia be the first event of its kind in Latin America, it will be the highest-altitude data journalism event the world has seen so far.

Journalists, programmers and designers will gather in the capital, La Paz, whose altitude reaches more than 11,800 feet (3,600 meters) above sea level.

Contest Funds Innovative Journalism to Improve Health, Prosperity of Africans

To grasp how often people in Africa think about health, simply say "hello."

"In most African languages, the way to say ‘Good morning’ is often translated into some variation of ‘How is your health?’ or ‘How is your body?’" says media consultant Joseph Warungu.

But while health tops the list of issues of concern to Africans, the topic is often shortchanged in media coverage, says Warungu, an ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow and consultant to the African Media Initiative (AMI).

$1M Grant to Fund Great Storytelling on Key African Issues

A new $1 million program will offer African journalists reporting grants to support investigative, multimedia and data-driven stories that aim to improve health and prosperity across the continent.