Our Mission
To pursue a better future for our world, we must first imagine it. And beyond just imagining a better future, we must create it here and now in a way that embodies and reflects our ideals and values.
The newsroom acts as a powerful site of cultural production in addition to a catalyst for socio-political change. It has the capacity to shift public awareness and mobilize citizens to take action to address social problems. By imagining and then simulating a newsroom built upon new values and practices of journalism, we hope to demonstrate to other journalists, storytellers and mediamakers the potency of our central argument: diversity should be leveraged as a tool for civic engagement and as a catalyst for progressive change.
Our Journalism Starts Here
We might not yet have the resources to build this newsroom, but we hope our efforts and sketches provide inspiration and encouragement to like-minded changemakers in the media world.
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To convey the possibilities and potential impact of our imagined newsroom, we’ve taken on an investigation about a single topic — women’s empowerment — through its natural lifecycle within the newsroom. The storytelling process begins by reaching out to the community and other stakeholders with reporting inside communities around the world, then the data and stories travel into the newsroom for analysis, synthesis and deliberation, and finally, the stories and ideas for civic engagement return to communities through dynamic storytelling platforms.
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After we’ve deliberated as an organization and selected a story investigation topic, we stretch out our hands to reach community partners across the world. Deep listening and empathy are the foundations of effective and impactful journalism, so we explore ways to provide individuals and groups a space in which they feel comfortable and excited to share their ideas, dreams, fears and stories.
We set up listening labs — facilitated focus groups meant to surface lived experiences and strategies for making social change — and collect testimonials, data and conduct standard reporting methods. For an example of a listening lab choose the marker in Lebanon.
Enter Our Newsroom
After conducting investigations in communities around the world, we convene our multicultural, multinational staff to analyze, deliberate and synthesize our findings. We look for trends, distinctions and best practices for civic engagement that we can share back with partner communities. We explore ways to tell those stories and critique each other’s work to ensure effective representation of diverse communities. We eventually come to a shared plan of action, which argues for both high-level social change priorities and granular, strategic possibilities for progressive groups to follow. Try moving the camera!
