Category: Journalism

  • You can write a great essay. But can you tell a great story?

    You can write a great essay. But can you tell a great story?

    What’s the difference between academic writing and writing a news story? How different can they be?

    I started out as a student of political science, became a journalist and then taught at university. Having started as an academic, you’d think returning to academic writing would be a snap. But it wasn’t.

    As a journalist I’d been trained to say what needed to be said in as few words as possible. My writing needed to be easily read by anybody, regardless of their level of education and whether or not they read English as a first language. But academic writing is meant to impress. An essay is written by a student to impress a teacher, or a professor to impress colleagues or a tenure committee, or by a scientist or social scientist to impress a publisher.

    Academic essays, reports and studies are meant to be ready by peers: people at the same or higher education level, who are experts in the same field of specialization and read them in their offices and classes.

    News stories are meant to be read by anyone, sitting around the breakfast table as they munch on corn flakes.

    You’d think the academic writing would be harder, no?

    Telling stories

    Imagine talking to a group of friends about something that happened in school. You don’t have to keep explaining who you are talking about or what you are talking about. They know all your references. But try telling the same story to your parents or better yet, adults who don’t know your school or community. It is a bit frustrating, because they don’t know what a stickler for rules Mr. Jackson is, or why most people avoid the third floor bathroom, or how so-and-so was dating you-know-who’s brother on the down low. You know, all that stuff that you need to know to understand why what happened at school was so significant.

    It is much more difficult to tell a story when the person you are telling it to has no context. Moreover, when you write an essay or report you expect the person you are writing it for to read it. That’s their job. But no one is expected to read a news story.

    As the author, you need to entice readers to choose your story to read. And you need to keep their attention throughout the story, because they aren’t obligated to read it to the end. So the story can’t be boring or tedious to read. Each paragraph has to have something interesting in it. It needs to be a good story worth reading.

    I learned quickly as a journalist to read my stories out loud to myself. By doing so, I could hear when my writing was getting tired and dull. I could picture the person who is hearing the story fall asleep or walk away. When that happened I hit the delete button and started the paragraph again.

    I would rethink whether the information I had included was really needed. Did my reader need to know that piece of data to understand what was happening?

    Comparing academic and journalistic writing

    To see the difference between journalistic and academic writing it is useful to look at a news story that came off of a report.

    The news organization Vox published an article 17 December about a new report on poverty that was done by researchers at four California universities.

    This is how the report began:

    We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 23 countries that together account for 50% of the world’s poor, we estimate that reducing the poverty rate to 1% (from a baseline of 12% at the time of last survey) would cost $170B nominal per year.

    Would you choose to read that with your corn flakes?

    Here is how Vox reporter Sara Herschander begins the story:

    When it comes to fixing the world’s worst problems, it’s easy to pretend that we’re helpless.

    We tell ourselves that global poverty is just too big, too distant and too intractable an issue for us to solve. If the world could afford to solve it, or something like hunger, then surely somebody else would have done it already.

    But, it turns out, that’s simply not true. According to a new report by a group of anti-poverty researchers that uses AI tools to achieve unusually granular data of the picture on the ground, the price tag for completely ending extreme poverty would be just $318 billion per year.

    Writing that is clear and concise

    The researchers didn’t worry that most people wouldn’t understand the terms “poverty minimization”, “direct transfers”, “statistical learning problem” or “information constraints”.

    But try sticking those terms into a story you tell friends in the school hall and they’ll tune you out.

    There is another big difference between news stories and academic essays and reports. Journalists don’t footnote sources. That’s because you wouldn’t have footnotes in a story you tell out loud. Just try it.

    So instead, when a journalist needs to cite a source they write something like, “that’s according to data from the U.S. Census” or, “a recent study out of Harvard found that.” The journalist would likely hyperlink to the actual study for readers who might want to read it, as I did above for both the Vox article and the report. The idea is that the citation should be as short as possible and it should not break into the story.

    The real challenge for a journalist is that the average reader has a very short attention span. Any break in a story is like an exit door. It is the chance for the reader to leave that depressing story about poverty to go to a more uplifting story about football or Bad Bunny.

    The importance of revision

    That’s why journalists write several drafts of a story before it gets published. In the first draft they just try to get all the information they have onto a page. In the second draft, they think about whether the information is needed and start taking things out and adding in others they might have forgotten. In the third, they try to close all those exit doors — all the places in the story that are tedious.

    There are some tricks to doing this. It helps to round up or down numbers that have a lot of digits. A number like $1,569,345 is tedious to read. It takes 13 words to say it out loud. Instead, saying about $1.6 million will do the trick. That’s just five words out loud.

    And it helps to use analogies and metaphors people can recognize. In a story I once wrote about the volatility of the stock market (doesn’t that sound like a yawner?) I likened the stock chart to Bart Simpson’s hair. For a story about an old technology company that kept getting sold and resold, I likened it to a secondhand sofa not moldy enough to toss into a skip.

    But reaching for these analogies isn’t easy; it takes a little extra time and mental effort. In some ways journalists are translators. In general, translators take something in one language and turn it into another — from Japanese to English, for example. A journalist takes something from the language of the boring and tedious and obscure and turns it into the language of interesting and understandable.

    It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. You start with a bunch of pieces that seem to make little sense, but if you put them together in the right way you get a clear picture from it. But sometimes to do that you have to keep moving the different pieces around and sometimes you find you have to undo an entire section because something just doesn’t fit.

    The result, when you are done, though, is pretty satisfying.

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why are news stories so different from essays?

    2. In what ways are journalists translators?

    3. What do you think makes a story interesting to read or hear?

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  • To fight climate change, begin in the classroom

    To fight climate change, begin in the classroom

    A good teacher stays with you. For me it was my Grade 9 English teacher, Mrs. Renshaw, who was an eagle in a smart skirt suit, her beak always pointed in your direction, her eyes sharp and seeing. She scared us.

    The highest value, she often said, was “self discipline”. You would not be late to Mrs. Renshaw’s class.

    She stays with me not because some students cried under her screech, but because of the way she taught. We would begin every class by writing a caption to a funny image — a bicycle with square wheels or a whale breathing on land.

    We would then read, all together, one student out loud at a time, before discussing the themes of the story and its meaning.

    We didn’t have to wait for social science or psychology class to discuss such things as war, power structures, human instinct or violence because in Mrs. Renshaw’s class, we read and discussed “Lord of the Flies”. She thrived on hearing our interpretations of an author’s intentional and unintentional meaning and on hearing the stories we would come up with ourselves.

    She passed away a few years after I left high school, but Mrs. Renshaw left something powerful with me: A passion for stories as a way of understanding our world.

    Learning through stories

    For all teachers out there, Mrs. Renshaw left this lesson: Stories could be the main vessel through which we teach and through which we can empower youth.

    This is the heart of the EYES project.

    It started as an idea, almost precisely two years ago, driven by the bright headlights of two organisations: News Decoder and the The Environment and Human Rights Academy.

    The goal? Combine authoritative climate education and journalism to create a pathway for youth to deep knowledge.

    We would design a climate change curriculum with a systems approach and justice lens, grounded in storytelling, to provide teachers with an innovative and flexible way of teaching something multifaceted and vital — and to provide students with the agency to take action.

    The curriculum wouldn’t prescribe shorter showers or fewer beef burgers. It would instead shine light on the systems that keep the climate crisis in a relentless spiral and the injustices that have come as a result. And it would give students this fundamental task: Find the stories of the people and systems at the heart of climate change, but in their own communities and circumstances. We would guide them in communicating these stories to the world.

    Seeing the small parts that make a big problem

    They could start, maybe, with saving water if they have water to save and eating a plant-based diet if that’s available and affordable to them, but they should understand those are just pieces of a giant problem.

    By finding and telling stories, by being a journalist in one’s own community, students can start to connect the different pieces of climate change to their own circumstances and to feel a different sense of agency.

    Producing the climate storytelling curriculum was one thing. The challenge was getting it into schools. We ended up piloting it in ten countries — five in the European Union, five outside Europe — to gather feedback and refine the materials into a curriculum that can be added to any educator’s repertoire.

    We soon collided with reality. Tight school curricula leave little room for innovation. Teachers are busy. How to present something both complex and innovative in a way that is engaging, tangible and accessible to all students between the ages of 15 and 18?

    We built up a team of pilot teachers — springboarding from our networks -– and gave them a set of seven modules that explored such things as fossil fuel emissions, the carbon budget, climate justice and reasons to focus away from individual carbon footprints.

    Reporting climate change

    The modules included a project for students. They would pick a topic and report on it as journalists. That meant conducting interviews, gathering data and presenting it in a multimedia format.

    We imagined deep investigations, groundbreaking documentaries, enlivened youth.

    We organised in-person events to see how this curriculum would empower students in real time. In Brussels, we spoke with students about how emitting fossil fuels stays profitable and about how one area in Mumbai can be six degrees hotter than its immediate — and wealthier -– neighbouring area.

    In Paris, students pitched stories about climate injustice, and in Pristina, Kosovo, Roma students drew images of their own lived reality of climate change. We were in Romania and Serbia, and in two alternative education spaces in Portugal, where all modules were delivered to students who came from complex social backgrounds.

    We supported our pilot teachers in Cameroon, Colombia and Kenya from afar and connected students in Colombia, Kenya and Slovenia by making them “pen pals” so they could exchange letters on their differing lived experiences of climate change.

    Change doesn’t come easy.

    But we kept falling back onto the same challenges: time is squeezed at schools and climate injustice — a reality often experienced “elsewhere” — is hard to convey to young people.

    We get it. The economic system that climate change is rooted in is a hard one to grasp when you’re trying to figure out whether to go to university or how to get a job or what career to train for.

    It was disheartening. Was anyone really being empowered? There was little pick up and a whole lot of resistance, despite the innovative social science research that was at the heart of our program.

    And so again, we came back to the thread of the project — storytelling. After all, as author and organizational consultant Peg Neuhauser said: “No tribal chief or elder has ever handed out statistical reports, charts, graphs or lists to explain where the group is headed or what it must do.”

    It was in a conference room just south of Brussels, over three days in crisp October, that the wick of the project’s candle was finally lit. Educators from across Europe gathered around a large table to revitalise their teaching and, as the project was coming to a close, they opened a door I’d turned a blind eye to.

    Inspiring teachers to empower youth

    They listened, they contributed and they gave us a sense that we’d done it. We had laid down the soil. We had planted the seeds. All we needed were enthusiastic and present teachers to find the time and space to be together. This was the bright and warm spring we were waiting for.

    We saw that our curriculum was not a rigid product but a set of concepts, pedagogies and ideas that could be adapted by skilled and passionate teachers. And we could trust them to do that. The magic wasn’t in what we gave them, but in feeding the fire they already had for teaching climate change.

    The EYES curriculum is now as follows: 16 standalone classroom units each dealing with one concept — from tipping points to systemic change, from human–nature connection to green extractivism — and each including a bite-size storytelling activity such as come up with a pitch, explain a concept, make a connection. It includes six journalism guides from the principles of journalism and how to spot greenwashing, to how to interview and write an article.

    There’s an Educators’ Guide produced from the brainstorming of that workshop in Brussels, a blog written by educators and students and a podcast series featuring brilliant thinkers. All materials are freely available to educators wherever they teach.

    Ultimately, the success of EYES comes down to people: The educators; the advisory board; the students who were enlightened and empowered; the brilliance, strength and kindness of Andreea Pletea at The Environment and Human Rights Academy and her intimidatingly intelligent colleagues Anka Stankovic and Sebastien Kaye; the team at Young Educators European Association who bolstered the project when it was needed by helping to reach more students; Matthew and Jules Pye of The Climate Academy for transforming my way of seeing this global challenge; and my fantastic, curious and creative colleagues at News Decoder.

    Empowering Youth through Environmental Storytelling comes to an end on 31 December. And as I close my laptop on EYES for the final time, I am assured that I leave behind something that will continue to spread in classrooms and help teachers and students find the climate stories yet to be told.

    As Mrs. Renshaw taught me: A story does not end on the last page. It lives on in those it touches.

    Questions to consider:

    1. How can storytelling help students learn?

    2. What does it mean to look at a problem at the systems level?

    3. If you were going to explore a topic related to climate change, what would you tackle?

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  • The winners are …

    The winners are …

    A story about pollution caused when fires destroy cars and devices that are supposed to be ecological took first prize in News Decoder’s 18th storytelling competition.

    News Decoder published the article, “Are you storing toxic waste in your home or car?” by Paolo McCarrey on 11 November. McCarrey is a student at The Thacher School in California.

    Three stories tied for second place: A personal reflection, “What’s not talked about when you live overseas,” about the different forms racial discrimination can take in different countries by Aida Sherwani of Connecticut College in the United States; a story about discrimination and ignorance surrounding autism in Tanzania by Ramona-Blessing Mkunna, a student at the African Leadership Academy in South Africa; and an article about the effect of climate change on the wine industry in Belgium and France by Slav Karaslavov, a student at the European School Brussels II (EEBII) in Belgium.

    While News Decoder published Sherwani’s article in July, the stories by both Mkunna and Karaslavov were submitted in draft form.

    Two other unpublished drafts tied for third place: An article about climate illiteracy by Amaury Chauve, who also attends EEBII and a podcast by Catherine Araba Esaaba Dowuona-Addison, a student at SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College in Ghana, about the religious cult leader Jim Jones, who killed by poison some 900 of his followers in the 1970s.

    The judges were impressed.

    Of the first place winner, one judge noted that the interviews served as a valuable tool in the investigation. “I also find the argument central to current discussions around climate change solutions, so the timeliness is great,” the judge wrote.

    The winners were selected by a three-person jury that included Thadeus Greenson, an award-winning investigative reporter who serves as press education specialist at the First Amendment Coalition in California, News Decoder correspondent Christianez Ratna Kiruba, a physician and patient rights advocate in India who writes about healthcare issues and former News Decoder Student Ambassador Joshua Glazer, now a student at Emory University in the U.S. state of Georgia.

    They rated the entries based on set criteria: whether the author interviewed anyone for the story; whether the student reported the story without bias; whether the student considered different perspectives and the judge’s own subjective assessment about the quality of the story.

    News Decoder Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner was particularly impressed by the challenging topics students took on. “The entries knock back the notion that young people shy away from complexity,” she said. “Give them room to explore topics that interest them, give them to tools to find experts and reliable sources and they will dive into really complicated issues.”

    The entries came from 10 schools in six countries on four continents.

    Meeting professional standards

    To produce an article or podcast for the competition, the students needed to find an original topic, credible sources and experts to interview. For stories that explored personal experiences, they needed to dive deep into their feelings and into what was happening around them.

    “If you didn’t know that the entries were being done by people with no journalism experience you would think they had come from professional publications,” Burstiner said.

    For articles to be published on News Decoder, they have to meet professional standards. Students work through News Decoder’s approach, known as PRDR for Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise. The winning stories that were published went through that process. The other stories will be published in the next few weeks, after the students go through that final revision process.

    News Decoder also encourages students to write through a global lens, connecting problems in one community with similar problems in other countries.

    The contest is held two times a year in honor of the late Arch Roberts Jr., who served with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna after more than 12 years as a staff member with the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. With the backing of an anonymous donor, News Decoder was able to award a total of $800 in cash prizes to this year’s winners. The entries came from students across News Decoder’s network of school partners.

    To be considered for the contest, an entry must have been written by one or more students enrolled in a News Decoder partner institution.

    Learn more about News Decoder’s school partnership program.

    A list of all the winners:

    First place:

    Paolo McCarrey, The Thacher School (USA) for “Are you storing toxic waste in your home or car?”

    Second place: 

    Aida Sherwani, Connecticut College (USA) for “What’s not talked about when you live overseas”

    Ramona-Blessing Mkunna, African Leadership Academy (South Africa) for “The Misconception of Autism in Tanzania”

    Slav Karaslavov, EEBII (Belgium) for “From vine to bottle: Europe’s newest climate-caused crisis may significantly alter one of its oldest industries”

    Third Place: 

    Amaury Chauve, EEBII (Belgium), for “Can we tackle the problem of climate illiteracy?”

    Catherine Araba Esaaba Dowuona-Addison, SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College (Ghana) for “Paradise on Earth — a podcast”

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  • Let’s have no locks on learning

    Let’s have no locks on learning

    At News Decoder we believe that information should flow across borders and that you shouldn’t need money to access it. That’s why we’ve created resources for both young people and educators that are open access — they are free and available to anyone. It is our mission, after all, to inform, connect and empower young people to be engaged citizens and changemakers locally, nationally and globally.

    These free resources include articles, podcasts and videos that offer young people tips on writing and reporting and information they need to be media literate such as guides for fact-checking news stories and verifying the accuracy of information. We also make publicly accessible our Decoder Dialogues —  in which we gather young people from different countries together with experts to talk about an important topic. You can watch our latest Decoder Dialogue on how young people speak out and stand up that took place 2 December. 

    For a great read on how some places are addressing the problems of paywalls on academic and scientific research, check out Charissa Eggers recent article for News Decoder. 

    Below are a series of useful guides for student journalists or for anyone who wants to become a better storyteller. 

    And check out more of our open access learning resources. 

    https://news-decoder.com/top-tips-can-you-be-the-bearer-of-good-news/ 

     

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  • Let’s stop talking about problems as if they can’t be solved

    Let’s stop talking about problems as if they can’t be solved

    Doesn’t it seem as if the world gets more complicated every day? It is difficult to keep track of all the global calamities, let alone make sense of them.

    When News Decoder came into being 10 years ago, it was to combat one thing: the problem of too much news and information in a world of constant streaming and posting and too little context and understanding of what all this news and information means. News Decoder Founder Nelson Graves called this a “knowledge gap.”

    But 10 years on, this gap is even more difficult to close. That’s because the problems have metastasized and each one seems more unsolvable — climate change, disease, hunger, genocide, racial hatred, homelessness, mass unemployment. How can you work to solve each problem when they are all interconnected? The result is widespread despair caused by the belief that these problems are unsolvable.

    We need an antidote to this despair.

    It is no longer enough to close the knowledge gap. We need to bust the myth that problems are unsolvable, when really they are just overwhelming. And they are overwhelming because too often the news and information young people get focuses on obstacles to solutions — the inability of governments and organizations to work together, and politicians who prioritize winning elections at all cost. Too often, media focuses on the same problems in the same places so young people don’t see the solutions that can be found in places media ignore.

    Determination, not despair

    Once young people see problems as solvable, they can find the energy to work towards those solutions. That’s why solutions journalism has become a cornerstone of our educational mission.

    We teach students to apply a critical, curious lens to the media and the world around them — continually questioning, taking nothing at face value. And at the same time we show them how to find the solutions and the people working on those solutions all over the world. In doing so they might just see that the problem in their community that seemed unsolvable is being tackled elsewhere and those solutions can be applied back home.

    Consider the story we published on Monday by University of Toronto Fellow Natasha Yu Chia Hu. In looking at the overwhelming and connected problems of food insecurity, poverty, obesity and diabetes she focused on a program New York City has launched to make the foods young people get in school healthier, and how other places around the world are tackling the problems in similar ways.

    At News Decoder, students don’t just read about these solutions, they seek out the stories themselves. In the United States, student Aiden Huber explored the problem of food deserts. In Switzerland, Liv Egli explored the disconnect between environmentally-minded consumers and the beef they eat. In France, Clover Choi looked at the connection between war and food shortages. 

    And they engage in thoughtful conversations on these topics with experts and with their peers in other countries through our school-to-school cross-border webinars and our Decoder Dialogues.

    From disempowerment to agency

    By encouraging global perspectives and enabling cross-continental exchange, by nurturing their voices and giving them a platform to communicate with global audiences, we transform young people’s sense of disempowerment into agency.

    Going into our second decade, News Decoder wants to do this in more ways.

    We want to meet educators where they are and within their real-world constraints and opportunities to help them implement experiential learning and AI-resilient methodologies. This means more than listening; it means an active partnership.

    We want to expand our reach to enable as many educators and young people as possible to benefit from our approach and build a truly diverse global community.

    We intend to find new ways to diversify our network of correspondents, emphasising those in Global South nations to enable us to explore solutions in places the mainstream media ignores. And we want to create new ways for young people, journalists and experts to connect across borders — through live virtual roundtables and in-person workshops.

    Working together across borders

    In a world where so many laudable nonprofit organizations are vying for funds, we need to forge partnerships with like-minded organizations and share our knowledge and expertise in ways that benefit everyone working in the field.

    At News Decoder, we keep our mission foremost: Informing, connecting and empowering young people to be engaged citizens and changemakers locally, nationally and globally. We need funds to do that, but fundraising isn’t our mission. Where we can work with other organisations to fulfill our mission and where we can share our resources towards that purpose, we will.

    We have been doing this all along. With the University of Toronto we take on journalists-in-training and give them a platform to report on important, complicated issues. With The Environment and Human Rights Academy at the European School of Brussels II, we created a teaching curriculum for climate change that educators can implement in their classes, complemented by a 3-day in-person teacher training workshop. With Prisa Media of Spain and some seven other organizations, we joined WePod, a cross-border project to support the growth and sustainability of the European podcasting ecosystem. And with Mobile Stories in Sweden, we helped create open-access resources — video tutorials, articles and educators’ guides — to help young people report and write trustworthy news stories grounded in ethical practice.

    All this is part of our desire to create a global community of young people who refuse to be discouraged by news and who instead use news to drill down into problems to identify solutions and work towards those solutions — whether that means pushing their government representatives to pass laws, voting out representatives who foment division, pressuring corporations to change their ways or using social media to rally the people around them to fight for change.

    Moving forward, we’re making our educational experiences accessible to more young people by expanding open-access materials and creating public engagement forums. We’ll continue to adapt our classroom work to individual school needs while prioritizing communities where we can make the greatest difference: under-resourced or under-represented groups.

    Together, as a global community, we can fight the despair that comes with the myth that problems are too overwhelming to solve.

    Anyone who has worked with young people knows this: When they are inspired and energized, it is hard for anyone to stand in their way.

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  • When the clock ticks

    When the clock ticks

    I always respond the same: Give me a deadline you feel you can comfortably meet and then I can put it on our publishing calendar. What I don’t want is for the person to give me an early date and then not be able to meet it.

    So, how does a reporter writing a story for News Decoder come up with that deadline? It comes down to “doability”. That means what it says: what you can do, what is feasible. In determining doability, it helps to look at the opposite: Something that isn’t doable.

    Some things are difficult.

    What makes something not doable? The idea for the story is great, but realistically you won’t be able to interview anyone for it. Wouldn’t it be great to do a story on Russian hackers? But do you know any Russian hackers or anyone who knows Russian hackers? What about a story on the wealthy people giving money to political campaigns? Again, do you know anyone or can you realistically reach anyone who would give you information about that?

    In assessing the doability of a story, the first question to ask, then, is where your information will come from. You might not need to know key sources personally, but you need a way to be able to reach them and a reason to feel confident that they will talk to you.

    The second criteria is your financial wherewithal. To find the information, will you need to travel to get it? Do you have the money and time to do that?

    Third, if the subject deals with an uncomfortable subject — sexual assault, race, abortion, religion or suicide, for example — do you have the emotional resolve to be able to ask people difficult questions about their experiences? Not everyone can do that. You need to be honest with yourself about your willingness to tackle such topics.

    Last, what other responsibilities do you have that might interfere? How much time do you have to work on the story? If you have classes to attend or a job, will you only have a few hours here and there? That needs to be part of your calculation on how long it will take you to do the story.

    Many editors want to see these criteria explained when you pitch the story. They want to know that you have a solid plan for getting the information you need and the interviews to humanize the story. They want to know that you also have the wherewithal to do it.

    Be conservative. That means never overpromise. If you think it will take 20 hours to do the story, allow for 30. If you think you will need to spend $100 on travel costs, budget twice that. If you think you can turn in a story by Friday, promise it for the following Wednesday.

    No reporter was ever fired for turning in a solid story early. But if you want more story assignments you need to always, always turn them in when you promise them.

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why are deadlines so important in journalism?

    2. What is one piece of advice the author provides for meeting deadlines?

    3. Did you ever have a deadline that was difficult to meet? How did you handle it?

     

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  • A partnership across the Atlantic to inform the world

    A partnership across the Atlantic to inform the world

    Preety Sharma is a public health and development consultant currently based in Northern India, near the border with Nepal. She is also a News Decoder correspondent, one of dozens who came to News Decoder through a journalism fellowship at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

    For more than five years, the University of Toronto and News Decoder have partnered to help train health professionals in journalism, with the goal of meeting this need: Too much disinformation in the world about important health issues and too much factual information presented to the public in articles that are difficult to read.

    Under the program, mid-career professionals spend a year in journalism training at the University of Toronto and as part of the program, pitch stories to professional news organizations. But to get published, the articles must meet the strict standards of each news organization that accepts the story pitches.

    To publish on News Decoder, for example, the stories must be written in way that is accessible to young people and to those who read English as a foreign language. This is challenging for many professional journalists. The stories must also have a global angle and show how the problems in the stories play out in different parts of the world.

    Sharma’s first story for News Decoder was on how a relatively inexpensive food product made from algae could be the solution to ending world hunger. Another story she wrote, on the problem of plastics in children’s toys, became News Decoder’s most-read story of all time.

    “My first couple of stories were with News Decoder,” Sharma said. “I am glad to have had an opportunity to share it with a diverse and young audience globally.”

    Sharma is now a News Decoder correspondent, someone who writes periodically for the site.

    Bringing specialized knowledge to journalism

    Marcy Burstiner, News Decoder’s educational news director, has worked with Sharma on all her stories and thinks the Dalla Lana program and its partnership with News Decoder is unique and important. “When I taught university journalism, I often told science majors that they should consider going into journalism,” she said. “There are a thousand medical publications but they are not written with a general audience in mind and meanwhile most journalists lack the specialized knowledge to really understand and put into context what is happening in medicine and the hard sciences.”

    For News Decoder, this problem is particularly important, she said. “Health and science are two subjects that young people are hungry for information on and that’s our target audience,” Burstiner said. “But, because so much of the information is dense, they turn to sites on the internet that present pseudo science and they can’t tell the difference.”

    Sharma agrees. “In the age of fake news and social media information explosion, it is crucial to have a credible and trusted media outlet that can present complex issues, ideas and concepts to youth in a simple and educational style,” she said.

    News Decoder Founder Nelson Graves said that the partnership between the University of Toronto and News Decoder was a win-win proposition from the start. “Fellows at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health have a chance to publish stories examining some of the world’s most pressing issues on our global platform,” he said. “They benefit from editing by journalists with deep international experience.”

    The students in News Decoder’s global community and readers around the globe also benefit from the fellows’ reporting and insights, he said and that helps to maintain News Decoder’s breadth and depth.

    “News Decoder’s association with the University of Toronto encapsulates our nonprofit’s commitment to global citizenship and to fostering connections across borders and between generations,” Graves said.

    Connecting with young people

    Correspondent Norma Hilton also came to News Decoder through the University of Toronto’s fellowship in global journalism. Her first story was on K-Pop and social media influencers, a topic that’s important to News Decoder’s teen audience. Hilton said it was a great learning experience. “I’d never really written for a youth audience or taken more of an education angle to my stories before,” she said. “So, it was great to understand what young people want to hear about and write for them.”

    Hilton is also one of many University of Toronto fellows who have not only written stories for News Decoder, but become an integral part of the News Decoder team. She participated in workshops and cross-border roundtables with students and produced articles and videos that serve as journalism tutorials on such things as how to cover events, how to fact-check articles and how to cover traumatic situations.

    “I’ve never really thought I’d be on a panel of any kind, but being able to talk about my journalism experience and hopefully help younger people be interested in journalism and its power, has been the honour of a lifetime,” Hilton said.

    News Decoder Managing Director Maria Krasinski argued that the partnership with the University of Toronto is unique. “Neither of our organisations is a traditional journalism school,” she said. “Rather, we both recognize that learning journalism skills helps people, no matter their discipline or profession, communicate clearly and with impact.”

    She said that, for the students News Decoder works with, journalism is an entry point, a way to take action and engage with the issues affecting their communities and participate meaningfully in civic dialogue. “Young people discover that journalism isn’t just writing stories, it’s about learning to question, to listen and to make sense of the world,” she said.

    For the University of Toronto fellows, meanwhile, the journalism fellowship adds a powerful new skill to their already impressive toolkits. “It helps them translate their knowledge and expertise into stories that resonate beyond academic and industry circles,” Krasinski said. “Many of the fellows stay connected to News Decoder well after their fellowship ends. They are based all over the world and bring a diversity of perspectives and experience that enriches our news platform.”

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  • Can we close the “knowledge gap”?

    Can we close the “knowledge gap”?

    Can we close the “knowledge gap”?

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  • When young people ask big questions and seek answers

    When young people ask big questions and seek answers

    Cliffrene Haffner attended the African Leadership Academy (ALA) in South Africa during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her university applications were stalling and she felt stressed and anxious.

    “Life felt unstable, as if I were hanging by a thin thread,” Haffner said. But it was at ALA that she discovered News Decoder.

    “Joining News Decoder helped me rebuild my voice,” she wrote. “It created a place to write honestly and with purpose whilst supporting others in telling their stories. At a time when the world felt numb and disconnected, we used storytelling to bring back hope on campus by sharing our fears, thoughts and expectations.”

    At News Decoder, students work with professional editors and news correspondents to explore complicated, global topics. They have the opportunity to report and write news stories, research and present findings in global webinars with students from other countries, produce podcasts and sit in on live video roundtables with experts and their peers across the globe.

    Many get their articles published on News Decoder’s global news site.

    A different way of seeing the world

    Out of these experiential learning activities, they take away important skills valuable in their later careers, whatever those careers might be: How to communicate clearly, how to recognize multiple perspectives, how to cut through jargon and propaganda and separate facts from opinion and speculation.

    One milestone for many of these is our Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise process, which we call PRDR. In it, students pitch a story topic to News Decoder with a plan on how to research and report it. We ask them to identify different perspectives on problems they want to explore and experts they can reach out to for information and context.

    Then we guide them through a process of introspection, if the story is a personal reflection on their own experience, or a process of reporting and interviewing. News Decoder doesn’t promise students that their stories will get published at the end of the process. They have to work for that — revising their drafts until the finished story is clear and relevant to a global audience.

    One student who went through the process was Joshua Glazer, now a student at Emory University in the United States. Glazer came to News Decoder in high school as an exchange student in Spain with School Year Abroad.

    “I think the skills that I got out of that went on to really change the course of my education and how I view the world,” Glazer said. “Because when you step into the world of journalism you learn a different way of seeing the world.”

    Recognizing our biases

    Glazer learned that for journalism, he had to be less opinionated. “You have to really approach things kind of as they are in the world,” Glazer said. “And that is hard to do. That is not an easy skill that we can do as humans because we inherently have biases.”

    He said it challenged him to look inwards and recognize his biases and counter them with evidence.

    “So I think those skills have really changed the course of how I view having an argument with somebody because all of a sudden, you know, when you have an argument with someone, it’s all opinion,” he said.

    For Haffner, who is now a business administration student at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan, News Decoder reshaped how she and her peers understood storytelling.

    “It taught us to let go of rigid biases and to make authenticity the centre of our work,” Haffner said. “Students from different backgrounds found a space where their voices were heard, respected and valued. Our stories formed a shared map, each one opening a new room to explore, each voice strengthening the collective journey we were on. In that chaotic period, we created something meaningful together. Something bigger than us.”

    Working through the complexity of a topic

    Marouane El Bahraoui, a research intern at The Carter Center in the U.S. state of Georgia, also discovered News Decoder at the African Leadership Academy. At the time, he was interested in writing about the effectiveness of the Arab Maghreb Union — an economic bloc of five North African countries. He grew up in Morocco but didn’t want to approach the topic from a purely Moroccan perspective.

    “It was like a very raw idea,” he said.

    He pitched the story and worked with both News Decoder Founder Nelson Graves and correspondent Tom Heneghan to refine the idea. They guided him in the reporting and writing process.

    “One aspect that I liked a lot from my research was the people that I had the chance to talk to,” he said. “It was during Covid and I was just at home and I’m talking to, you know, professors in U.S. universities, I’m talking to UN officials, experts working in think tanks in D.C. and I was thinking oh those people are just so far, you can’t even reach them. And then you have a conversation with them and they’re just normal people.”

    He also found writing the story daunting. “It was a little bit overwhelming for me at the time,” he said. “You know, you’re not writing like an academic essay.”

    Graves encouraged him to write in a straightforward manner. In school, he had been taught to write in a beautiful way to impress.

    “From News Decoder, something I learned is to always keep the audience in mind who you are speaking to, who are you writing to,” he said.

    He took away the importance of letting readers make their own conclusions. “You’re not writing to tell the reader what to think,” he said. “You are writing to give them ideas and arguments, facts and leave the thinking for them.”

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  • Can you believe it? | News Decoder

    Can you believe it? | News Decoder

    Can you tell the difference between a rumor and fact?

    Let’s start with gossip. That’s where you talk or chat with people about other people. We do this all the time, right? Something becomes a rumor when you or someone else learn something specific through all the chit chat and then pass it on, through chats with other people or through social media.

    A rumor can be about anyone and anything. The more nasty or naughty the tidbit, the greater the chance people will pass it on. When enough people spread it, it becomes viral. That’s where it seems to take on a life of its own.

    A fact is something that can be proven or disproven. The thing is, both fact and rumor can be accepted as a sort of truth. In the classic song “The Boxer,” the American musician Paul Simon once sang, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

    Once a piece of information has gone viral, whether fact or fiction, it is difficult to convince people who have accepted it that it isn’t true.

    Fact and fiction

    That’s why it is important — if you care about truth, that is — to determine whether or not a rumor is based on fact before you pass it on. That’s what ethical journalists do. Reporting is about finding evidence that can show whether something is true. Without evidence, journalists shouldn’t report something, or if they do they must make sure their readers or listeners understand that the information is based on speculation or unproven rumor.

    There are two types of evidence they will look for: direct evidence and indirect evidence. The first is information you get first-hand — you experience or observe something yourself. All else is indirect. Rumor is third-hand: someone heard something from someone who heard it from the person who experienced it.

    Most times you don’t know how many “hands” information has been through before it comes to you. Understand that in general, stories change every time they pass from one person to another.

    If you don’t want to become a source of misinformation, then before you tell a story or pass on some piece of information, ask yourself these questions:

    → How do I know it?

    → Where did I get that information and do I know where that person or source got it?

    → Can I trace the information back to the original source?

    → What don’t I know about this?

    Original and secondary sources

    An original source might be yourself, if you were there when something happened. It might be a story told you by someone who was there when something happened — an eyewitness. It might be a report or study authored by someone or a group of people who gathered the data themselves.

    Keep in mind though, that people see and experience things differently and two people who are eyewitness to the same event might have remarkably different memories of that event. How they tell a story often depends on their perspective and that often depends on how they relate to the people involved.

    If you grow up with dogs, then when you see a big dog barking you might interpret that as the dog wants to play. But if you have been bitten by a dog, then a big dog barking seems threatening. Same dog, same circumstance, but contrasting perspectives based on your previous experience.

    Pretty much everything else is second-hand: A report that gets its information from data collected elsewhere or from a study done by other researchers; a story told to you by someone who spoke to the person who experienced it.

    But how do videos come into play? You see a video taken by someone else. That’s second-hand. But don’t you see what the person who took the video sees? Isn’t that almost the same as being an eyewitness?

    Not really. Consider this. Someone tells you about an event. You say: “How do you know that happened?” They say: “I was there. I saw it.” That’s pretty convincing. Now, if they say: “I saw the video.” That’s isn’t as convincing. Why? Because you know that the video might not have shown all of what happened. It might have left out something significant. It might even have been edited or doctored in some way.

    Is there evidence?

    Alone, any one source of information might not be convincing, even eyewitness testimony. That’s why when ethical reporters are making accusations in a story or on a podcast, they provide multiple, different types of evidence — a story from an eyewitness, bolstered by an email sent to the person, along with a video, and data from a report.

    It’s kind of like those scenes in murder mysteries where someone has to provide a solid alibi. They can say they were with their spouse, but do you believe the spouse?

    If they were caught on CCTV, that’s pretty convincing. Oh, there’s that parking ticket they got when they were at the movies. And in their coat pocket is the receipt for the popcorn and soda they bought with a date and time on it.

    Now, you don’t have to provide all that evidence every time you pass on a story you heard or read. If that were a requirement, conversations would turn really dull. We are all storytellers and we are geared to entertain. That means that when we tell a story we want to make it a good one. We exaggerate a little. We emphasize some parts and not others.

    The goal here isn’t to take that fun away. But we do have a worldwide problem of misinformation and disinformation.

    Do you want to be part of that problem or part of a solution? If the latter, all you have to do is this: Recognize what you actually know and separate it in your head from what you heard or saw second hand (from a video or photo or documentary) and let people know where you got that information so they can know.

    Don’t pass on information as true when it might not be true or if it is only partially true. Don’t pretend to be more authoritative than you are.

    And perhaps most important: What you don’t know might be as important as what you do know.

    Questions to consider:

    1. What is an example of an original source?

    2. Why should you not totally trust information from a video?

    3. Can you think of a a time when your memory of an event differed from that of someone else who was there?

     

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