Category: News Decoder

  • 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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  • When will we listen to what young people say?

    When will we listen to what young people say?

    Imagine adding your thoughts to a conversation, only to have them dismissed by the group — and not because of what you said, but because they thought you were too young to know what you are talking about or understand the topic at hand.

    That’s what teens around the world face when they try to participate in “adult” conversations.

    On Tuesday 2 December, we gathered seven people from six countries in a live virtual roundtable to discuss whether and how young people are able to speak out and be heard. Five teens from News Decoder partners schools in India, South Africa and the United States were joined by News Decoder correspondent Alfonso Silva-Santisteban from Peru and Marouane El Bahraoui, a research intern at the Carter Center in the United States and African Leadership Academy alum originally from Morocco.

    When we asked each of the teens whether they felt they were listened to, they all agreed on one thing: When talking to their peers they felt understood and respected. But when trying to get their opinions across in a room of adults, they were often dismissed and felt disrected.

    “If I’m talking about a certain topic to my peers and they already have that knowledge already, they already know what I’m talking about, then it’s much easier for them to actually hear me and understand me,” said Ramona-Blessing Mkunna, a Tanzanian student studying at the African Leadership Academy in South Africa.

    Some voices are valued more.

    Sophie De Lavandeyra, a student at The Hewitt School in New York City said that she feels that even when she speaks to teachers or family members, she is heard and listened to but not equally valued. “And ultimately, there’s this sense of ‘I’m a student, I’m a child’, so therefore my opinions must be not as valued as other adults in my community,” she said.

    Sydney also attends Hewitt and said that the problem of being heard is more pronounced for girls. “I think people can undermine our opinions or statements and beliefs that we have,” she said.

    Mahee Mantri, a student at VIBGYOR High in India said that she feels that people look at age and not experience, and that while her experiences might be different, they should still be considered valid. It seems, she said, that the age difference gives some people an excuse to not listen.

    That young people feel they aren’t heard may be the one unifying aspect of what we call the “Gen Z” generation — the first generation to be born in a fully-digital world.

    El Bahraoui said that if there is a Gen Z movement, it is one that doesn’t have a leader and it doesn’t have a specific set of demands, but the demands they do have seem to cross borders: lowering unemployment, ending nepotism and corruption, slowing down climate change.

    “Young people are afraid of the uncertain future or the uncertainty of the future. That’s why there is all this anger and people going out to the street and protesting because people want some stability some certainty,” he said.

    From anger to action

    In many places, like Kenya, to get heard youth are taking to the streets in protests and when they do, it has produced results, El Bahraoui said. “Some protests led to the dissolution of the house of representatives,” he said. “Some protests led to the ousting of the president or the head of state. Other protests led only to the government removing a financial bill, such as the case in Kenya. There was a tax bill and then Gen Z protests went to the streets and the government just removed that bill, instead of removing the whole government or the whole parliament.”

    Silva-Santisteban said some of the frustrations young people have is that even when protests produce change, often those changes aren’t long-lasting or significant.

    “There’s an outburst of outrage and young people are called to be responsible of the change. Like they’re the spearheads of the protest. And at some point they become responsible of the change, but then the conditions are the same, especially in a country [like] Peru where you have a political crisis, a lot of conditions for unemployment.”

    Meanwhile, the young people that took to the streets face violence and are stigmatized, he said.

    The young people in the roundtable seemed to agree that shouting demands might not be the most effective way to get heard. Instead it comes down to an ongoing process of talking to people you might not agree with, and more important listening respectfully to what they have to say.

    Dialogue is needed.

    Anna Bamugye, a Ugandan student at the African Leadership Academy, said that you can’t force your opinions on people. “It’s about understanding each other and where you’re coming from,” she said. “And most of the time, we find comfort in talking to those who understand what we’re trying to convey, what the message we’re trying to say.”

    But in order to get a message to people, you must talk to people who may not understand you. “You have to talk to people who have different views,” she said. “To hear where other people are coming from allows you to understand, and maybe just help understand how you can shift that person’s perspective and understand where both parties are coming from.”

    In this way too, she said, you could learn something from them that you had never thought of.

    Mkunna said that If the goal is to raise awareness, you have to consider the most effective way of doing that. She has cousins who were born with autism and has found that in Tanzania people are largely ignorant about autism. As a result, autistic people face discrimination. She decided to launch a social media campaign to educate people about autism. “I think it really helped,” she said. “Because we got a chance to go on national TV and we went on radio and we talked about autism.”

    In New York, Del Cid and De Lavandeyra found themselves angry about the immigration raids taking place in New York and all over the country. Del Cid channeled her anger into photography. “So I personally use my art and the images that I take to kind of convey a story and a narrative,” she said.

    De Lavandeyra wrote an AI program using a large language model, that lets people who speak little English get questions answered. The program allows them “to be able to chat in whatever language is their home language, and be able to ask questions and get their legal answers based off [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] data,” she said. “But written in a way where they could understand, and it was not just a bunch of legal jargon that felt unintelligible for them and something they weren’t being able to process.”

    Mantri said that it is important to both listen and speak up. “I feel there is a generation gap which I experienced in my parents or their generation, and in my generation we question why — why is it things are like that?” she said. “I always like to question why is it like this and they probably just hear it and consider it as back answering or disrespect.”

     Questions to consider:

    1. What is the difference between being heard and having someone listen to what you say?

    2. Why is the ability to listen to what people say important if you want to get your opinions across?

    3. In what ways do you try to get your voice heard?

     

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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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  • With News Decoder, students explore their role in the world

    With News Decoder, students explore their role in the world

    Back in 2020, during the height of the Covid epidemic, high school students in the U.S. state of Connecticut sat down with News Decoder founder Nelson Graves to explore a number of thorny topics that ranged from the death penalty to whether animals should be kept in zoos.

    The students in “American Voices & Choices: Ethics in Modern Society” at Westover School had been working with News Decoder since the start of that academic year, mastering the process we call Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise — or PRDR — to identify topical issues at the intersection of ethics and public policy.

    They pitched ideas they wanted to report on: teen health; police brutality; abortion; economic privilege in the environmental movement; the risks of experimental vaccines; the impact of alcohol on youth.

    Later, each student received detailed feedback from a News Decoder editor, aimed at helping them narrow their research and produce original reporting.

    Westover was an early News Decoder school partner. Since our founding 10 years ago, News Decoder has worked with high school and university students in 89 schools across 23 countries.

    Decoding news in school

    Teachers have used us as part of their course curricula, as extra credit assignments and as standalone learning opportunities for their students.

    At Realgymnasium Rämibühl Zürich in Switzerland, teacher Martin Bott brings News Decoder in each year. In one weeklong workshop, students produced podcasts. Over five days, they pitched News Decoder stories about a problem they identified in their local communities, identified an expert to interview, found how that problem was relevant to people in other countries and then wrote a podcast script, revised it and recorded it. “[News Decoder] enabled me to do a few projects which really open up perspectives for the students, give them a taste of life beyond the classroom and of the world of journalism,” Bott said. 

    In another workshop for RGZH, News Decoder turned students into “foreign correspondents.” They were tasked with finding stories in Zurich that people in other countries would find interesting. Like the students in the podcasting workshop, they then found an expert to interview, wrote a draft and revised it with the goal of publishing it on News Decoder. 

    One student in the workshop noticed a demonstration of people with dogs and got up the nerve to talk to one of them. They were from an organization that rescued Spanish greyhounds and she decided it would be a good idea for a News Decoder story. The story she wrote ended up as one of News Decoder’s most-read stories of all time.

    Not only have Bott’s students been able to publish stories on News Decoder, many of these stories, including the article about the greyhounds, have won awards in our twice yearly global storytelling competition. 

    “We’ve been delighted to get so many of those stories published on News Decoder,” Bott said. “That’s very, very motivating for the students. And it’s a wonderful learning process for them because they realise it’s not just about school rules and so on out there.”

    Challenging students to do more

    Bott said that working with professionals at News Decoder gets the students to step up. “When you’re a journalist, you’ve got a responsibility,” he said. “That’s something we’ve been able to talk about with journalists who’ve met us from various parts of the world through News Decoder. And you’ve got real pressure as well. And they’re not, I think they’re not quite used to that. So it really opens their eyes.”

    At The Hewitt School in New York, 15 teens at the all-girls school meet once a month as a club. They read and discuss News Decoder stories and pitch their own stories. They also prepare for a cross-border webinar; each year they join with students from a News Decoder partner school in another country, and decide with those students on a topic to explore. 

    They then research the topic, interview experts and come together with the students from the other school to present their findings live in a video conference before an audience of people from the two schools.

    In 2024, students from The Thacher School in California worked with peers at the European School of Brussels II on a webinar on consumerism and the human impacts of climate change. 

    Russell Spinney is faculty adviser for News Decoder at Thacher. “The webinars really were kind of ways just to get to know each other, discover that we actually do have some common interests. But not only that, that we also have problems that are similar,” he said. 

    “News Decoder’s workshops,” he said, “get students to think of ways to communicate their research beyond the classroom and connect with what’s going on in the world.” News Decoder has partnered schools this way in some 50 school-school webinars. 

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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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  • Empowering youth through environmental storytelling

    Empowering youth through environmental storytelling

    Through storytelling, we can bring climate-related data to life. Through storytelling, young people can use their voice and the voices of those around them to turn something complex, global and overwhelming, into something local, tangible and meaningful. Through storytelling, young people can help shift narratives and bring to the forefront stories of action and of hope.

    This is the idea behind the EYES climate storytelling curriculum.

    Now available on the eyesonclimate.org website, the curriculum is the culmination of the Empowering Youth through Environmental Storytelling project (EYES), an Erasmus+ co-funded project by News Decoder, The Environment and Human Rights Academy (TEHRA) and Young Educators European Association.

    The Climate Change 101 unit begins with the basics: human activities driving climate change and what temperature increase means for our planet. Students are tasked with producing an article that explains the topic to a younger audience.

    A unit on Climate Injustice walks students through the uncomfortable reality that those causing climate change are suffering the least from its impacts. Those who have contributed the least? They tend to be in the grip of climate change.

    Human stories from a man-made disaster

    We know that learning about the devastations of the climate crisis can leave young people feeling anxious and angry. We also know from the teachers who piloted the EYES curriculum that it’s important to localise these topics.

    So in the Climate Injustice unit, students are tasked with finding a human story: someone to illustrate climate injustice at play in their local area or region.

    Hearing stories about people lets us understand the reality of an issue. Telling these stories gives young people a device for meaning-making and a platform for agency.

    In our Systemic Change unit, students learn about the interconnected mechanisms that keep our economy rooted in endless economic growth and fossil fuel use. They learn about the ‘deep’ leverage points for making change — the rules, the goals and the mindset of a system. They research case studies on commodity supply chains and form their questions into a story pitch.

    Our curriculum runs across school subjects for students between 15 and 18 years of age. Other units include: Tipping Points, Planetary Boundaries, Human–Nature Connection, The Carbon Budget, Doughnut Economics and a Climate Justice Case Study.

    Solutions are out there.

    In Systemic Solutions to the Climate Crisis, we showcase seven inspiring examples of climate solutions from around the world, from local projects such as community-owned solar panels in Mexico to the transition to renewables in Uruguay, to global movements such as recognising the rights of nature or degrowth in the Global North.

    Meaningful action can happen at any scale. By engaging with these case studies, students can see that stories of just and transformative systems change happen all around them.

    There are so many stories yet to be told, and that in itself is empowering.

    To bolster student projects, the curriculum includes units on journalism and storytelling: The Principles of Journalism, Fact Checking and Misinformation, Interviewing and How to Write a Pitch, Write an Article and Produce a Podcast.

    “Storytelling can turn young people into active users of climate knowledge, and even change makers,” said Andreea Pletea, The Environment and Human Rights Academy programme manager. “Students can even help shift dominant narratives by bringing to the surface systemic solutions to the environmental crises that also address inequalities.”

    Causes and systems

    Aside from storytelling, the main focus of the EYES curriculum is on systems thinking and climate injustice.

    “We invite learners to go upstream to the root causes of the crises we face, and question why, despite increasing awareness, meaningful action often lags behind,” Pletea said. “Seeing the big picture particularly through systems thinking and global justice can also help young people make sense of what’s going on in their own local context.”

    Pletea said that ultimately, the goal is to plant a seed. “That all of us, including young people, are more than consumers,” she said. “We are citizens with a voice and power to act and demand change, and especially when we come together.”

    The EYES project itself began as a seed. TEHRA and News Decoder came together to improve climate change education through storytelling, and created a set of materials that were piloted in multiple education contexts across Europe, Africa and Latin America.

    The seeds to stories

    In Slovenia, Kenya and Colombia, pilot students exchanged letters on their local experiences of climate change. In Kosovo, a Roma community of young people visualised their personal experience of climate change through art.

    At a summer camp in Belgium, students played climate change games, pulled apart the individual carbon footprint and were guided through a nature meditation. In Kenya, students visited the precious Karura national park and wrote stories about tipping points and the value of forests.

    The feedback from students and educators, including at a three-day educators workshop in Brussels in October, helped shape and restructure the curriculum. It evolved into a set of off-the-shelf resources that can be used by multiple teachers in one school or independently by learners.

    If you are an educator, we invite you to dive into climate change with your students and use the EYES curriculum. Students need to learn about the root causes of the climate crisis so that they know in which direction to head — in their future careers as much as in their personal set of values.

    Through storytelling, young people can engage with the reality that is climate change, both as authors and as listeners. Storytelling is the way we understand ourselves: why we act the way we do and how together we can solve the problems that humankind has caused.

    Questions to consider:

    1. How can storytelling can turn someone into an active user of climate knowledge?

    2. What types of climate activities did students in different countries do through the EYES lessons?

    3. What stories about climate change have you found interesting to read or hear about?

     

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  • You have a story idea. Now what?

    You have a story idea. Now what?

    If you have already eaten a lot of cake another piece will make you sick. Maybe you are trying to stay healthy and sugary foods aren’t healthy. But maybe you have eaten healthy all week and deserve a treat. Or it is a new cake recipe your friend came up with. Or it’s your birthday. All those are great reasons to have that piece of cake now.

    Identify a “news angle”

    The achievement of your healthy diet, or the new recipe or your birthday are like news angles. They are the reason you will eat cake now. They also answer the question: What’s so special about this piece of cake?

    If you think of a story topic like this cake, the angle will define which direction the topic will take.

    You could tell your editor that your angle is that the carbon tax is new and experts think it might not be as effective in cutting emissions as politicians promise. Or the carbon tax is the latest in a series of taxes imposed by the government and people are so sick of taxes, they might vote in an anti-tax political party in the next election. Or maybe next week is a big anniversary for the environmental group that pushed for the tax in the first place — it’s kind of like their birthday.

    If your pitch was basically, “I think the carbon tax would make a great story,” your editors would likely pass on it. But maybe these pitches would catch their attention: 

    • A carbon tax just passed in Denmark marks a new way of lowering carbon emissions and other governments and political parties are watching to see if it works. If it doesn’t, it could set back the push for clean energy not only in Denmark, but across Europe.
    • The carbon tax in Denmark is a gamble on the part of the country’s environmental advocates. Increasing numbers of voters believe they are already overtaxed. If it isn’t as effective as promised it could push people to vote for conservative, anti-tax politicians.
    • Next month is the twentieth anniversary of Denmark’s Green Party. But amid the celebrations is some real concern. The environmental movement has placed a big bet on the new carbon tax — which has garnered significant opposition. 

    If it’s difficult to find an angle for your topic, start telling people around you about your topic and about what you’ve discovered through your research. What kinds of questions do they ask about it? What do they seem to be interested in? Do they ask you something that makes you think, hmm, that’s a good question! If so, then you’ve found your angle. 

    Narrow your focus

    There might be so many angles you end up all over the place. Editors won’t okay a story that they think will come in as a confusing mess. So it is also important to narrow your focus. In telling stories we are often tempted to tell people everything, but listeners and readers have short attention spans and limited appetites. How much cake can you eat in one sitting? 

    So think about what you want the focus of your story to be. It’s about a carbon tax. But is your focus on the effectiveness of it in lowering emissions? In that case you want to interview climate scientists. Is the focus about the politics of the tax? Then you want to talk to political experts. Maybe the story is about the cost of the tax on the economy. Then you will want to talk to economists and everyday taxpayers. 

    Before pitching the story, consider the one thing the story will be about, how you will focus on it and why that is important or interesting or relevant to the audience of the publication or show.

    Don’t worry that your focus is too narrow. You can use something small happening in a small place to tell a big story.

    What happens in Denmark could be emblematic of what is happening elsewhere or will likely happen elsewhere. The effects of one tax in one place could help explain the challenges of funding climate solutions in general. 

    Identify the problem and who it affects.

    The smaller the story, the easier it is for people to consume it and understand it and that is what your editors will look for in a pitch. 

    It is important to identify what is at stake and who will be affected by the problem at the heart of your story – the “stakeholders”. In a story about a carbon tax, are the people most affect the companies who pollute? Is it the taxpayers? Is it the environmentalists frustrated by the lack of action on climate change? Is it the politicians who risk losing the next election or the opposition candidates who might win office?

    Finally, do some initial research so you can present to the editors some information that shows the importance of the story and come up with a plan for how you will report it. Before an editor okays a story they want to be confident you can actually do it. 

    Here is how to construct a strong pitch:

    1. State what the problem is and why this is an important story now.: Remember to narrow your focus. Editors won’t likely okay pitches that are too vague or broad. 
    2. State how you plan to find a possible solution
    3. State the main data and the important context – What it is that makes this story important or particularly interesting or relevant to the audience.
    4. Who the problem affects.
    5. The news angle: Why is it relevant now
    6. How you plan to go about reporting the story– the data or reports you will seek the people you plan to interview.
    7. The big question your story will answer.

    Be concise

    Here is the real challenge: You have to keep it all short. Your pitch needs to show your editor that you don’t waste words and that you won’t turn in a story that’s a long, tedious, confusing read. Try to keep it to less than 300 words. 

    Be clear. Say only what you need to say. Don’t make your pitch flowery or use exclamation points. Keep to facts and keep out assumptions or biases. Don’t try too hard to convince. If the story idea is a good one it should convince on its own. 

    Finally, let’s give you an example. Imagine you are my editor and I am pitching a story about how to pitch a story. Here is my pitch. It is 194 words. 

    Young people around the world are itching to tell stories about the problems they see around them. But they find the pitching process intimidating. They’ve got big ideas but don’t know how to come up with an idea out of those big ideas that would grab the attention of an editor. Their story pitches end up too broad, vague and with too many angles.

    The result is that important stories don’t get told. I plan to talk to editors about the pitching process and identify the elements that make a strong pitch and the common problems they see in weak pitches. I will also rely on information put together by News Decoder’s Engaging Youth in Environmental Storytelling (EYES) project. 

    The story is timely because 19 October is World Mental Health Day and reporting and telling non-fiction stories is a great way for young people to think through the big problems they face and that they see in the world around them and to talk to experts who can help them put it all into context. 

    Ultimately, my story will answer this question: Why do some stories get published but other, equally important stories don’t?

     

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  • A decade of giving teens the last word

    A decade of giving teens the last word

    They are important not only for the students writing these stories but for teens all over the world reading or listening to these stories. They see their own anxieties and concerns reflected.

    As managing director at News Decoder, Maria Krasinski has seen how empowering personal reflection stories are when published. 

    “These stories build students’ self-awareness, confidence and empathy,” Krasinski said. “Seeing their stories published is an empowering act that validates their lived experiences and tells them that their voices are worth being heard.”

    She said that what News Decoder does is ask students to pause, analyze and articulate what they learned from an experience. “That creative process strengthens not only their storytelling skills, but also their ability to make sense of the world and step into public conversation,” she said. 

    A decade of publishing student stories

    News Decoder has been doing this for 10 years. Some of the first stories we published were personal reflections sent in by students.

    Back in May 2016, a high school student studying for a year in France wrote a personal reflection article after having encountered a number of her peers from Turkey at a conference in Luxembourg. During the conference they learned that a suicide bomber had killed three people in Istanbul.

    “I can’t even begin to imagine the heartbreak and panic they felt when they found out,” she wrote. 

    She then explored the concept of senseless violence:

    “I’m afraid that I’m beginning to become desensitized to the tragedies that strike all around the world,” she wrote. “When I got home from the conference and brought up the topic of the Turkish bombings, my host mom asked me how that news was different from any other day’s news, and then asked me to pass the pepper.”

    Students reach profound conclusions.

    In the article, she worked through her complicated thoughts and feelings and came to this conclusion: 

    “If we allow ourselves to be desensitized to all the bad, the good will stop motivating us as well.”

    Back in 2017, News Decoder’s founder Nelson Graves wrote that students make use of the News Decoder platform to make their voices heard. 

    “News-Decoder offers students a chance to put their best foot forward, to push the envelope, to confront different viewpoints and to work with professional correspondents,” he said. 

    For 10 years News Decoder has used storytelling to engage students in the process of learning. Through our educational programs, students are encouraged to ask big questions, identify problems they see around them and talk to people to get their questions answered — classmates, neighbours, family and experts.

    All the while, we ask students to compare their lived experiences and the problems they see around them, with what is happening elsewhere in the world. If they see inequities in their communities, how does that manifest in other countries? In doing this, they find out how connected they are to all the people seeing and experiencing these same problems. 

    Seeing the world through a global lens

    Amina McCauley is program manager for News Decoder’s EYES project — Empowering Youth Through Environmental Storytelling. She said that the global connection is important.

    “I think that young people rarely get the chance to articulate their values in a global context,” McCauley said. “Writing a personal reflection allows them to understand themselves better through this different lens.”

    The empowerment comes when they master the art of communicating what they learn to the wider world. 

    We want News Decoder students, and anyone we work with, to be able to respond when they hear or see something they think is wrong, but to be able to do so not just quickly but thoughtfully. 

    We’d like you to join our network and help us do that. If you are a teacher or school administrator, explore our school programs and consider bringing us into your schools. If you are a journalist consider donating articles and time to engage with students across the world. And if you have the means, consider donating funds to our nonprofit. 

    Why should ignorant people and bullies have the last word? 

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  • A decade getting teens to do something many avoid: Think

    A decade getting teens to do something many avoid: Think

    TikTok reels, attention grabbing headlines and AI that spits out instant answers. The way teens engage with the world today often lacks depth. 

    But at this age, where the teen brain is rapidly developing, deeper thinking — dubbed by psychologists as transcendent thinking — is vital not just for self-reflection and problem solving, but also self-esteem and better relationships in adulthood. 

    Many of us spend a lot of time in what researchers call “surface-level” thinking — reacting to what’s in front of us. Transcendent thinking, though, is when we go beyond concept descriptions, to wrestle with questions like, What does this say about justice? How do systems work? Where do I fit in all this? 

    “Young people get so much information fed to them through social media, influencers and podcasts and AI, and this is such a passive way of learning,” said Marcy Burstiner, News Decoder’s educational news director. “Dangerous, really, if they aren’t critically thinking about the information they are getting.”

    That’s why for 10 years News Decoder has used the lens of journalism to engage students in the process of learning. Through our educational programs, students are encouraged to ask big questions, identify problems they see around them and talk to people to get their questions answered — classmates, neighbours, family and experts. In doing this, they find out information themselves. 

    Spoon-fed learning

    This is more important than ever as the internet transforms from a place where people would lose themselves as they “surfed,” stumbling upon all kinds of new and interesting information along the way, into a place where an AI bot does that for them and spits out summarized results. 

    For 10 years, we’ve been asking teens to find real people to interview, to compare their different perspectives and from that to come up with their own original thoughts about complex topics where there isn’t a clear right and wrong, where there are layers of inequity. 

    Student Jack McConnel at The Tatnall School in the United States did this when he interviewed his state’s congressional representative, Sarah McBride, the nation’s first transgender representative in Congress.

    Through the research he did, and after interviewing McBride, McConnel came to the conclusion that voters in his district didn’t elect her because of gender identity, but because McBride pledged to help solve the more mundane issues they cared most about — protecting consumers from getting scammed, for example, or helping farmers to lower food prices. Gender identity wasn’t their most important concern.

    Students, like McConnel, who work with News Decoder often start with a “pitch” — a proposal for a news story. In the pitch, we have them ask a big question that their story will answer. McConnel’s asked three: “What role does identity play in our elected officials? Has this fixation from both sides made congressional and senatorial positions simply for show? Does it matter more who the person is or what the person does, and have we lost sight of what matters about our politicians?”

    Through his research and his one-to-one interview with McBride, he was able to answer all those questions. 

    Beyond facts

    Hannah Choo is a student at an international school in South Korea, and is working with News Decoder as a summer intern. As part of her work, she creates video content for social media based on articles published on News Decoder.

    Choo has found that through engaging with these stories, she’s forming a deeper connection with the issues the stories explore. She said the challenge is to go beyond merely summarizing the information. The goal is to connect with an audience. 

    “And that puts me in a position where I need to really focus on why this issue matters and why I should care,” Choo said. “And that gives a lot more of a sense of purpose.” 

    Choo remembers talking to a biology graduate student, who told her about apoptosis, a process whereby cells die off — a way our bodies get rid of unneeded cells. Alone, this concept feels meaningless, even dry. 

    But the grad student told Choo that when we’re initially formed in the womb, we have paddle-shaped hands with a webbing of skin connecting the fingers and toes. This webbing disappears as we form, due to this apoptosis. Choo remembers looking at her own hands in fascination.

    “And so later, when I actually got to learn biology and learn about the cell cycle, it was a lot easier for me to engage with the topic,” Choo said. “I wasn’t just studying science but I was studying my own body.” 

    From deep thinking to deeper relationships

    A five-year study, published in 2024 in the journal Scientific Reports, followed 65 teenagers aged 14-18 to see how transcendent thinking shapes their brains, and how this further shapes their lives.  

    The teens were shown emotionally rich mini-documentaries featuring real stories of adolescents around the globe — a method that triggers transcendent thinking. They then talked through what the stories meant: how they felt, why they mattered, and what bigger ideas they raised. 

    They found that teens who engaged in this deeper style of thinking showed stronger connections over time between two key brain networks — those involved in self-reflection and big-picture thought, and focus and problem solving. 

    Crucially, they also found that these teens went on to have a clearer sense of identity in late adolescence, which later linked to greater self-esteem and better relationships in young adulthood.

    One way News Decoder helps young people understand deeper meanings and broader implications is by having them look at societal problems and possible solutions. 

    Searching out solutions

    At News Decoder we ask students to identify a problem in their community and then see if they can find people working to solve that problem. 

    “In the process they see at first that a lot of problems seem to have no solution or the solutions are so far off,” Burstiner said. “But all the complications that prevent solutions are like protective layers around the problem. They are like the levels you need to surmount in a video game.”

    If a teen has the patience and persistence to work through those complications they can not only see the solutions but they can see what is preventing those solutions, Burstiner said. 

    One News Decoder student in India wondered what might happen when climate change causes massive migration. 

    “In exploring the topic she hit on the idea of lost languages — that a language is what often ties a community together and connects generations. But if a community is forced to disperse and the people end up integrating into other lands, the language that connected them could die out,” Burstiner said.

    Connecting dots 

    Another student at The Tatnall School played soccer, and began thinking about how much it cost his family for him to play at a competitive level. “In exploring this he realized how much of competitive sports is elitist and how much more difficult it is for someone to go into professional sports if they are poor,” Burstiner said. 

    When students conduct interviews with people who understand these topics in-depth or who are affected by these issues, they can further connect their sense of self with these stories. 

    Choo, during her internship, pitched a story about cancer, because a close family member was undergoing cancer treatment. She asked this question: “How does climate change affect the quality of healthcare for cancer patients?”  

    In doing the research, uncovering connections and conducting interviews, she connected the often-abstract issue of climate change to her own life. 

    “This was the first time I could really connect climate change to my own life and my own loved ones,” Choo said.

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