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.”
