Blog Post

Citizen Journalism Gives the People of the Niger Delta a Voice

Somewhere far from the capital city, far from most newsrooms, and, for that matter, most news consumers, a dilapidated hospital stops functioning. Maybe it happened because the faltering power system failed, or maybe the unpaid staff members finally quit. Either way, the result is the same: people in a remote place just lost their access to healthcare.

In the city, people start noticing when the lines at the local health facility grow longer with people from the countryside who have come because they have nowhere to go for treatment back home.

Reporting Contest Leads to Rise in Polio Vaccines in Ethiopia

At a health center in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, a mother carries her child while waiting in line for him to receive a meningitis vaccine. “I have heard from the media about meningitis that it can physically disable or kill a child,” says the mother, Seble Yihun. Previously, she might have waited for a health extension worker to come to her home with the vaccine. But, she said, “I also heard health care centers are getting short of vaccines.

Empowering Women in Journalism and Tech in Latin America

Working in newsrooms with a multidisciplinary team of developers, journalists and designers became my everyday life when I was part of the Guardian Interactive team over the last three years.

This began with my former boss, Alastair Dant, who had the vision not only to start the Guardian Interactive team, but who recognized the need to place a woman in a key position on his team. This changed my life.

How Costa Rica’s La Nación is Telling Stories Visually

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unstoppable Ascent of Data Journalism in Latin America

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

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

Journalists Can Now Use OpenData Latinoamérica to Find, Share Reliable Data

We can’t do data journalism without reliable data. Accurate source data is just as important to data journalism as a reliable human source is to a reporter’s interview. We need a central repository where you can share the data that you have already proved to be reliable. Our answer to this need: OpenData Latinoamérica, which we are leading as ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellows.

How Journalists in High-Risk Situations Can Encrypt Their Documents

In high-risk situations, it is essential that journalists develop skills to protect their information. This is especially important for those who obtain sensitive or confidential data. The data stored by investigative journalists often show evidence of corruption by public officials or matters related to organized crime. For this reason, those who seek to attack journalists usually go after their computers or their mobile devices such as phones or tablets.

HackDash Helps Global Media Innovators Organize Teams and Projects

The concept behind HackDash is simple yet powerful: a web platform that brings people and ideas together and allows anyone to know the state of a project.

Site on Latin America’s Rich and Powerful Gives Users its Content

Poderopedia is a platform that reveals the relationships among elites in a country or region, especially in places where power is concentrated in the hands of a few people.

After winning the Knight News Challenge in 2011, we launched Poderopedia in Chile last fall.