ICFJ Knight Fellowships

16 Free Digital Tools Created by ICFJ Knight Fellows That Any Newsroom Can Use

The ICFJ Knight Fellows are global media innovators who foster news innovation and experimentation to deepen coverage, expand news delivery and better engage citizens. As part of their work, they’ve created tools that they are eager to share with journalists worldwide.

Two ICFJ Knight Fellows, Jorge Luis Sierra and Shaheryar Popalzai, are speaking at the 2017 NICAR conference in Jacksonville, Florida, on March 2-5.

‘Salama’ App Helps to Keep Journalists Safe

From Mexico to Iraq to the United States, journalists around the world face severe threats to their physical safety and digital security every day. For this reason, I created a free risk assessment web application, called Salama, that’s designed especially for journalists and bloggers to help keep them safe on the job.

Journalists from more than 130 news organizations in Latin America, the U.S., Africa and the Middle East have conducted their first-ever risk assessment using Salama.

Why publishing more open data isn’t enough to empower citizens

When I attended the International Open Data Conference last October in Madrid, there was plenty of talk about whether open data has failed to live up to its promise. Has open data really increased transparency, improved government efficiency, brought about world peace, ended world hunger?

ICFJ Knight Fellow Janine Warner: Perfectionism is the enemy of news startups

Frustrated by the constraints of traditional media, a growing number of journalists are interested in launching their own news startups, says Janine Warner, an ICFJ Knight Fellow who helps Latin American news entrepreneurs strengthen their business models. Too often, she says, when aspiring entrepreneurs come up with a great idea, two obstacles trip them up.

One is perfectionism. “If you’re an entrepreneur, waiting until everything is perfect is a problem,” Warner said in a recent interview with Chilean website Puroperiodismo.