What We Offer Our Network

ICFJ seeks to support its network of international journalists tailored to regional and local needs. We foster global collaboration and  community-building, provide resources and highlight opportunities to provide for continued professional development. 

We offer our network a series of community-building initiatives that help connect our alumni and journalists around the world to each other and ICFJ to collaborate, share ideas, and benefit from our programs, resources, story contests and reporting grants. These include closed listservs, open subscriptions to the ICFJ Newsletter and IJNet Newsletter, and global network initiatives, led by our award-winning team of community managers.

Here are some of our global initiatives:

• The ICFJ Pamela Howard Forum on Global Crisis Reporting - ICFJ has evolved our community project since the pandemic to expand it to help journalists meet the challenges of the future in a post-pandemic world, including climate change, disease, financial crises, and technology disruptions and their consequences. The goal: to equip journalists to cover critical global issues of local importance and spur local to global collaborations. Just as almost every reporter became a “health reporter” during the pandemic, the global challenges ahead will demand that journalists build expertise to meet future crises. These crises do not stop at any border. Trained journalists, who can effectively and accurately report on the seismic events ahead, will be vital to finding solutions. 
• ICFJ Global Health Crisis Reporting Forum - In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ICFJ launched the Global Health Crisis Reporting Forum in five languages (Arabic, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish) to bring together our network of international journalists and connect them to health experts, veteran health reporters, resources, and to each other to better report on COVID-19 and all the subsequent issues stemming from the pandemic, from health to economics and political consequences to  media sustainability. Through this Forum, we have also held The ICFJ COVID-19 Reporting Contest and helped catalyze reporting through the ICFJ-Hearst Foundations COVID-19 Reporting Grants. The Forum was honored by the Online News Association in 2021 with the ONA Community Award for the service it provided global reporters during the pandemic connecting them to health experts.

ICFJ also awards prizes to recognize journalists of the highest standards. They include:

• ICFJ Knight International Award - The ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award recognizes excellent reporting that makes a difference in the lives of people around the world. Recipients of the ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award are reporters, editors, technologists, media managers or citizen journalists who, despite difficult circumstances, produce pioneering news reports or innovations that make a significant impact in their countries.
• The Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling - The Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling, a collaboration between the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), the ONE Campaign, and the Elliott family, honors up-and-coming journalists in Africa who strive to strengthen people's voices and illuminate the transformational change taking place on the continent.

We also offer training and professional development through more than 70 international programs run annually. These programs include fellowships such as the ICFJ Knight Fellowships, the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship and fellows for Emerging Media Leaders.

ICFJ also provides a number of resources to our network through IJNet and our global trends analysis on the journalism industry, useful to academics and media entrepreneurs alike.