Each week as part of the Knight International Media Innovators blog, the ICFJ Knight team will round up stories focused on how their fellows are making an impact in the field. Find out more about the fellows' projects by clicking here.
Hala Nigeria debuts five projects to increase public engagement with health news, Pakistan gets its first data bootcamp and more from the Knight Fellows in this week’s roundup.
Hala Nigeria launches five health engagement projects
Hala Nigeria worked with five newsrooms to create health projects that would increase audience engagement on health issues. Using design-thinking techniques, ICFJ Knight Fellows Declan Okpalaeke, Oluseun Onigbinde, Cece Fadope and Babatunde Akpeji worked with a team of technologists, fellow journalists and health experts to complete five projects with media partners in Nigeria.
The Daily Trust, The Nation, The Punch, Vanguard newspapers and TV Continental all helped build apps and websites that focused on maternal health, emergency services, fake malaria medications and Ebola stories. See a full list of the projects with descriptions here.
Pakistan’s first data bootcamp in session
ICFJ Knight Fellow Rahma Mian teamed up with ICFJ’s Center for Excellence in Journalism to organize Pakistan’s first data bootcamp. The three-day event is already in motion, but make sure to follow the conversation by subscribing to this Twitter list, which is chock-full of attendees and trainers, and following the hashtag #dbootcamp. The data bootcamp ends Saturday, but you can check out projects attendees started working on by clicking here.
Throughout the event, journalists, developers and designers will try to “make sense of large government datasets and turn complex information into useful tools for citizens.” ICFJ Knight Fellows Justin Arenstein and Friedrich Lindenberg and Code for Africa’s Serah Rono, are helping to lead the bootcamp. See some of the slides from their presentations.
Media Factory 2015 seeking applicants
Media Factory pairs Latin American digital media companies with mentors and invests US$75,000 into each organization. The news accelerator program, run by ICFJ Knight Fellow Mariano Blejman, is accepting applications for its second class, which will be held after Media Party 2015 in Buenos Aires over the course of three months beginning Sept. 1, 2015. For more information about past Media Factory participants and who is eligible to apply, click here.
A happy birthday to Poderopedia Venezuela
In December 2012, former ICFJ Knight Fellow Miguel Paz launched Poderopedia in Chile, and his team has since expanded to Colombia and Venezuela. All three chapters have worked to map who is who in business and politics and raise flags when there are clear conflicts of interest.
Poderopedia Venezuela launched on World Press Freedom Day in 2014 and celebrated its one-year anniversary this week. Check out the watchdog organization’s video (in Spanish), which outlines Poderopedia VE’s first year of successes. You can also read a blog post written by the team about nepotism within current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government and the military’s political power.
What else the fellows have been up to
- Fellow Javier Garza spoke at the Global Media Freedom conference. Garza presented Periodistas en Risego (Journalists at Risk), a map that tracks attacks on journalists created by Jorge Luis Sierra during his fellowship.
- Code for Ghana, which was one of the 2012 African News Innovation Challenge winners, held a Twitter chat on the impact of open data on socio-economic development in Ghana.
- Fellow Juan Manuel Casanueva organized a “Periodismo, Datos y Mezcales” meetup featuring HacksLabs winners Cargografias and Ojo Publico.