Media Community Newsletter April 2024

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Get funded to explore an underreported issue, apply for the DW Akademie’s Fellowship for Investigative Journalism in East Africa and discover how Hayat Alijowaily is using film to advocate for climate justice.

1. Journalism trends: Women are still underrepresented in leadership roles in newsrooms - and it’s concerning. As stated in the Women and leadership in the news media 2024 report by Reuters Institute: “Top editorial leadership matters both in terms of how journalism is practiced and how it appears in society.” The report analyzed the gender breakdown of top editors of 240 major online and offline news outlets in 12 different markets and five continents. Only 24% of the 174 top editors were women even though 40% of journalists in the 12 markets were women. The report concludes, “As has been the case in almost every year since we started this work in 2020, all the markets covered have a majority – often a large majority – of men in top editorial positions.”

2. Who’s funding: Is there an underreported issue you want to explore? The Pulitzer Center is offering grants to fund underreported African stories. Projects must focus on issues like sanitation, water, education, maternal health, and climate resilience. Criteria: Open to fulltime and freelance reporters, photographers, radio/audio journalists, television/video journalists, and documentary filmmakers. Deadline: Rolling. More info.

3. Training Opportunity: This one is for journalists in East Africa - the DW Akademie is looking for 15 investigative journalists to join the Fellowship for Investigative Journalism in East Africa. The program supports the research and reporting project on digital challenges as well as on concrete solution-based approaches. Deadline: 12 May. More info.

4. In the spotlight: Access to safe abortions leaves women with choices, and some try to end their pregnancies in dangerous ways. Kenyan journalist Linda Ngari explores the “public health issue” in Investigating Abortion Rights in Kenya, where almost two-thirds of pregnancies in Kenya are unintended and unregulated terminations are estimated to claim the lives of over 2,000 women every year. Linda is an accomplished fact-checking and data journalist, open-source intelligence expert, and digital rights advocate. She is the fact-checking editor at Africa Uncensored. She was part of the 2021 Data Storytelling Fellowship by Baraza Media Lab, where she explored the role of play therapy in preventing child crime.

5. Stories that moved us: Find out how Hayat Alijowaily is advancing the campaign about climate justice in Africa through film; why Cameroonian TV host, Jocelyne Fotso, is committing her media career to addressing social issues; which African cities have the most millionaires; and how low-budget, high-quality films can help African film making. These are some of the stories produced by bird story agency. It’s Africa’s first and only news agency for alternative stories about Africa.

It pays to tell better stories about Africa, so we partnered with the Thomson Foundation on a digital course called African Stories: A guide for journalists on how to tell better stories about Africa. It’s free and takes three hours to complete. Then you can pitch to bird story agency and get paid to publish stories that better represent Africa.