News Decoder’s global community extends across five continents connecting with thousands of young people. With your help, we aim to reach even more youth in more places.
The News Decoder global community
In the past week we celebrated News Decoder’s 8th birthday with a look at where we’ve been, what we are up to now and our plans for the future.
We did this by using the old journalism technique of Who, What, Where, When, How and Why?
We looked at the WHO we aim to help: Youth across the world. We want young people to see themselves as part of a larger world. We do this by embedding into course curriculums and by working with student-led clubs inside schools.
WHAT we do is create and nurture connections through school partnerships:
- We prompt students to identify problems in their local communities in relation to what people experience in other places;
- We ask them to consider their feelings and thoughts in connection to beliefs held by other people elsewhere;
- We bring them together, across national borders, to research important issues and present their findings in live webinars
- We connect curious youth reporters with experienced correspondents to learn more about the profession.
Seeing the world through the lens of journalism
We wanted you to understand WHY we use the lens of journalism to foster global citizenship and media literacy.
In taking students through the process of writing stories for publication, they seek out credible sources of information, learn how to measure the reliability and accuracy of information and how to account for and balance out bias. They master global citizenship competencies linked to socio-emotional learning. This is the essence of media literacy.
Our correspondents gave you their thoughts on what it means to think like a journalist. Jonathan Sharp said that journalists look beyond facts to causes and repercussions. Maggie Fox told us that it requires questioning where you get your information, why you seek out certain people and where their expertise comes from.
Our correspondents talked about the need to be skeptical and open-minded in gathering information and then present it in a balanced, dispassionate way.
The future for News Decoder
Our managing director Maria Krasinski took you through a voyage into the future to show you WHERE we hope to go.
We want to expand the number of schools we work with and do so equitably across economic divides. We want to expand the regions of the world in which we mentor students, and ask you to help us find school partners in Africa and Asia, South America and Australia.
We want to expand the places we report on and work with journalists in more under-reported areas of the world.
And because we want to do this equitably, we want to expand our open-access resources — learning tools and materials free to anyone, anywhere.
And we want to expand the ways we work with students, from being embedded in classrooms, to working with them through clubs, camps or school trips. We want to help them to tell stories in more ways: videos, podcasts and alternative storytelling formats like animation, games and graphic non-fiction.
How you can help
Today we’re sharing HOW you can help us. Your contributions help to sponsor school partners and expand the ways we work with schools, teachers, and students. They also help us to connect to schools in more regions of the world, pay our hard-working correspondents and keep our site ad-free and independent.
Thanks to supporters like you, for the 2022-23 academic year News Decoder was able to offer nearly €30,000 in fee waivers for schools of limited means to join our global community.
News Decoder is a small, nonprofit organization with big goals. We work with a modest budget, have a small (but mighty) staff and serve a large number of students — many of them one-on-one — across many different time zones.
With your help, we can continue to do what we do so well. And we will be able to do more in more places, help more schools and mentor more young people.
