Picture this: A group of illegal fishermen in a Philippine province turned into “guardians of the sea.” A community in India that for every girl born plants 111 trees in a ritual that has reduced the number of child marriages as well as floods. The women of the Nunavut people of Canada who are in charge of managing childbirth and care for new mothers, or the construction of a community in Cuba to provide protection to survivors of sexual violence.
These were the topics of some of the stories that were part of the 2023 Global Edition of the Human Journalism Network, an initiative designed as a platform to share feature stories that “portray how people and communities face our most urgent social problems.”
In the midst of an increasingly chaotic world that is inevitably reflected in daily reporting and that has led to other phenomena such as “news avoidance,” these types of stories seem to be a refreshing breeze, a brake on the “extreme negativity” of the media.
Such is the conviction of Argentine journalist Chani Guyot, founder of the Human Journalism Network [and a Knight Fellow with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ)], for whom enhancing the reach of these stories — which he calls “human journalism” — has become a professional mission.
“The media has a responsibility to showcase society’s problems in its ‘watchdog’ role, but we believe it also has a responsibility to showcase the stories of the people and organizations that are seeking to solve those problems, because those stories exist and are often underrepresented,” Guyot, who is also the founder of the digital news outlet Red/Acción, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
The Human Journalism Network started in 2021 as a “pilot” project, according to Guyot. At that time, the platform was intended for allied media, or partners, in Latin America. For that Latin American edition, eight news outlets participated and shared five stories each, for a total of 40 stories. In addition to sharing their stories, the media partners were free to republish the texts shared by the other news outlets.
by Silvia Higuera
Photo by Kasturi Laxmi Mohit on Unsplash
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