2018: Community Investigations Training Programmes
Wanting to build on our success with the workshops we held during 2016 and 2017, and backed by repeat funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, in 2018 we partnered up with some of the most established organisations we’d engaged then and worked closely with them to put together tailored programmes which would run for much longer and take a cohort of trainee contributors through their own investigations.
This required some collaborative planning meetings and some coordination across the organisations, with the CIJ acting as a central hub. Obviously, we also attended sessions of each course, met participants and provided guidance and expertise to feed into the curricula that each organisation built for its participants.
In the end, we and the four partner organisations delivered some comprehensive training programmes that not only skilled up the contributor bases of each publication and helped to cement their community ties, but also produced some excellent investigations and stories.
The four programmes were:
Star and Crescent: Reclaim The News
2018: Data-Driven Community Journalism
During 2018 we ran a focused training programme for community journalists specifically targeted at helping them to use the techniques of Data Journalism for their investigative reporting. Participants were chosen by application and we were able to support them to travel to a series of our trademark hands-on classes and work through their own investigations with the support and mentorship of our data journalism experts.