This South African initiative helps newsrooms access women experts

Originally developed as a tool for women in rural India to learn how to read and write, Khabar Lahariya has grown into an important outlet of Indian journalism. Covering events in small, rural communities whose isolation has often bred corruption, Khabar Lahariya is spreading information and holding people accountable.

A woman named MaiLy Do started a Vietnamese-language radio show in Oklahoma City after she realized on Sept. 11, 2001 that her family back home with limited English had no way of finding out if she was okay. Today the station broadcasts for 24 hours across the US and 40 other countries. It offers a voice to the Vietnamese-American population in Oklahoma City and is also essential in disseminating critical information to residents who have limited English skills.

Nightshade is a new tool designed to fight against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without permission. Nightshade “poisons” the training data to essentially confuse the AI model and prevent it from copying an artist’s work. The purpose of Nightshade is to return the power to artists to protect their intellectual property and prevent large AI companies like Google and Meta from taking advantage of them.

Ledenews.com is one of the more than 80 online-only news sites started in 2019 to fill the void in news deserts. The site covers sports, politics, traffic, and local stories about local people in the Wheeling, WV area. The site cost $5,000 to start and now brings in about $60,000 a year in advertising, with 1,500 to 2,000 readers a day, a rate of growth that suggests profitability within a few years. The site publishes around 10 stories a week, including three major features, and all of the news is geared towards local issues not covered by other publications, including holding local officials accountable.

Digital sleuths preserved a trove of evidence from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by acting quickly to "scrape" and archive videos, images, and other data from social media. Investigative journalists from Bellingcat, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, and Czech data archive Intelligence X were among those who responded before rioters, worried about criminal charges, began deleting posts. Crowdsourcing calls for assistance also produced a robust response from people anxious to aid law enforcement or debunk post-riot disinformation.

Several groups are preserving digital content related to the capital insurrection to ensure it is archived in case it gets deleted. A subreddit thread collected thousands of Tweets, Snapchats, and other videos to upload to the cloud, while the Woke Collective ensured the survival of livestreams by publishing them on its own YouTube and Twitch accounts. Efforts to crowdsource the identification of members of the mob include the Instagram account, @homegrownterrorists, and the journalism site, Bellingcat, which invited contributions to a publicly editable Google spreadsheet of links.

City Limits, a nonprofit newsroom in New York City that specializes in longer-form journalism, created a judicial election voter guide that received nearly 81,000 page views, more than six times that of the site’s other top-performing posts. The company also partnered with Gotham Gazette and WNYC to create an interactive voter guide that gives users a breakdown of election races in their area. The collaboration filled an information void for readers, expanded City Limits’ reach, and allowed it to benefit from the resources of the larger organizations, such as a tech team to build a custom embeddable widget.

Talk2020 is a searchable database from the Wall Street Journal with thousands of transcripts from presidential and vice-presidential candidates’ campaign speeches, media appearances, debates, and more. Users can filter by issue, date, candidate, or keyword to find quotes and facts about a candidate’s record. It began as an internal tool to help reporters and editors working in the D.C. bureau frame and inform their own journalism, but focus groups showed that news consumers also wanted to be able to quickly locate quotes and facts for their own edification and to support fact-based debates with others.

To entice paying subscribers to its ad-free news site, and to spark informed discourse in its comments section, The Correspondent promotes an unusual degree of interaction between its journalists and readers and actively seeds discussions with experts’ comments. Unlike often-toxic discussion forums on other news sites, The Correspondents' forums foster collaborations between writers and readers on prospective articles and in analyses after publication. While it's too soon to tell if the strategy will retain and expand subscriber rolls, the forums show an unusual level of quality and civility.

Volunteers from tech companies collaborated with epidemiologists to create a Covid-19 tracking site that works to monitor the spread of the virus and help people know if they have been in contact with anyone who may have been infected. Although registration to the site is still short of the goal number, 10,000 people have already provided their information.