Untold Stories

News Points: Georgetown Global Gateway — A Student’s Experience

Katie Suter, Georgetown University Class of 2011

When entering our Justice and Peace Studies class this past January, many of my classmates were excited about the prospect of learning various human rights and social justice theories. However, more than simply teaching us about the academic prospects associated with nonprofit work, Professor Rachel Stohl wanted us to get a hands-on approach to the field of Justice and Peace, starting with participating in the Pulitzer Center’s Global Gateway initiative.

Participating in Global Gateway was most definitely rewarding for me, but presented its share of challenges. Using the Pulitzer Center’s reporting as research, we were to design an awareness campaign and choose a target group, short-term and long-term strategies, and what information we were going to disseminate. This was the first challenge: getting started.

News Points: How Nonprofit Journalism Pays Off

Nathalie Applewhite, Pulitzer Center

The past several decades have been marked by two trends in journalism, neither of them conducive to an informed public or the furtherance of democracy. On the one hand there is the growing consolidation of media ownership and a precipitous drop in national and global reporting. On the other there is a fragmentation of the media creating a hyper-competitive landscape that drives the news market to deliver infotainment, soft news, and more ideologically defined, or ‘opinion’ media.

Notions of ‘public trust,’ responsibility and the ‘fourth estate’ seem to increasingly fall to the realm of citizen journalists, bloggers and advocacy organizations. And yet, despite a few exceptions, many still depend on traditional news outlets as points of departure for their information. And in a world of algorithm determined headlines, popularity usually beats public interest and the information the public needs to make informed decisions too often gets lost. The bottom line: If commercial incentives are the driving force of information gathering and dissemination — be it traditional or new media — what’s in the public interest (and not just what the public is interested in) will likely be ignored and the American public will pay the price.

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News Points: 2007's Top Underreported Stories

...and what the Pulitzer Center's doing about it.

Both Time magazine and Doctors Without Borders recently weighed in on what they considered the most underreported stories of 2007. The top spot on both lists was occupied by Somalia, a country that has experienced increasing levels of violence and political turmoil since Ethiopian troops toppled the ruling Islamic regime in late 2006 − and a place where the Pulitzer Center has sponsored groundbreaking reports.

Within weeks of Ethiopia’s invasion (with support from the United States), free-lance journalists Nick Wadhams and Zoe Alsop were on the ground in Ethiopia, documenting human rights abuses and incipient rebellions in a country tagged by U.S. officials as a key ally in the war on terrorism. Their stories appeared in newspapers across the country and on NPR.

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