Welcome to reported.ly!

A global news community with you at the heart of it

On behalf of our entire team, I’d like to welcome you to reported.ly, brought to you by First Look Media. We want to bring global news directly to you through social media — and hope you’ll become a part of our online community. Come along for the ride. :-)

Let’s face it; the world is a messy, complicated place. All too often, coverage of global news is presented as black and white, or seen solely through the eyes of self-styled experts. At reported.ly, we believe that for all of us to broaden our worldviews, we need to engage more closely with each other, crossing cultural and linguistic boundaries. Until recently — relatively recently, anyway — the only way we could do that was through reading a newspaper or watching TV. We had to rely solely on others to learn about the rest of the world — and we had to take them at their word. Thanks to advances in social media, though, it’s possible for us to establish relationships across continents and borders in ways previous generations could have only dreamed of, giving so many of us a chance to better understand each other.

Most news organizations use social media. That’s hardly groundbreaking any more. They’re on Twitter and Facebook. They probably have an Instagram account and are likely spending too many meetings on how they can exploit reddit. But therein lies the problem: for too many news outlets, social media is simply a tool to redirect people to their own websites. Social media “users” are just that — users that can be tallied as pageviews and unique visitors, rather than vibrant communities of people with cultural expertise and life experiences who could contribute to our better understanding of the world, if only given the chance. There are robust, informed conversations taking place online every day, around the world — and too often, these conversations are ignored by the media in favor of their own coverage.

That’s where reported.ly comes in. We’re an international team of journalists with literally dozens of years’ worth of combined experience as online community organizers, storytellers and curators. We don’t try to send people away from their favorite online communities just to rack up pageviews. We take pride in being active, engaged members of Twitter, Facebook, reddit — no better than anyone else there. We want to tell stories from around the world, serving these online communities as our primary platforms for reporting — not secondary to some website or app. Forget native advertising — we want to produce native journalism for social media communities, in conjunction with members of those communities.

Some of the most compelling news stories around the world emerge directly from social media. We want to earn your trust to be your guide, helping you navigating the never-ending stream of rumors and footage and get a better sense of what is actually happening. And we’ll never bullshit you, stalling for time while we wait to learn everything — we commit to being upfront of what we know, what we don’t know, and why.

For the next few weeks through the end of 2014, as we ramp up our team and our online presence, we want to hear from you — on Twitter, on Facebook, on reddit. We want to know what you think works in global news coverage and what doesn’t. We want to hear how you think social media can improve online story telling — or how on some occasions it might not. We want to nerd out with our fellow news geeks on how individual social media platforms can better serve our reporting needs, and yours. And we want to begin the process of forming online communities of dedicated, civic-minded people who believe that they, too, can play a role in helping all of us understand the world better, and perhaps make it a little more civil in the process.

To get a better sense of who we are and what we have in mind, we invite you to follow @reportedly on Twitter, as well as our team, and read the rest of our Medium collection. Here you’ll find some thoughts on our core values — our commitments to you as both professional journalists and as individual human beings. You can also learn more about our team, and where you can find us across social media. We’ll also post introductions of ourselves, and our individual thoughts on why we’ve come together around this project. Think of our Medium collection as our team diary, as we brainstorm what we can accomplish as a team, and as a community.

So, welcome to reported.ly. The conversation begins today — we hope you’ll join us and be a part of it.

Andy Carvin
Editor-In-Chief and Founder, reported.ly
December 8, 2014