Apply for Leap: A Trust and Transparency Innovation training program from ICFJ and Trusting News
The International Center for Journalists and Trusting News are accepting applications for a new training program focused on building trust and transparency in media to better engage and serve communities and provide a beacon of reliable information.
The program is part of Leap, ICFJ’s news innovation lab. Use this link to apply by June 12, 2022.
The goal of the training program is to provide a guided, focused experience to ease the risk and cost that inhibits innovation in the newsroom while finding answers to this question:
What can we build to increase trust in journalism now — and ensure that misinformation and polarization do not find a foothold in future spaces?
Who should apply?
People can apply as part of a newsroom team or as individuals. Newsroom teams will develop and work on an idea that would be prototyped and used in their newsroom. Individuals will be matched with two other participants to develop and work on an idea that could then be shared with other newsrooms or used by individual journalists.
Leap is right for you if you are a journalist, technologist or product person who:
- Can identify a journalism challenge and work to solve it
- Likes to collaborate with others
- Wants to be a changemaker
- Is ready to commit at least three hours a week
- Is willing to share your product or outcomes with the journalistic community
- Is fluent in English
Use this link to apply by June 12, 2022.
How will it work?
The training program will be 10 weeks long and is divided into three sections:
- Explore (four weeks): Two workshops a week with experts in the field to map the landscape, identify needs and introduce new tools to address them.
- Sprint (two weekends): An intensive Design Thinking process to rapidly develop and test a project or a product prototype.
- Develop (four weeks): Teams work with mentors to develop their ideas enough to integrate them into their newsrooms or pitch them to a funder for further development. We will provide grants to build out the best ideas.
The training will take place from July 5, 2022, through September 30, 2022.
Trusting News will lead the Explore phase of the Leap training program, which will include weekly trainings. During the trainings, Trusting News will share best practices related to trust and transparency and invite journalists we’ve worked with to share what they have done in their newsroom to build trust. Explore will also include weekly workshops where Leap participants will work with Trusting News and a workshop leader to brainstorm and develop possible solutions to diminishing trust in news.
Building trust and transparency using technology and product
At Trusting News, we are focused on working with newsrooms to experiment with possible solutions to the declining trust in news. Usually, those involve actions journalists choose to take day-to-day. But we also are curious about the systems and tools we use to do the work, and we know the journalists we work with are, too.
We’ve been wondering more about how technology and news products could help journalists rebuild trust with their users. We moved from wondering to action last year with help from Emma Carew Grovum and the Online News Association and led a brainstorming session with ONA Insights attendees to try to answer that question.
As a group we identified seven areas where a lack of trust in journalism may be improved by technological or product solutions:
- Social media and technology.
- User experience.
- Revenue.
- Community engagement.
- Transparency of process.
- News vs. opinion.
- Language, culture and news literacy.
The Leap training will focus on some of these same areas. Read more about what we learned during the ONA Insights in this Medium post.
We hope you will join us for this training where we hope to develop innovative ideas for building trust and transparency in news. If you have any questions send an email to leap@icfj.org. Use this link to apply by June 12, 2022.
At Trusting News, we learn how people decide what news to trust and turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We train and empower journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust through transparency and engagement. We’re co-hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the American Press Institute. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Read more about our work at TrustingNews.org.
