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New York Times Launches Journalistic Initiative to Look at Global Challenges Beyond the Daily News Cycle

Dec 01, 2020
Headway, a new initiative from The New York Times supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), will give the public free access to new in-depth reporting on the environment, health, infrastructure, the economy, and social issues that looks beyond the daily churn of news.
A team of journalists from the Times, including Headway founder Michael Kimmelman, will explore big challenges at the national and global scale from the perspective of how we can make progress toward resolving them. To share the benefits of the project and its approach to journalism more widely, reporting fellows from The New York Times Fellowship will follow one year working on Headway projects with a second year embedded at a local news organization, drawing on their experience through Headway to contribute there.

A major SNF grant helps fund the three-year initiative, which aims to produce 10 to 12 major projects each year.

SNF sees excellent journalism as a pillar of democratic society and an essential ingredient in our collective response to the myriad challenges confronting us; helping foster and sustain it is an important and long-running thread of work in the Foundation’s grantmaking.

SNF has provided exclusive support for iMEdD (the incubator for Media Education and Development), a journalism nonprofit launched in 2018 that incubates new journalistic projects and organizations, facilitates international knowledge exchange, produces interactive data-driven projects, and much more. Among a number of other projects to build journalistic capacity around the world, SNF has also provided support for the Center for Strategic and International Studies Journalism Bootcamp, which offers student journalists an intensive practicum in producing a long-form multimedia reporting on a topic of timely international concern.