First project in New York Times Headway initiative looks back at past predictions of the future

Headway, a new initiative from The New York Times launching today, brings together leading journalists to look at the world’s challenges through the lens of progress.

The new journalistic effort launches with a series called Hindsight, which revisits past discussion of major topics such as climate, poverty, and HIV/AIDS to see what we can learn by comparing what people thought would happen next to what actually transpired.

Explore the freely accessible Hindsight stories:

• “What Does It Mean to Save a Neighborhood?”
• “Hundreds of Companies Promised to Help Save Forests. Did They?”
• “What Can One Life Tell Us About the Battle Against H.I.V.?”
• “Europe Met a Climate Target. But Is It Burning Less Carbon?”
• “Extreme Poverty Has Been Sharply Cut. What Has Changed?”
• “Millions More People Got Access to Water. Can They Drink It?”

Headway aims to give the public free access to in-depth new reporting on the environment, health, infrastructure, the economy, and social issues that looks beyond the daily churn of news. Over the course of the three-year initiative, a team of journalists from the Times will continue to explore big challenges at the national and global scale from the perspective of how we can make progress toward resolving them. All of Headway’s stories will be freely accessible without a subscription.

Learn more about Headway—and test your skill at assessing past predictions—in an interactive piece by the initiative’s editor.

SNF proudly supports the Headway as part of an effort to help maintain independent and accessible journalism as a pillar of democratic society, especially efforts like Headway that are able to step back and take a long view to offer useful insights. The Foundation also supports a “bootcamp” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies where journalism students produce a long-form investigative reporting project on a timely international topic. Another such organization is iMEdD (the incubator for Media Education and Development), a journalism nonprofit launched in 2018 with exclusive support from SNF that produces interactive data-driven projects, in addition to incubating new journalistic projects and organizations and much more.