Back from South Africa with partnerships in place for an exciting new journalism program

That’s Round Earth editor Beverley Abel and me meeting at the Times Media Group’s office in Cape Town. For the first time, Round Earth is working on a project that will embed our journalism students within a newspaper in-country. We plan to partner students from US colleges and universities with early-career reporters at the Times’ offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg to work together on under reported stories.

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Hello to my friends and the friends of Round Earth Media,

I’m delighted to be writing from South Africa where I will be spending the next few weeks finalizing plans for an exciting new Round Earth project here, another collaboration with SIT Study Abroad. I’m accompanied by Round Earth editor

Beverley Abel, who hails from South Africa, and Imraan Buccus, the SIT Study Abroad Academic Director for “Social and Political Transformation.” Among other things, we’re meeting with editors at The Times Media Group,

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Round Earth Media Awarded Unrestricted MacArthur Foundation Support

Minneapolis, May 18, 2106 – Round Earth Media announced today that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named it one of 12 journalism nonprofits to receive major unrestricted operating grants, “enabling even more entrepreneurial work that makes available factual reporting, authentic stories, and diverse voices to help inform a robust public civic dialogue,” said MacArthur President Julia Stasch.

Round Earth Media will receive five years of general operating support totaling $500,000.

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That’s the question the lawyer for the plaintiffs asked the Boston Globe’s investigative reporter in the Academy Award-winning movie, Spotlight.

The reporter’s answer? I do.

If you haven’t watched Spotlight — I encourage you — it’s available for rent online. (Click the image below for this fantastic movie’s trailer).

In 2002, the Globe’s investigative reporters were given time and resources to expose not only individual priests who abused kids but also the system that covered up the abuse.

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Kiannah Sepeda-Miller, a student on our journalism study abroad program in Morocco.

A caravan of camels carries our students across the Merzouga dunes in the Moroccan Sahara.
Here’s Kiannah, writing in her student newspaper, The Knox Student:”It’s an embarrassing privilege that we (Americans) get by thinking so little of a world that cannot afford to ignore us. My program [the SIT Study Abroad/Round Earth Media journalism program in Morocco] spent a night at a college dormitory in Ouarzazate with a large group of Moroccan women who knew the lyrics to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” far better than we did — and most of them didn’t speak English.

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Ishan Thakore, 23, is the kid in school that everyone knows will go on to do great things. He is a student of public policy who also focuses on global health and journalism. His name hints at a South Asian heritage, he likes to play tennis, read, watch movies, and run. He has a tendency to try new things and fall in love with them like the time he took a writing course sophomore year of college and then signed up for Morocco: Field Studies in Journalism and New Media,

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The little boy’s body washed up on the beach, the exhausted men and women, old and young, sleeping on the streets of European cities.  Millions of people around the world are on the move. They’re fleeing war, violence and desperate poverty.

And it’s not just Europe, Africa and the Middle East where this is happening.

On our southern border, every day, a human drama plays out, as Central Americans and Mexicans try desperately to cross into the US.

If you’ve ever wondered why people risk their lives – and their children’s lives –

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Devin and Imelda met in a hotel lobby in Phoenix, one of the few places offering a reprieve from the Arizona August. Apart from the assignment they shared, the Round Earth Media partners didn’t appear to have much in common. Imelda Robles was a print journalist; Devin Browne created stories for the radio. Browne hailed from laid back Los Angeles; Robles called Monterrey, Mexico home.

Their differences showed immediately. Browne was dressed for the triple digit temperatures, American-style—Robles was not.

“[Imelda] showed up in long jeans and high platform heels,

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Marlon Bishop is a producer at Latino USA, and has been reporting on Latin American issues for many years. He was in Arizona earlier this summer on a Round Earth Media reporting trip with Alicia Fernandez, a Juarez-based editorial producer. Marlon’s previous reporting trip with Round Earth Media resulted in the Peabody-winning piece “Gangs, Murder, and Migration in Honduras.” 

How was reporting in Arizona different from reporting in Honduras?

The exchange that happens between the reporters is different.

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Alicia Fernández sits in her car, parked somewhere between the two points that anchor her to Juárez, Mexico: her home where she lives with her parents and two sisters, and the offices of El Diaro where she works as an editorial producer. Through her windshield she observes a convenience store, a bridge spanning some distance, and other vehicles, “going one way and another.”

“It’s not a very fun scene, but that’s kind of life,” she says.

Fernández was born and raised in Juárez,

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