And the campaign goes on! If you’ve produced an important story that you think the world needs to know, don’t just rely on traditional and new-media avenues of distribution. To truly bring the story home you need to tap into high schools and universities. Educational outreach expands your reach. Equally important, longer term, it helps inspire an appetite for quality reporting.
Back to School
Our Global Gateway program brings our journalists into schools to present the topics covered and to challenge youth to think about how the media landscape is shaped. If you can provide curricular tools to teachers, your reporting will have a far longer shelf life. This can start with the development of teachers’ guides that use your reporting as a departure point but it doesn’t stop there. Classroom visits and online resources that allow students to engage with the journalists and with each other can provide transformative learning experiences.
Online
From our first Global Gateway on, we’ve used online platforms to link journalists with students before the physical visits. This helped introduce the topics and generate a conversation over a period of time, which guaranteed the issue was explored in depth. Our Pulitzer Gateway (the online component of the Global Gateway program) provides a platform where students can explore rich multi-media reporting on important topics, as in our Women/Children/Crisis portal that already features five separate reporting projects. Once on the portal you have an abundance of options: Answer questions about the reporting, ask the journalists questions, even engage with youth in the countries where the reporting took place. Teachers can take advantage of the lesson plans or create their own paths through the reporting - and then post their approaches for other teachers to follow. Everyone is invited to share their own stories, too, thereby mapping the universality of these and similar themes.
Because the topics chosen are usually systemic in nature we know that these stories will continue to resonate - and that we’ll likely contribute additional reporting over time. And the gateways, in that way, continue as a fresh resource for years to come.
In person
The online portals provide great interactive spaces, but they are no substitute for the physical visits. The kind of questions, and answers, that come up differ significantly between online and in person exchanges. So whenever possible, meet your audience. Even the online exchanges that follow will be richer as a result.
And don’t forget, lastly, that we’re all students! Reaching out to your physical community to present your reporting doesn’t have to be expensive. And if you can reach the communities featured in your reporting, they’ll value the face-to-face exchange you’ll find a more committed (even when critical) audience to follow your story, and your campaign!