Journalism was attractive to me for the same reason it is for many others – a sense of justice and wanting to tell people’s stories in the hope that we can change things for the better. But you quickly realise the cynical reality: chasing the news; the grind; the drama. After a few years, I worked as a reporter in southern Africa, and that’s when I saw the discrepancy between real life and the depressing picture people were seeing. Yes, there were problems, but there were also people trying to do something about them, yet editors weren’t interested. ‘Good news is no news’ is the mantra for a lot of mainstream media.
Back home, I was drawn to working with publications that were telling the alternative side of the story, and it was eye-opening to realise there were loads of people like me. The moment you see this, you grow as an individual and as a collective, and have power, and that’s how we set up the Constructive Journalism Project in 2014. We work with three groups: newsrooms that need to be educated about the benefits of constructive journalism, freelancers who can pitch differently to drive change, and students – the next generation.