Stories without borders: Can you think like a journalist?

We teach teens to see the world through a journalistic lens. But what does that mean? 

how can that help to teach global awareness and media literacy?

Journalists look for stories that have universal significance. The theme of our mid year fundraising drive is Stories Without Borders. All kinds of issues have universal significance: The need or lack of housing, health threats, violence and crime, food, the environment, mental health. These are things that pull people together across borders: sports, music and movies, for example. Seeing how people from different nations face similar problems is global awareness. In getting students to research, report and write stories for publication they seek out credible sources of information and in so doing learn how to measure the reliability and accuracy of information and how to account and balance out bias. 

This is the essence of media literacy. Journalists think differently. They are skeptical but not cynical. They give people the benefit of the doubt and try to decipher what people mean when they say something. Journalists stay mentally prepared to be surprised at all times. They think fast and distill complicated, tedious information into the gist of what people need or might want  to know. Ultimately, journalists search for truth and inspiration to make the world a better place, said News Decoder correspondent Katharine Lake Berz. Berz was a management consultant when she took a Fellowship in Global Journalism at the University of Toronto. 

She was a consultant at McKinney & Company for 10 years and has since advised a number of nonprofit organizations. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and a Master of Philosophy in International Relations from Cambridge University. “Journalism has helped me analyse issues from multiple standpoints,” Benz said. “As a management consultant we are hired to come up with the ‘right answer’. As a journalist we learn that that there are no ‘right answers’ but rich and different perspectives.” Every person a journalist meets, every problem they encounter is the beginning of a compelling story worth telling the world through an article, a video, a photo or a podcast.