As part of its mission to promote transparency and democracy while exploring world events from the perspective of women, World Pulse magazine recently initiated the first of a series of Voices of Our Future journalism projects. The program pairs participants with mentors who help them become skilled in using Web 2.0, traditional storytelling, investigative journalism, and new media to explore the experiences of communities and individuals whose lives are overlooked by major media outlets. By blending skilled journalism, local perspectives, and the immediacy of cell phone and internet communications, the project hopes to shape public opinion and awareness while helping new female journalists “change their own lives and uplift their communities.”
The project complements World Pulse’s ongoing PulseWire initiative, which provides an online forum for women from developing and industrialized areas to share information about political and social change and collaborate to find solutions to current problems. Voices of Our Future builds on many of the techniques of PulseWire, including a heavy reliance on the internet to connect rural and isolated communities to broader dialogues and a flexible, innovative, approach to narrative that blends multiple perspectives. World Pulse hopes that both PulseWire and the annual Voices of Our Future project will promote transparency and participatory civil society in a variety of regions.
The program holds a great deal of promise. While giving participants the skills needed to cultivate pluralist, open, societies, it also gives media consumers in other nations new perspectives on global issues–moving beyond the repetitive, provincial, focus of major media outlets in the US. By incorporating realtime media and pairing the program with PulseWire and other online arenas, World Pulse has given the project the potential to address crises and emergencies in a way reminiscent of Peter Gabriel’s WITNESS initiative while adding depth of analysis.