Congratulations to Paul McNally, radio journalist at the Wits Justice Project and Wits Radio Academy, and founder of the Citizen Justice Network (CJN), who was selected as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University for 2016.
The fellowship, which will run for six week later this year, provides short term research opportunities to journalists working on innovative and original projects committed to fostering progress in the field of international journalism.
Paul will be developing an online tool which will function as a virtual newsroom. The tool speaks directly to his work with South African paralegal journalists at the Citizen Justice Network, who are often separated by large distances. The tool is intended to bridge the gap between community journalists thus enabling them to conduct better investigations.
“One of the challenges CJN faces is distance between the different offices, but also how much information and meat for stories can be lost in the process of creating a story remotely,” says Paul, “The tool will help with the process of being a reporter but allow the CJN community to connect and importantly share and search each other’s journalism experiences.”
We are so proud of Paul who is one of only eight visiting fellows this year and whose idea was chosen from an impressive pool of over 300 applicants, including those focused on programming, research, financial strategies and design.
Learn more about the great work the Citizen Justice Network does training community paralegals to be radio journalists
Read more about the Knight Visiting Nieman Fellowship here.