Welcome!
By John Schidlovsky | June 18, 2009 | IRP
John Schidlovsky on the rail line in Kibera
Welcome to the new IRP web site!
Our new site is designed to be more visual and interactive. So tell us what you think. We have hundreds of great stories by scores of IRP journalists who’ve reported from nearly 100 countries around the world.
I’m just back from Kenya, the latest destination for our Gatekeepers trip. In the next few weeks, we’ll post more stories, videos and photo slide shows from the 12 editors who took part in the trip. It was a fascinating trip to one of the more important countries in Africa, a continent we’ve focused on during IRP’s 11-year history.
And meet our new group of 10 IRP Fellows. They’ve got some exciting destinations for their five-week individual reporting trips later this year. It’s an impressive group, with journalists from The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, the Associated Press, the Des Moines Register, the American Prospect, NBC News, Salt Lake Tribune and several freelancers.
We had 186 applicants for this year’s IRP Fellowships, and, according to our information, that makes us the “most-applied for” university-based journalism fellowship program in the United States. One reason we’ve grown so fast is that journalists know that we give them opportunities to go report anywhere in the world, in any medium, at a time when so many mainstream news organizations have cut back on international reporting. Since 1998, we’ve forged partnerships with virtually every news organization in the United States to offer prize-winning reporting done in collaboration with IRP.
I’ll be blogging here periodically, along with other IRP staffers, and occasionally some guests. Again, welcome to our new site, and I look forward to hearing from you!
John