Our Impact in 2017

Curriculum

In August, SJN introduced “Learning Lab,” an online platform for curriculum resources. This new product set marked a pivotal shift in how we organize and disseminate our curriculum. Gone are static, downloadable PDFs: as an interactive, easily-adaptable suite of online courses, our training can now be modified and expanded as new insights surface. The online format allows easy movement from the toolkits themselves to sample stories in the Story Tracker®; blog posts that expand upon a topic and bring in voices from the network; quizzes that engage users more deeply on important topics; and opportunities to drill down further via new beat-specific guides. The “choose-your-own-adventure” setup encourages users to hone in on specific questions or to scan learning that increasingly reflects the knowledge and experience of our wider network of journalists.

Since August, we have had over 400 course initiations — somewhat lower than expected, but a substantial improvement from previous traffic to our curricular content. (Of those, about 9% completed a toolkit, indicating that the guides are used as tactical resources.) Including downloads of our old PDF-form toolkits in the first half of the year (152) and attendees at in-person or live webinar SJN trainings (844), exposures to our curriculum totaled 1,458.

We expect to see significant growth in traffic via our new toolkit translations, which targeting our emerging audiences outside the U.S. Learning Lab launched with the Basic Toolkit in English, French, and Spanish. In December 2017 we released a Bahasa Indonesian translation, bringing our potential global reach to over 2 billion. A Chinese translation was released in early 2018, to be followed by versions in Arabic, Russian, and other languages.

TOPLINE STATS

10,297 total journalists trained in person or online.

4 languages in which Learning Lab can be accessed (so far)

WhatWe’veLearned

Our biggest knowledge asset is now our network: Increasingly, the experience and perspective of journalists and newsrooms will inform our curriculum – and Learning Lab allows us the flexibility to continually enrich our teaching materials with timely case studies and insights from that network. What’s more, we’re relying on partnerships with local media development organizations to translate those resources, meeting growing demand for our resources outside the U.S.

Where We’reHeaded in 2018

Our online curriculum will be available in as many as 11 languages by the end of 2018, including Arabic, Russian, Korean, Polish, Czech, and Romanian. We will release new toolkits to equip editors and journalism school professors, as well as new resources on engagement, investigative reporting and solutions, and visual solutions journalism.