A few years ago, the term ‘fake news’ dominated headlines. Journalists increasingly came under scrutiny and attack over claims they weren’t telling the truth. Or that they were hiding something to benefit their own or their company’s mandate. With Between Us, you’d be hard pressed to accuse the series of that. This digital series is an open book, as it were, to our journalists’ experience covering the news. Here we have more time to talk to them about the stories they’ve covered, to hear their personal accounts and sometimes, to show their personal text messages, pages from their notebooks, emails- anything behind the scenes that reveal what has gone into the story. More importantly, by doing that, we’re able to see the people in their story through a more personal prism and are better able to understand what they are going through. This digital-only series aims to take our audience to another level of news reporting. Through first person storytelling it is also our hope to engage our audience in a story they might otherwise not be interested in. What sets this series apart is its animations. Through these illustrations our audience is taken on an emotive journey, visuals you can’t capture with a camera.
Our strategy is simple. Watch what our journalists are doing – and talk to them about it.
One of the greatest challenges is finding the studios around the world to shoot the interview to our specifications. Sometimes this is impossible, like when Israel bombed our offices in Gaza. So we pivoted and asked our team on the ground to grab a chair for our journalist and place it on the rubble for the interview.
During the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, time, patchy internet and security made it incredibly difficult to sit down with our journalist. So we did it via Zoom at a border crossing where refugees were trying to get into Poland.
Our goal is to be part of the conversation and to help make sense of a situation as the story unfolds. Like we did with the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran. But we also remember stories that are otherwise buried or swept up in the news cycle, like the Tigray War. Due to the content covered in 2022, we were able to attract new audiences and have them take place in the top 10 from South Africa to Ethiopia and India to The Philippines.
Overall results
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