Pulitzer Center: AI Spotlight Series Program (Global South)

The program is divided into three tracks: one for reporters on any desk, one for reporters focused on covering AI or deepening their knowledge of AI reporting, and one for editors (on any desk) commissioning stories and thinking strategically about your team’s overall coverage.

Each course is designed to give you a strong grounding in what AI is and how it works as well as the tools to identify critical stories—from spot news to deep investigations—that will highlight the technology’s impacts, hold companies and governments accountable, and drive policy and community change, while avoiding both hype and unnecessary alarmism.

At the program’s end, you can pitch the Pulitzer Center for a grant or fellowship to support an AI accountability reporting project. You will also join the Center’s broader AI Accountability Network, a global consortium of journalists investigating and documenting AI’s impacts on people and communities.

Focus Areas

• Climate and Environment
  • The Pulitzer Center’s Climate and Environment initiatives support journalism and audience engagement on the most pressing issues facing the planet’s ecosystems and the communities who rely on them. Topics covered by Pulitzer Center reporting include rainforests, oceans, climate change, pollution, extractive industries, and more.
• Global Health
  • The Pulitzer Center’s Global Health initiatives support vital reporting and audience engagement on systemic, interconnected health issues around the world. They value cross-border and collaborative journalism and encourage reporters to look into powerful interests that are threatening health globally.
• Peace and Conflict
  • The Pulitzer Center’s Peace and Conflict initiatives support journalism and audience engagement on the roots of conflict and its connections with many underreported global issues, from mass migration to authoritarianism, to gender violence, and the struggle over natural resources. Pulitzer Center journalists sustain attention on global conflicts and investigate pathways to peace.
• Human Rights
  • The Pulitzer Center’s Human Rights initiatives support vital reporting and audience engagement on topics including gender equality, racial justice, Indigenous rights, religion, and more.
• Information and Artificial Intelligence
  • The Pulitzer Center’s Information and Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives support journalism and audience engagement on in-depth AI accountability stories that examine governments’ and corporations’ uses of predictive and surveillance technologies to guide decisions in policing, medicine, social welfare, the criminal justice system, hiring, and more.

Tracks

• Introduction to Al Reporting
  • Format: 90-minute webinar
  • This track is designed for reporters interested in getting started but with minimal or no knowledge of Al. They will dissect what makes a good Al accountability story, from quick turnaround stories to more ambitious investigations, and dig deeper into a few examples.
• Al Reporting Intensive
  • Format: 3 x 2-hour virtual interactive sessions
  • Capacity: 25-30 journalists per session
  • This track is designed for reporters who grasp Al, spend a significant amount of their time covering technology, and want to go deeper. It will help you clarify your understanding of technical concepts and think more expansively about how to cover the different facets of this fast-moving story.
• An Editor’s Guide to AI
  • Format: 90-minute virtual interactive training
  • Capacity: 25-30 journalists per session
  • This track is designed for managing editors, executive editors, desk editors, and social media editors-anyone in charge of directing coverage, commissioning stories, or packaging and producing them for public consumption. They will identify different types of Al stories and dissect what distinguishes the best coverage, including its framing, headline, and artwork.

Outcomes

• Introduction to Al Reporting
  • Through this course, participants will learn:
    • background knowledge on the history of AI to understand its latest developments
    • a clearer understanding of how AI works and how to better cover the multiple parts that make up its supply chain
    • how to resist AI hype, and how to identify and cover the most important dangers, failures, and real world impacts of AI
    • how to use their existing arsenal of tools to cover AI from every angle
• Al Reporting Intensive
  • Through this course, participants will learn:
    • background knowledge on the history of AI to understand its latest developments
    • a clearer understanding of how AI works and how to better cover the multiple parts that make up its supply chain
    • how to resist AI hype, and how to identify and cover the most important dangers, failures, and real world impacts of AI
    • practical reporting methods to report on AI, including basic spreadsheets, public records requests, and strategies on approaching sources working at tech companies
    • techniques for investigating bias in automated systems and tracking misinformation
    • how to bulletproof your reporting with the help of experts and fact checkers
    • how to formulate clear pitches around AI, including for accountability stories
• An Editor’s Guide to AI
  • Through this course, participants will learn:
    • background knowledge on the history and latest developments in AI that can help them identify, plan, and execute AI coverage and projects in the newsroom
    • the different categories of AI stories and how to shape them
    • how to resist AI hype, and how to identify and cover the most important dangers, failures, and real world impacts of AI
    • how to spot and avoid AI cliches and jargon
    • tips and tricks on how to assess and question AI pitches to make for better stories
    • practical tools and guidelines that can help them and their reporters better navigate coverage of AI and its impacts.

Who can apply?

• The program will prioritize journalists from the Global South and from communities underrepresented in media.

For more information, visit Pulitzer Center.