Financial Investigative Reporting and Mentorship Initiative

The Pacific Islands Financial Investigative Reporting and Mentorship Initiative (the FIRM) will support the establishment and expansion of financial investigative reporting units within six Pacific Island newsrooms starting in early 2024.

This initiative is designed to boost the capacity of local, independent media in the Indo-Pacific region to undertake in-depth and consistent reporting on financial transactions involving the use of public monies, including transnational investment schemes, private dealmaking, and other opaque finance-related matters that can have major impacts on a country’s economic and political systems.

Benefits

• Each of the selected newsrooms will receive salary support to hire a full-time, seasoned financial investigative journalist to staff the unit for up to three years.
• Newsrooms selected to participate in the FIRM initiative will receive specialized and targeted professional development and mentorship services throughout the three years that focus on enhancing strategic financial investigative reporting skills, sharing information on journalism safety, cyber security, and visual journalism, and encouraging international collaboration on story design and reporting.
• The journalists participating in the FIRM initiative will join the East-West Center’s media alumni network and become Corps members of Report for the World’s international network of newsroom partners and journalists committed to transformative, on-the-ground reporting.

Eligibility Criteria

• Media organizations eligible to apply under this special call for applications include newsrooms from the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Sāmoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

For more information, visit East-West Center.