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New Delhi: The GroundTruth Project’s Report for the World programme, which partners with media organisations across the world to strengthen local news and report under-covered matters, has announced the placement with nine journalists as part of its 2021 corps – including three reporters with The Wire in India.
The programme now supports a total of 15 journalists in three countries.
“After we announced our first cohort of journalists, the message from local news organisations around the world was loud and clear: To sustainably serve our communities, we need more help, and we need more reporters,” Kevin Grant, co-founder and chief content officer of GroundTruth, said in a press release. “And it’s no surprise that almost half of the journalists will be covering health or the environment.”
The three journalists who have joined The Wire under the project – Banjot Kaur, Aathira Perincherry and Kaushal Shroff – will cover health, the environment and political economy, respectively. The corps members chosen under the programme become full-time employees of the newsroom they are associated with for up to three years.
“India has never needed an independent, free press as much as it does today. To grow our own staff by three journalists in partnership with Report for the World marks a good day for journalism in India, and a good day for our democracy,” Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, said on the inductions.
The Report for the World project was launched earlier this year, in India and Nigeria. Scroll.in has partnered with the programme since then.
GroundTruth is a not-for-profit organisation supported in its global efforts by the Google News Initiative, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Bake Family Trust, the Henry Luce Foundation, Robin D’Alessandro, Susie Trees and Maurice and Carol Feinberg Family Foundation.