News for All offers solutions to journalism’s biggest challenges

We all know that journalism is facing existential questions around trust, news avoidance and the need to better engage with audiences.

So what if, all at once, we could:

• Help news organisations better understand the needs of our most marginalised communities
• Rebuild relationships between newsrooms and those people and communities who trust journalism the least
• And inspire the greater civic and democratic engagement, necessary for healthy societies

Well now, the News for All project has delivered inspiring solutions to some of those existential challenges. Most importantly, those answers have come from citizens themselves.

Working deeply with some of Wales’s most marginalised people and communities, across more than six months of participatory research, the ‘News for All’ project has put community at the centre of the process to understand exactly what our citizens want and need from journalism.

Key insights from the research include:

• Participants are very news literate – this informs their decision not to engage with journalism
• The need for new innovation approaches that focus on the input side of journalism, rather than new formats or outputs
• Our group were clear that AI is not the answer to the fundamental challenges of journalism, which centre around human connection and accountability
• Innovative approaches to community engagement can inspire wider civic and democratic participation.

Our report, “News For All: The Story so Far,” co-authored and co-edited by research participants and the project team of journalists, designers, and researchers from Media Cymru and the BBC, provides more detail on all these insights and the solutions our group proposed.

The report also sets out how the work could be replicated by any media organisation around the world – with potentially transformational effects

Download “News for All: The Story so Far” – Participatory Research Report

Additional resources

News for All | BSL Video

News for All | Full-length Video