Journalism Fellowships

The Fellowship is open to full-time editorial and technology employees of newspapers, magazines, wire services, nonprofit newsrooms, digital media, television and radio news organizations, as well as independent journalists around the world. Employees of technology companies working in the media space also are encouraged to apply.

The Starling Lab invites journalists and technologists who are eager to expand their technological and storytelling skills. We encourage collaboration among interdisciplinary teams, both editorial and technology. These can be from the same organization or with collaborating newsrooms. Fellows are expected to continue their employment with their parent organization during the duration of the fellowship.

The Starling Lab encourages proposals from local journalists and applicants from underrepresented groups, especially those who are covering their own communities.

All fellows will develop a project proposal, set deadlines and remotely meet with Starling staff to discuss prototypes and potential solutions to the problems of trust, provenance, mis/disinformation, and how new decentralized technologies might provide roadmaps to such solutions. In addition to their editorial project, all fellows will be required to write or support portions of a “case study” analyzing the use of the Starling framework in their project for publication on the Starling website.

All fellows will submit a project proposal and plan. The Proposal should outline the goal of the project and/or problem to be solved. The application should explain how the applicant intends to apply the Starling Framework to the project and apply cutting edge, open-source tools to innovate, report and tell innovative stories. The proposal should outline milestones over the course of six months and budgetary requirements, not to exceed $20,000.00.

Grants are for expenses directly related to supporting the project proposal and story publication. Costs include travel, data acquisition, data analysis, technology (such as server costs or software) as well as pay for contractors used to work on editorial or data components of the project. For organizational applicants, such as newsrooms, we will consider requests to cover the cost of staff salaries or the cost of contractors used to fill in for a staff journalist who is freed up to work on the project.

General administrative and overhead costs (e.g., office rent) are ineligible. Independent journalists such as freelancers, may include in their proposed budgets the cost of their time working on a story.

Applications are on a rolling basis, starting January 1st.

Have questions? Email journalism@starlinglab.org