Fact-checking Modi’s India, Meduza is you, and COVID reporters are not OK

The International Journalism Festival weekly round-up. Stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter, by following our Telegram channel, or by joining us on Facebook and Twitter.

Fact-checking Modi’s India. As the pandemic rages across the country, one team of fact-checkers contends with a post-truth dystopia.

Meduza is you. Almost 80,000 people have donated to keep this news organization alive. We’re now retooling for sustainability as a ‘foreign agent’ in Russia. Here’s our plan.

COVID reporters are not okay. Extremely not okay. An underprepared industry is losing a generation of journalists to despair, trauma, and moral injury as they cover the story of a lifetime.

IJ4EU rebooted: €1.1M in grants for investigative journalism in Europe. The Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund will disburse €1.1 million in grants to cross-border projects in EU member states in 2021 and launch an ambitious new support scheme for freelancers.

How China’s steady erosion of media freedom rose from Sichuan’s ruins. Journalists and activists hoped the 2008 earthquake would open a crack in censorship. Instead, it was the start of more than a decade of tight control of traditional and online outlets.

Vietnamese journalist Tran Thi Tuyet Dieu sentenced to eight years in prison. The court convicted the journalist of violating Article 117 of the Vietnamese penal code for “creating, storing and disseminating information and materials against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”

A global look at local news. A global comparative report on how local news media around the world are renewing and rebuilding in the digital age. How to sustain the vital journalism that serves communities where they live?

New ways to fund journalism – philanthropy: Big in the US, worth £55m since 2019 in UK. Our analysis – which looks at philanthropic support to newsrooms, large and small – is based on figures provided to Press Gazette by funders and recipients, as well as figures published on donor websites.

One year at Rest of World. Last May, we set out to explore technology and its impact outside the Western bubble. Here’s what happened.

Photo credit: Gwydion M. Williams Pandemic In India under Creative Commons License (CC BY 2.0)