We believe journalism on crisis and conflict can be more accurate, more inclusive, and more useful. That belief is what aidóni is built on.

aidóni‘s mission is to strengthen communities through constructive, inclusive, solutions-oriented, and people-centred journalism, by improving how crisis and conflict are covered and by creating the conditions for that improvement to be lasting.

We do this not by producing journalism ourselves, but by working upstream: shaping the practices, conversations, and shared standards that determine how stories are told before they are published.

We focus specifically on crisis and conflict because these are the contexts where the consequences of journalism are highest, where narratives can dehumanise or restore dignity, where coverage can inflame or help people understand, and where communities most need to be represented accurately and fairly.

What we mean by constructive, inclusive, solutions-oriented, and people-centred journalism

Constructive journalism centres understanding, context, and response alongside crisis and disruption. It does not sanitise reality or avoid difficult truths. It asks what fuller, more accurate reporting looks like, and creates space for audiences to engage with complexity rather than retreat from it.

Inclusive journalism ensures that the voices most often marginalised in mainstream coverage are treated as essential, not supplementary. It recognises that inclusion is a question of dignity and accuracy, not optics. And it extends into the newsroom itself: when journalism is made by people with genuinely diverse perspectives and experiences, it misses fewer stories, asks better questions, and produces a more complete picture of the world.

Solutions-oriented journalism illuminates what is possible alongside what has gone wrong. It does not look away from complexity or suffering. It asks what responses exist, what agency communities hold, and how journalism can contribute to understanding without flattening the realities it covers.

People-centred journalism places lived experience at the heart of how stories are shaped. It treats the knowledge held by communities not as background colour but as essential to understanding. It refuses to reduce people to their worst moments, and insists that those most affected by a crisis are also the most qualified to speak about it.

Together, these are not a softer form of journalism. They are a more rigorous one.

How we pursue this mission

We convene journalists, communities, practitioners, and experts in structured dialogue, creating spaces where knowledge that rarely reaches newsrooms can be shared, examined, and applied.

We produce practical resources through our Collaborative Guide Programme, our core initiative and the heart of how we sustain this work. Each programme brings together a curated group of journalists, agents of change, and community representatives around a specific theme related to crisis or conflict. Through facilitated sessions and collective reflection, participants co-create a practical reporting guide grounded in lived experience and cross-sector expertise. The result is a resource journalists can use across contexts, and a process that shifts how they think about the stories they cover. Organisations working on specific thematic areas can partner with us to develop a programme in their field, contributing to how their realities are represented in the media while supporting journalism that is genuinely independent.

We host public conversations, through our podcast and other formats, that put the hardest questions about journalism on the table. Not to deliver verdicts, but to open up the questions.

We think and write about journalism publicly, because changing how it is practiced starts with changing how it is thought about.

What success looks like

aidóni measures its impact not in volume of content produced, but in the quality of thinking it enables and the depth of change it contributes to over time.

Success is journalists who report more accurately and inclusively on the communities they cover. Communities that feel fairly and fully represented. Funders and institutions that understand journalism’s role in social change. And a media landscape that takes seriously its responsibility to the people whose realities it shapes.

We are building towards this slowly, collectively, and without shortcuts.

aidóni started with a frustration that would not go away.

Méline Laffabry had wanted to be a journalist for as long as she could remember. She was curious about people, about what shapes societies, about what communities on opposite sides of the world share and what keeps them apart. Journalism seemed like the best possible way to spend a life learning and then passing on what you find.

But the journalism she encountered rarely reflected the world she was actually seeing. Mainstream coverage of crisis and conflict felt distant from the people it claimed to represent. Angles were predictable. Stereotypes went unchallenged. Communities were spoken about rather than engaged with. And the network she was building through her studies and travels, colleagues, friends, and fellow students from across Latin America, Europe, and beyond, kept showing her how little the news was actually telling her about their lives and cultures.

One moment sharpened this early on. At eighteen, she spent a semester in Boston surrounded by young Venezuelans whose families were sending them abroad in the months after Chávez’s death, as the country’s future grew uncertain. Through them she learned things she had never heard before, stories and perspectives that were simply not reaching European audiences. When she returned home six months later, she could barely find coverage of any of it in the French press.

That experience stayed with her. Over the following years she made it her practice to stay immersed in different cultures and perspectives, surrounding herself with people from across the globe rather than retreating into familiar contexts. It was during her Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Journalism, Media and Globalisation, studied across Aarhus University, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and Swansea University, that much of this crystallised. The programme brought together eighty students from forty-two countries, newcomers and decade-long veterans of journalism, and the conversations they had, in classrooms, in late nights, in arguments that ran well past any reasonable hour, were challenging and formative. It was also where she first encountered constructive journalism as a named practice. It put words to things she had been reaching towards without knowing what to call them.

Then in 2019 she was in Chile, before and after the estallido social, one of the largest uprisings in the country’s recent history, and watched as the complexity of what was happening again failed to reach audiences elsewhere.

These were not isolated failures. They were patterns. And they pointed to something structural: journalism needed to stop talking at the world and start talking with it.

The idea that would become aidóni took shape in Santiago in 2020, while Méline was writing her master’s thesis on citizen and alternative journalists covering the estallido. She began sketching what a different kind of space could look like, not a newsroom, but something that sat upstream of journalism itself: shaping how it is practiced, connecting the people who practice it with the communities it affects, and creating conditions for the kind of reporting that mainstream structures rarely make room for. A few months later, back in Paris, she began building it.

Méline is a journalist and a trainer in constructive coverage of social conflict and solutions journalism, accredited by the Solutions Journalism Network. She has spent years working with journalists, students, and emerging storytellers across different contexts and cultures. She brings to this work both the conviction of someone who has seen the gap from many angles, and the honesty to know that no single perspective, including her own, is sufficient. aidóni was built precisely on that premise.

The people who make it what it is

What Méline found, quickly, was that the frustration and the will for something different were widely shared. And so aidóni was always going to be bigger than one person.

When we began gathering people, the response confirmed what she had suspected: this was not a niche concern. The network grew to include people from nineteen countries across different regions, fields, generations, and cultural contexts. Many said they had been looking for a space like this for a long time.

The first years were deliberately exploratory. We listened to the network, researched, and tried things out. We produced a guide on reporting peace efforts grounded in direct input from peacebuilders, organised events, launched a podcast and newsletter, collaborated on a multimedia series on migration through Tunisia, and published original journalism. We spoke at international gatherings including the B Future Festival and PeaceCon. The relationships that formed during that period now extend well beyond aidóni itself.

In the second half of 2025, we stepped back and looked honestly at everything we had learned: what worked, what did not, and where aidóni could be most useful to the field. That reflection is what is shaping this next phase.

Why aidóni

aidóni is Greek for nightingale. The name comes from legends found across the globe that share a common thread: people witness or speak uncomfortable truths, and the powerful silence them by turning them into small, plain birds. But in the legends, those birds develop a song of extraordinary complexity and beauty, and through it they keep telling their stories.

It felt like the right image for the journalism we want to support. The name carries something of what we believe: that the people most often silenced are also the ones with the most important things to say.

Where we are now

aidóni is now in its second stage. The exploratory, volunteer-led first chapter gave us something invaluable: real knowledge of what the field needs and what aidóni is capable of. We are building on that now with more structure, more clarity, and a longer-term view.

The Collaborative Guide Programme is becoming our core work. The podcast continues as our main public-facing voice. And a growing network of journalists, practitioners, and thinkers who have gathered around this project over the past three years continues to shape what aidóni is and where it goes.

Méline started it. What it has become belongs to everyone who helped build it.

aidóni is built by people who believe journalism can do better, and who have chosen to do something about it.

At the centre is a core team of people who bring together expertise across journalism, editorial production, programme design, and communications. Around them sits a growing network of journalists, practitioners, researchers, and agents of change from across the world who contribute to, shape, and challenge the work. It is that combination of a committed core and a genuinely diverse wider network that gives aidóni both its stability and its range.

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I’m the founder of aidóni. I’m a journalist, graduated from the Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Journalism, Media and Globalisation, where I specialised in war and conflict reporting. I focus on human rights and social conflicts, with a particular interest in Latin America, and I am accredited by the Solutions Journalism Network in constructive and solutions journalism.

I have lived, studied, and worked in France, the United States, Spain, Poland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany and Chile. And traveled to many more. These experiences gave me the opportunity to meet extraordinary journalists and agents of change from all over the world. They are the ones who inspired aidóni.

My apartment is full of novels and essays, and my suitcase is always ready to go. You can usually find me at a terrace enjoying life and some wine with friends, walking around cities, or getting lost in a museum.

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I am a senior editor and journalist with a background in international news and financial services. I have worked for BBC World Service, BBC Breakfast News; BBC local radio, and BBC Radio Four as both a reporter and a producer.

Other large communication organisations include the Financial Times and Reuters. Regarding the latter, I was headhunted as a senior business editor, tasked with restructuring Reuters TV output from C2C to C2B.

I am also qualified in project management, marketing, and content strategies and was the manager of thought leadership content for the US not-for-profit, The Project Management Institute (PMI).

I have established four businesses and am currently focused on projects which aid community cohesion, and offer individuals and organisations the opportunity to expand their knowledge and efficacy in their chosen fields of expertise.

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I am Zahra, born and raised in Pakistan, formative years spent in the US and then migrated again to Europe for higher studies. Currently in Germany until the wind blows me elsewhere.

I’m a multimedia journalist, award-winning editor, and researcher with a decade of experience in international journalism and the non-profit sector. I hold a double master’s degree in journalism, media, and globalisation and have conducted research on press censorship in Pakistan. I report on music, culture, migration, and climate, and my work has been featured in DAWN, Aurora Magazine, Unbias the News, LOLA Mag, Cutacut, The National, The News International and more.

I’m a shutterbug with a lot of love for music festivals, sea air, mountain treks, and traveling to learn everything I possibly can from all cultures.

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I am a multimedia journalist based in New Delhi, India working on stories at the intersection of gender, migration and human rights. I am also a podcast producer and host, creating conversations that unpack complex social and political issues.

At aidóni, I spearhead the flagship podcast What’s The Word?, along with other audio and video production. I also work with nonprofits in India, reporting on stories of development from the grassroots. Over the years, I have worked across print, television, and digital newsrooms. As a 2022 Human Rights and Religious Freedom (HRRF) grantee, I produced an investigative documentary on caste bias in grassroots cricket.

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I’m Kriti! Fueled by a passion for excellence in fashion, management, and beyond, I bring a fresh perspective from my background in marketing, sales, and merchandising.

I’ve hopped on board with aidóni because I believe in questioning everything we hear. In a world where opinions are plentiful, I’m dedicated to seeking out the facts that truly guide the path forward.

In my free time, you can find me lost in a good book, delving into random subjects through research, hitting the trails on my trusty bike, getting my hands dirty with a paintbrush, or grabbing a drink with friends.

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Our network

Beyond the core team, aidóni draws on a growing international network of journalists, researchers, practitioners, and community representatives who bring expertise, perspective, and lived experience to our work. They contribute to our programmes, appear on our podcast, shape our thinking, and challenge our assumptions.

If you are interested in becoming part of that network, we would like to hear from you.

Get in touch →

“aidóni creates space for people to think together about journalism on crisis and conflict, because how we think about it shapes how it’s practiced.”