What We Do
We work at the level of practice, not just output.
Producing more journalism is not the answer. Changing how it is practiced is.
The approach
Most efforts to improve journalism focus on content: more stories, more perspectives, more coverage. aidóni works differently.
We operate upstream, at the point where habits form, where knowledge circulates, and where the assumptions that shape reporting go either unquestioned or examined. We create structured spaces for journalists, communities, practitioners, and experts to come into genuine dialogue, because we believe that is where lasting change begins.
Our work takes three forms.
Strengthening journalism through structured collaboration
The Collaborative Guide Programme is our core initiative. It is a multi-stakeholder process designed to improve how crises and conflicts are reported, not by telling journalists what to do, but by creating the conditions for shared learning.
Each programme brings together journalists, agents of change, experts, and community representatives to collectively reflect on reporting practices, surface knowledge that rarely reaches newsrooms, and co-create practical resources that journalists can actually use.
The process moves through four stages: design and preparation, facilitated collaborative sessions, guide development, and dissemination. Each programme results in a practical reporting guide, grounded in lived experience and cross-sector expertise.
The impact is systemic. By influencing how journalists work, each guide has the potential to shape reporting across multiple outlets, geographies, and contexts.
Programmes can be designed around specific themes: gender and conflict, displacement, climate and crisis, and more. They can run online, in person, or in hybrid formats. And they are built to be adapted, not replicated wholesale, because context always matters.
For partners and funders
Organisations working on specific thematic areas can partner with aidóni to develop a programme in their field. Partners contribute to how their realities are represented in public narratives, while benefiting from independent, high-quality resources and direct engagement with journalists. All outputs remain editorially independent.
→ Find out about partnering with us
Our first guide is already in the world. Born out of a workshop at PeaceCon 2024, co-hosted with the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the United States Institute of Peace, the Community-Centred Peace Journalism Guide brings together twelve recommendations from local peacebuilders to journalists covering conflict. It is not a manual. It is a framework, grounded in real conversations, that invites journalists to reflect on their own biases, centre human experience, and report on peace and conflict with greater depth and care.
Putting the hard questions on the table
Podcasts are aidóni’s main public-facing activity. They are where we make our thinking audible, build relationships with journalists and practitioners, and invite wider audiences into conversations that are usually confined to newsrooms or academic papers.
Our current podcast, What’s The Word?, examines the language of conflict reporting. Each episode takes a term commonly used in journalism and asks: who chooses this word, what does it conceal, and what are the consequences of using it?
Season 2 features journalists, editors, linguists, and activists from across the world, in conversation with our host Shriya.
Beyond the podcast, aidóni organises and participates in conversations, panels, and events where journalism, peacebuilding, and social change and justice intersect. These are spaces for dialogue, not performance.
Ideas worth sitting with
Not everything aidóni produces is a programme or an episode. Some of it is slower: essays, questions, reflections on what we are learning and where our thinking is unsettled.
Our writing centres four questions that run through all of our work.
- How does journalism shape the way crisis and conflict are understood?
- What does open, honest conversation between journalists and communities actually look like?
- What does people-centred reporting mean in practice, beyond the phrase?
- And what does it take to build an organisation that does this work with integrity?
We do not publish for volume. We publish when we have something worth saying.
These three strands of work are not separate. The conversations feed the guides. The guides feed the thinking. The thinking sharpens the conversations. That is the model, and it is deliberately slow, because the change we are working towards does not happen quickly.
“We believe that thinking better about journalism is a collective process, and that creating the conditions for that thinking is already a form of impact.”