NAWA Media: a chapter closes, the work continues
After nine years of work, NAWA Media is coming to a close as a chapter of Pax Memoria. This is a decision to focus and consolidate. We want to bring our efforts together under one identity and give what we built together a clearer, more lasting home.
What NAWA Media was
NAWA Media began in 2017 as a small newsroom for early-career journalists at the Lebanese University, within Meedan’s Check Global programme and in collaboration with researchers at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. The idea was simple: a young journalist learns by working on a real story, not by lectures alone, and with someone alongside them step by step.
Over the years that small newsroom grew to include hundreds of journalists from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine and Sudan. They were trained in investigative journalism, in using open-source investigation to verify news and debunk rumours, and in media monitoring methods. Many received micro-grants to complete their investigations after training, placements in partner newsrooms, and publication in regional media.
In 2023 NAWA Media was relaunched as an independent platform with a new vision, home to the NAWA Media Lab. Its mission was to widen access to evidence-based reporting and accountability journalism in North Africa and West Asia, by confronting misinformation and building knowledge on media, human rights and social, economic and climate justice, through a journalistic model that joins accuracy with hands-on experience in data and technology.
From that lab came open-source investigations documenting the impact of conflict and climate change in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Egypt; a fellowship that accompanied early-career journalists for six or nine months inside specialised units; a library of open-source verification tools suited to our region; open online courses and a blog for self-paced learning; a podcast; and an index tracking climate misinformation.
Behind all of it stood one conviction: that the new generation of journalists, with their digital fluency and appetite for experiment, can innovate and lead change in the media if given the tools and the company. That conviction, that work and those people are what moves to Pax Memoria today.
What changes
- Most open-source investigations and the learning resources (courses, chapters and lessons) move to the Pax Memoria website and stay free to use, and one investigation remains on nawa.media.
- The tools library has an updated version at Pax Memoria, and old links will point there.
- The podcast and newsroom articles remain preserved in an archive, with authors credited.
- The fellowship continues.
- nawa.media stays registered, and we will redirect old links one by one to their new places, so no link you shared breaks.
Thank you
We thank everyone who wrote, investigated, filmed, translated, taught and learned with us, and every partner, supporter and reader who trusted this work. It was never the work of an institution alone. It was the work of people, and it goes on with them.
Contact: info@paxmemoria.org