Media Helping Media (MHM) provides free training resources for all involved in the media in transition states, post-conflict countries and areas where the media is still developing.
The site aims to help journalists produce accurate, fair, objective and impartial journalism in order to inform the public debate.
The articles on the site have been written by media professionals and donated free-of-charge. Many were written for training sessions delivered in the majority world.
The history of Media Helping Media
MHM was conceived in 2003 following a chat between two former BBC colleagues, David Brewer and Bob Eggington, who had worked together at the BBC’s political unit in London and were part of the launch team for BBC News Online. Both have experience as reporters and managers in print, broadcast, and online journalism.
In recent years David and Bob have been working in the field of international media development, training journalists in basic journalism skills and helping media managers adapt to changing audience behaviour.
That work had taken them to countries where many were unable to pay for journalism training. Seeing the scale of the demand for training, they decided that there needed to be a site offering free journalism training modules written in simple terms and accessible to all.
Once the idea had been developed, David took on to build and launch MHM, with Bob offering help and advice along the way.
Reproducing content
All the text on MHM is released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. That means you are free to reproduce, adapt and share the material for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the original source and provide a link to the original material.
All the images used have been released by those who took them under Creative Commons so that they can be used by others as long as attribution is provided. The conditions vary, so in all cases if you want to reproduce an image found on this site you will need to contact the creator.
MHM and artificial intelligence (AI)
In 2024 we started adding edited AI-generated material to some of the content on MHM.
This process continues and seems likely to have a long-term place in MHM coverage.
For the sake of clarity and transparency, we decided, therefore, to explain the basis on which we approach and utilise AI.
Our view of AI, at this stage of its development, is that it is a powerful tool — but with limitations that require careful handling.
So we are approaching our use of AI-generated content under these operating principles:
- We will use AI only to expand upon and support our own published content – not to generate original material.
- We will check all AI-generated material carefully and edit it where necessary for accuracy, coherence and relevance.
- We will always state openly where content has been produced with the help of AI.
So far we have introduced AI in four ways, all designed to augment our existing coverage.
- We used the free ChatGPT-powered tools from the Khan Academy to produce ‘Lesson plans‘ which offer a basic outline for in-house journalism trainers to adapt in order to create training courses for their staff.
- We also use the Khan Academy tools to produce Questions and Answers (Q&A) which we include after some of our articles to enable readers to test themselves on their understanding of the issues.
- We use Google Gemini’s AI tool to create ‘Further thoughts’ which amplify the original content by collecting related material and insights from the Internet.
- We use Google Gemini’s AI tool to create our free training course modules by giving Gemini up to 30 links to articles on MHM and asking it to construct an outline for a 5-6 week university or college course.
We will keep the use of AI under constant review.
Mistakes
All we ask in return for using the training resources on MHM is to let us know if you see any errors. You can use the contact form accessed from a link at the foot of any page. We hope you find MHM helpful in your pursuit of journalistic excellence.
Authors
To find out who wrote a particular training module on MHM, scroll down to the foot of the page where you will find a biography box telling you about the person who contributed the piece.
Dates
The publication dates of training modules on MMHN are not shown. This is because many have been updated and rewritten over the years. When a training module becomes out-of-date it is archived.
Fojo Media Institute
In January 2018 the Fojo Media Institute agreed to host the site and adopt MHM as an official resource of journalism training modules.
Fojo’s mission is to strengthen free, independent and professional journalism, and, as such, is an ideal partner. Webmaster, communications specialist and journalist Anders Behrmann has been a great help on the technical side.
MHM has no political or financial backers.
Social media
MHM is active on Mastodon, BlueSky and Facebook where we share updates.