At Media Helping Media (MHM), our unwavering focus is on news. We offer free training resources for everyone involved in news gathering and dissemination within transition states, post-conflict countries, and regions where independent media is still emerging.
Our goal is to empower journalists to deliver accurate, fair, objective, and impartial news that truly informs and shapes public discourse.
All the content on MHM is crafted by seasoned news professionals and media experts, drawing from their extensive experience in news reporting, editing, and management.
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.
- Check all AI-generated material carefully and edit it where necessary for accuracy, coherence and relevance.
- 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. To do this we have used Google’s Gemini, Open AI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI powered tools from The Khan Academy. By using these tools we have been able to produce:
- More than 60 free ‘Lesson plans‘ for journalism trainers to adapt in order to create day-long training courses.
- 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.
- ‘Further thoughts’ which amplify the original content by collecting related material and insights from the Internet.
- More than 20 six-week long modules for universities or colleges to use when creating courses.
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.