Three years ago, Global Press reporter Linda Mujuru stood knee-deep in the Odzi River in eastern Zimbabwe, surrounded by gold miners. The miners sold the gold they found to middlemen, who in turn sold it to the government. This is common in Zimbabwe, Africa’s ninth-largest gold producer.

Regulations ban the use of mercury in and around Zimbabwe’s rivers. The miners use it anyway to separate gold from sediment. Mercury fumes cause brain damage in both miners and other users of river water.

That story was published on the Global Press Journal website. But more importantly, it was published in The Zimbabwe Independent. That’s how people in Mutare, Zimbabwe’s third-largest city, learned that the mercury used in and around the river could kill them. They demanded change. The government soon announced that it would enforce the ban on mercury. The story won the Community Champion Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News.

This outcome wasn’t unusual for Global Press stories. We often heard about the impact our team had in places where stories were reported. After we published a story about how child soldiers in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo were ostracized, the city government in Goma, the largest city in the region, established a home for former child soldiers.

Because of our reporting, the Nepali government began giving identity documents to children born to Nepali women who worked abroad — something it had refused to do until our story drew the attention of advocacy-minded politicians to the issue.

After the Mongolian government stopped virginity testing on schoolgirls, the practice continued to occur in schools across the country — until our story went live.

In every case, the change happened because the stories made it into the hands of people who could do something about it.

At Global Press, we measured success in changed minds, lives and laws. We didn’t pursue pageviews for the bragging rights; we pursued the right readers. Lasting change happens when people around the world have the information they need to make decisions for themselves.

After 20 years of reporting from some of the most challenging locations in the world, Global Press is closing its doors. We’ve always been grant-funded, and now the philanthropy sector has dramatically shifted. Like many other internationally focused nonprofits, our funding challenges are insurmountable.

Our model might not have been glitzy, but it was effective. To boost the quality and impact of international journalism, consider these four things we did that made a difference.

1. Hire local journalists

Every one of the hundreds of journalists we employed reported on their own community. They spoke local languages and navigated local culture. They knew when something was off. Their communities trusted them. No fixers needed.

More local journalists are being hired by international news agencies, but there’s a common thread: Those journalists are often people who were trained in the U.S. They walk into the job knowing the cadence of a U.S.-style news story and understand the words and phrases that are considered here to edge into bias. The cultural divide is minimized.

Consider branching out. Advertise jobs in places where you want coverage. Remember that a local reporter will know how to report and produce the news in a style that can grab the attention of local people. It might not be what you’re used to. Train yourself to know the difference between something that is ineffective versus something that is just different. Develop a house style that prioritizes impact over conformity for the sake of it.

This might involve employing people who don’t speak English. Some of our most impactful coverage from the Democratic Republic of Congo came from Merveille Kavira Luneghe, with whom I communicated via an interpreter for a decade. When it was practically impossible for most of the world to know precisely where the armed group M23 was, Merveille knew. The fighters were in Kirumba, her city, killing people indiscriminately. We followed our robust duty of care principles to prioritize her safety, including requiring that she go on emergency leave. Weeks later, she returned to work, with more depth of knowledge about what was going on than any reporter who might have managed to enter the region for a short visit.

2. Prioritize publishing in local languages

We hired reporters who didn’t speak English, and we also published their stories in their languages. Every story from Nepal was published in Nepali and made available to our partners. In Mongolia, the stories were published in Mongolian. Throughout Latin America, we provided our content in Spanish. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, stories were available in French, and in Haiti, both French and Creole.

This required a team of translators — another expense that prioritized engagement with local people and decision-makers over clicks. It also slowed the editorial process. Recently, we began using human-assisted artificial intelligence to move content from one language to another, and reporters always signed off on the final product in their own language.

Offering news in local languages expanded our opportunities for media partnerships as well as broadened our organic reach. This made a big difference in reaching the right people. Even for readers who spoke English, the local-language version was more accessible and emphasized the importance of the news on a local level.

Global Press senior reporter Shilu Manandhar was an investigative journalist at Global Press for more than a decade. (Courtesy: Global Press)

3. Create media partnerships where your news is reported

Global Press invested in a team that established partnerships with news media in the countries where our stories were reported from. These news outlets included major publications in those countries: The Independent in Uganda; My Republica in Nepal; The Zimbabwean in Zimbabwe — more than 40 partners in all. In 2025 alone, Global Press Journal stories were republished 583 times.

People want information from a local source — a news agency that understands their culture and language. That’s where a core Global Press audience was. Not on Twitter. Not on TikTok. And while we had a growing audience on our own website, the primary impact didn’t emerge from readers there, either. Instead, it existed through in-country media, via more than 500 partnerships.

There were trade-offs to this model. We gave away stories for free. When it came down to budget decisions, we invested in our partnerships team, not in social media. Tracking our readership involved working with our partners to identify their reach, and merging it meaningfully with ours.

4. Create avenues for local feedback

Stories published by international news outlets tend to be immune to local critique. Often, people don’t even know how they’re being portrayed. But when a story is widely available to the people portrayed in it, details can be challenged.

Case in point: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s on-staff neurosurgeon, landed in Kathmandu just after a major earthquake in 2015. CNN aired a story showing that doctor standing next to a girl, then 8 years old. She sat up in a hospital bed, wide awake, holding a stuffed toy. The girl needed urgent neurosurgery to save her life, Gupta claimed, as he held up an X-ray. Gupta later told CNN’s viewers that the surgery was successful.

A nurse told Global Press senior reporter Shilu Manandhar that the girl neither needed nor got surgery. Manandhar tracked down the girl and showed her and her family the CNN video. They were baffled to discover that she’d been in international news. They’d never given permission for that. Most shockingly, she’d never had surgery at all — just treatment for a broken wrist and minor head wounds.

In fact, Gupta had operated on an entirely different person — a 15-year-old girl — whose family had no idea who he was.

Local people there knew the CNN story was wrong, but what were they going to do about it? It was difficult for the U.S.-based, industry-connected English speakers on our team to get a response from CNN. What is a nurse in a Kathmandu hospital going to do, let alone the family of a girl who doesn’t even know she was in the news at all?

When Global Press published a story, we knew we’d hear about it if we got something wrong. That didn’t happen, but when it did, local people knew who to talk to to get it fixed.

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Global Press isn’t the only news organization operating in local languages with local reporters. There are success stories. Major news organizations increasingly offer translated versions of major stories in relevant languages. Fixers who work closely with reporters in dangerous locations are being more frequently recognized for their work, and some even earn bylines.

But we need to do more, and we can. The goal of journalism isn’t to decide how the world should operate; it’s to put information into the hands of the people who can best use it.