Free Press Frontier is a documentary project exploring the role of independent journalism in societies with emerging press freedoms.

Press freedoms ultimately depend on critical news consumers. The audiences that read, watch, and listen to the news can only appreciate and support sound reporting if they know how to recognize it. Free Press Frontier takes audiences behind the news, profiling the work of independent, professional journalists in politically fragile societies. As we shadow local reporters covering controversial stories, Free Press Frontier shows the power of their craft to further human freedom and democratic ideals.

In both nascent and established democracies, news reporting is in crisis. Independent, professional journalism has lost its place in the market with no new foothold yet secured. This transition inevitably impacts the core functions of a free press in civil society. How will leaders and voters learn about one another, who will we turn to for reliable information, and how will understand the changes happening around us?

As the economy of news and information transforms over the next generation, Free Press Frontier will produce a documentary series focusing attention on the work of these journalists around the world as they dog officials, insist on access, persuade sources, and risk their lives to explain to audiences the forces that shape their communities. In these ways, we will provide vivid examples of integrity in journalism and its contribution to the vitality of democratic societies.

 

Who we are:

Jeanne Baron is an award-winning broadcast journalist. She has produced and reported for the GlobalPost, National Public Radio, Vermont Public Radio, the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, WGBH and WNYC in New York. She led the production of the national legal affairs program, NPR’s Justice Talking with Margot Adler and she is the recipient of a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Her reporting from Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and the Central African Republic has been featured on NPR and BBC/PRI’s The World.  She is a graduate of the Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.  Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.    

Alan Chin is a documentary photographer born and raised in New York City’s Chinatown. Since 1996, he has worked in China, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Central Asia. and most recently Egypt and Tunisia. Domestically, Alan has followed the historic trail of the civil rights movement and documented the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Oil Spill, and the 2008 presidential campaign. He is a contributing photographer to Newsweek and The New York Times, editor and photographer at BagNews, member of Facing Change: Documenting America (FCDA) and is represented by the Sasha Wolf Gallery. The New York Times nominated him for the Pulitizer prize for his coverage of the Kosovo war in 1999 and 2000.