AJMI - Doha

Al Jazeera Media Institute’s platform, Story, published "Black Stories Matters" series on June 17-22.

The illustrated narrative platform, published over one week, illustrated stories that address black Americans’ issues. The series included several illustrated journalistic stories of African-American individuals, with texts that simulated their own experiences.

The stories highlighted issues about their search for their origins and identities, social ostracism, covert racism, and other topics that simulated issues of racial discrimination against blacks in America from a social and psychological perspective through the memories and experiences of their characters.

The series addresses these stories from a new approach unfamiliar to the media, imitating a sensitive ethnic issue through very special and intimate memories and events, says Faten Jabai, of The Story platform team. “The importance of this series,” she continues, “stems from the absence of this type of narrative in the media, both traditional and digital. The press news is led by the numbers and the names of the areas of demonstrations and major political analysis, but this series puts the persons in the heart of the narrative.”

“The project is to enhance the value of an in-depth human narrative in dealing with major events and issues,” she said, “the greatest value of the series stems from the experience of journalists who have worked on the project with their stories and their proximity, and thus the ability to understand the story they tell more deeply.”

The series is part of a "Story" platform's vision of adopting a careful journalistic narrative based on in-depth human approaches away from the current standards and speed of news coverage. The stories were posted on the platform's Instagram and Facebook accounts and in both Arabic and English.​​