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Our Story

NJTI was created by a group of northern media professionals dedicated to consolidating the experiences and expertise of northern and Indigenous media practitioners, with the goal of sharing and expanding that knowledge. 

In 2020, a group of journalists gathered around a kitchen table to talk about the news industry in the North. The conversation was and continues to be, centered around two questions:

Where are the Northerners and Indigenous journalists in our newsrooms?

How do we get them into the industry?

Winter 2021

Spring 2022

Spring 2023

Our strategic planning was guided by Dëneze Nahkek’o and Amos Scott of Dene Nahjo — both of whom have their own experience as journalists and filmmakers. From these two days of collective visioning for the future, we decided to pursue hands-on skills training here in the North. We believe that delivering journalism skills training to this region that has been excluded from traditional journalism education is critical to addressing the present imbalance in northern newsrooms, and a key means to help foster journalistic integrity that’s also grounded in the cultures, languages and ways of doing that are unique to northern communities.

Journalists for Human Rights (JHR) connected with our group about an opportunity to partner with them, as they were keen to see our work continue after the conclusion of their Indigenous Reporters Program in Ontario the year prior. JHR was working with the Google News Initiative (GNI) to identify shared priorities for supporting journalism initiatives in Canada, and exploring more ways of supporting Indigenous journalists and communities quickly became a focus.

NJTI delivered its pilot training program in Inuvik in the Beaufort Delta to an all-Indigenous cohort of up and coming storytellers and journalists from across the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. 

Strategic Plan

Today, we are guided by a Steering Committee comprised of northern and Indigenous media professionals and are working towards delivering this training in every region in the North.

Through journalism and communications, we are working towards a new normal where Indigenous and northern people play leading roles in telling their own compelling stories, holding leaders to account, and growing wider awareness of the unique and important place of northerners in the world.

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