Meedan and Pop-Up Newsroom are extremely honored that at the ONA gala dinner over the weekend, our pioneering collaborative reporting initiative Verificado 2018 was awarded the prestigious Online Journalism Award for Excellence in Collaboration and Partnerships. In its inaugural year.

With other finalists including the Paradise Papers (NYT, Guardian, ICIJ, Süddeutsche Zeitung) and Crossing the Divide (GroundTruth, WGBH), that Verificado was named winner is a huge testament to the impact of our efforts in serving our audience ahead of crucial elections in Mexico.

The goal of Verificado was simple: to provide clear and credible information about the elections to the Mexican public, and limit the impact of mis- and disinformation on public discourse. The response to our initiative, both from our audience and our industry colleagues, has validated the need for collaborative approaches to this urgent global challenge.

Our involvement in Verificado started at the very beginning of the project, first conceived at our CheckCon conference in Beirut in April 2017, and spanned project design and framing at a Pop-Up Newsroom event in March, collaboration and partnerships, technology provision through our open source verification platform Check, and tools and skills training for over 100 journalists in Mexico.

We’re extremely grateful to all our incredible partners —in particular AJ+ Español and Animal Político — for the many months of hard work that went into making this pioneering collaboration a success, and to Facebook Journalism Project, Google News Initiative and our other supporters for making the project possible.