The PCIJ Story Project 2023 (Philippines)

• Eligibility Criteria:
  The PCIJ will accept proposals from journalists, influencers, as well as photographers, filmmakers, and artists who work in collaboration with journalists.
• Type of funding: Programmatic
• Target country: Philippines
• Application language: English

The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) is bringing back the PCIJ Project for Innovation in Storytelling or “The PCIJ Story Project,” a grant that funded innovative storytelling collaborations between journalists and artists in 2017.

The PCIJ Story Project 2023 will provide grants for stories that document or expose abuse, negligence, or wrongdoing in the following subject areas:

• poverty and inequality
• human rights
• the use of public funds
• media, free expression, press freedom, media ethics
• religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities
• courts and criminal justice

PCIJ invites journalists, communicators, and artists to team up to tell stories on these subject areas. The project seeks to support journalistic projects, including video animation, documentary photography, and stories that combine text with image and sound.

It will support stories intended for legacy news media as well as social media platforms, digital-only websites, and non-digital platforms that have traditionally not been used for journalistic production, such as film, the visual arts, theater, and music. Multiplatform storytelling is encouraged, but proposals for stories told in traditional print or broadcast formats will also be accepted.

There are no set formats for final outputs. PCIJ will accept proposals for journalist-artist collaborative projects, including short nonfiction films, photo essays, graphic novels, and even spoken word as long as they are based on facts and are backed up by documentary or testimonial evidence. There is no requirement to publish or air on traditional media.

The PCIJ Story Project encourages projects that break out of traditional forms of storytelling. Stories intended for YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or other social media platforms will be supported as long as they are accompanied by an ambitious and viable marketing, dissemination, and audience engagement strategy. In addition, they must be stories of significant public interest.

See here to learn more and apply.

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