How’s your mood these days?
At least one in five of us is feeling pretty hopeless, and its not difficult to see why.
The glowing screens in our palms, desks, living rooms, bedrooms, play a live feed of catastrophes we feel powerless to stop. Wild fires blaze around the Hollywood sign and the US withdraws from global agreements to stop climate change. North sea ice shrinks to its lowest ever level and four in five Canadians back a new cross-country oil pipeline. 62,000 are feared killed in Gaza and POTUS socials post an AI vision of a Trump Resort built on the rubble of their lives. As floods drench West Africa, Europe is seeing its bloodiest conflict since WWII, and 12 million flee war in Sudan, world leaders slash foreign aid budgets and invest in their militaries.
Increasingly, the world looks dark, dangerous and mad and we can’t see a way to save it. Anxiety levels are rocketing. Faith in democracy is plummeting.
Having worked at the sharp end of this darkening news cycle in both US and UK media for decades, we can tell you despair is as high among journalists as their audience. But the advantage foreign news journalists like us have over our news room colleagues is that we get to travel. We’ve worked all over the world, often together, and met heroic people and organisations, both government-backed and privately funded, quietly, passionately, diligently working to find solutions to our crises.
We’ve identified two problems we want to fix:
Most people don’t get to hear from the solution-makers because they’re not the politicians, rappers or tech moguls dominating their algorithms.
The experts, innovators, investors we most need to hear from are usually the least inclined to talk to the media. They see journalists as adversarial, they don’t want to be misrepresented.
As news makers, we decided the best way we can help is to encourage the people offering hope to talk to the people feeling despair.
So in 2023 we started Mongoose Media — a media consultancy offering tailored media training to mission driven companies. The courses we run are individually designed to help the people and organisations making a difference, from large group seminars explaining how the media really works to one on one interview drills with executives. We want our clients to step out confidently onto the global media platform and tell us what we need to know.