Complicating the narrative training

“What if journalists covered controversial issues differently — based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious?”.
Amanda Ripley in Complicating the Narratives (Medium)

Complicating the Narrative is used here as a practical reporting and editorial approach. Inclusive Journalism works with journalists and editors who want to move beyond binary framing without losing rigor or accountability.

Rather than treating polarization as a communication problem, this approach focuses on understanding how narratives are formed, reinforced, and sustained. It draws on insights from people who work with conflict in practice, including mediators, psychologists, and others whose daily work involves navigating disagreement without oversimplifying it.

In journalism, Complicating the Narrative offers tools to examine power dynamics and underlying assumptions, helping reporters and editors create stories that resist easy oppositions and surface deeper truths.

Amanda Ripley took those lessons and developed four steps for you to complicate the narrative:

Listen differently – give your source space and show understanding.
Go beneath the problem – ask questions that get to people’s motivations.
Embrace complexity – look at a historically and geographically different context.
Counter confirmation bias – amplify contradictions.

Options

Complicating the narrative – introduction

An introduction to Complicating the Narrative as a journalistic and editorial practice. The session draws on approaches developed in conflict mediation and applied to reporting on divisive or polarized issues. The focus is on identifying assumptions, examining motivations, and moving beyond binary framing without losing clarity or accountability.

Duration: 1 hour (online) | 1,5 hours (in-person)

Complicating the narrative – workshop

A practice-based workshop for journalists who are already familiar with Complicating the Narrative and want to work with it more deliberately. Through focused exercises and discussion, participants apply the approach to their own reporting, with room to concentrate on a specific topic or editorial question.

Duration: 1 day (online) | 1-2 days (in-person)

Complicating the narratives and decoloniality

This session explores how Complicating the Narrative can be applied to reporting on colonial history and its ongoing influence. Participants examine positionality, objectivity, and narrative authority, and analyze journalistic examples through a decolonial lens. The emphasis is on how framing choices shape whose knowledge is centered and whose is not.

Duration: 1,5 hours (online) | 2 hours (in-person)

Mentoring

Mentoring is available for journalists or newsrooms already working with Complicating the Narrative who want sustained, critical feedback. Mentoring focuses on editorial choices, narrative framing, and decision-making across the reporting process, from story idea to publication and distribution.

Duration: per 30 – 60 minutes, frequency agreed in advance.

In practice, Solutions Journalism and Complicating the Narrative are often used together. While Solutions Journalism focuses on reporting rigorously on responses to social problems, Complicating the Narrative addresses how stories are framed, whose perspectives are centered, and which assumptions remain unexamined. Combined, they support journalism that is both analytically strong and attentive to power and complexity.

What CTN is not

Sometimes, to understand something well, it’s good to watch an example of what it is not. The interview Julia Hartley-Brewer did with Dr. Barghouti does not complicate the narrative. The Israel-Hamas war is one of the most polarizing topics and interviews like this will polarize the issue even further, making people lose trust in journalism and completely turn away from people who think differently. Read the full analysis here.

20 min. workshop

For the 2023 Complicating the Narrative fellowship I designed a workshop in which participants needed to design two characters with opposing views. Which questions would they pick for each character and is there anything they would avoid asking because of not wanting to choose a side, impartiality or fear of activism? The practice invites to self-reflect on your position as a ‘neutral observer’ and your ability to have difficult conversations.