Coda examines the roots of global crises and exposes their connections and international ramifications. Coda deploys teams of reporters, video journalists, artists and designers to think through what themes and stories fuel each crisis.
What is Coda?
Coda Media is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media company that is dedicated to sustained, granularly focused, 360-degree storytelling on the roots of global crises, many of which arise from assailing the very legitimacy of empirical facts, such as disinformation campaigns and the war against science, or the applying of new technologies to surveil and control populations. With an aim to expose the connections between these topics, our journalism, original and reported by staff journalists and freelancers, is published continuously on the Coda website and with editorial partners.
The more potent global trendlines are connected to each other by rising social movements, emerging digital toolkits, new belief systems, and globe-spanning changes to societies. Take the nascent technologies that expose citizens to governmental oversight and control. Applications like facial recognition, deep fakes, predictive algorithms, and bio-monitoring digital tattoos enable governments to both pervade and evade their citizenry in ways unimaginable in the past. Even countries struggling to keep up economically have been able to adopt the latest in authoritarian technologies.
These technologies inform virtually every facet of politics, from the local to the global and are feeding the growing authoritarianism shaping whole regions—are the crises that can only be understood in context. Coda’s coverage of authoritarian tech is buoyed by our ongoing coverage of the disinformation campaigns intended to sow debilitating discord and doubt. Disinformation coverage, in turn, is connected to the rise of anti-science movements.
Coda’s journalism is delivered as text, documentaries, podcasts, long-reads and short reads, and animations. Coda reports globally, because we believe these days in order to do meaningful journalism on any big issue, it is important to show how local impacts the global and vice versa.
We work with a wide network of partners and are supported by foundation grants and private donations. Coda is a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News and the Global Investigative Journalism Network.
Why is Coda called Coda?
Coda comes from the Latin word cauda, which means “tail.” In a musical composition, a coda is a distinctive passage at the end, which helps distinguish and define the entire composition. In a story, a coda is an epilogue coming after a narrative concludes, and explains what happens next.
