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In 2018, although it was recently published article series Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, is dissatisfied with how climate change is pushing the world’s cities, which are Pulitzer Prize finalists.

He wanted more. He wanted to find a way to explore the various intersecting challenges facing the world’s urban centers, such as immigration and housing affordability, and how addressing these issues could drive social and economic progress.

So he took a step back to The Times’ editor-in-chief, Joseph Kahn: I want to step back from the news cycle and examine how the challenges facing the world’s communities will shape their futures. A few years later, that idea became the mission behind Headway, a new Times initiative that uses journalism to assess the world’s progress towards large-scale goals and questions what progress means.

“Especially in the last few years there has been both relentless bad news and a difficult time breaking out of the 24-hour news cycle,” said Mr. Kimmelman, Headway’s editor-in-chief. “There’s an appetite for another conversation at another pace.”

In Headway’s first article published in December, Mr. Kimmelman examined the battle to protect Lower Manhattan from rising seas through the lens of climate resilience. The article was part of Headway’s first series, “Hindsight” followed forecasts from decades ago to see if the targets were being met. Five of the articles in the series contained a multiple-choice question asking readers to measure the world’s progress on long-term goals such as controlling the spread of HIV or reducing carbon emissions, which are expected to be achieved by 2021. The results may inspire future Headway projects.)

“I was surprised at how pessimistic people were,” said Matt Thompson, Headway’s editor-in-chief. “They responded by assuming the worst case scenario.” He said most readers answered only one out of five questions correctly.

But Mr Thompson said he was not discouraged by the low correct answer rate.

“The whole point was to get people to look beyond their vision of what they hoped the future would be like,” he said.

Two additional Feedback articles – one the different fortunes of wind and solar energy in the United States and elsewhere Urbanization of the mega city Delhi in India – Published online in January. accompanying them Letter from Mr Thompson We invite readers to share their hopes, fears and expectations for 2022 as a way to inform future Headway reporting projects. This month, the Headway team will begin publishing longer stories, including one that explores efforts to protect a valuable natural resource in Africa whose greatest value to humans depends on its retention.

Headway’s assistant editor Vera Titunik said the team of reporters, editors and visual journalists, who are part of The Times’ special projects group led by Monica Drake, aims to release about 10 to 12 major projects a year. He estimates these will include 5,000-word long-form pieces or ambitious visual journalism as well as shorter stories.

Ms Titunik said Headway doesn’t have a paywall in her stories, as the startup receives nonprofit funding from organizations like the Ford Foundation. “It is the soul that is open to all,” she said.

A key part of the Headway initiative – and still in the early stages of development – is a community forum known as People’s Square. The team plans to create a collaborative space where readers can exchange ideas about solutions to global problems, both online and through face-to-face discussions and events. Headway hopes to host events at high schools, museums and universities across the country once coronavirus restrictions are lifted. Headway’s Public Square editor, Terry Parris Jr., said:

We want to reach as many people as possible, especially young people.” “We want to take a step back and see how we can directly inject ourselves into communities that would otherwise not be able to interact with us.”

In the coming years, the Headway team hopes to explore issues such as the inefficiency of the global waste cycle, the effectiveness of rewildification, the effort to conserve and restore natural physical resources, and the innovative ways cities across the United States are trying to tackle homelessness. . One of the goals is to produce another series of Past Stories later this year that revisits past hopes and expectations and asks what we can learn from the outcome.

Eventually, Mr Thompson said, the Headway team acknowledged that pointing out problems didn’t automatically fix them. But perhaps, he says, in the three years the initiative is now set to continue, the team can create a forum to help the world think more consciously ahead.

“One of the most powerful things journalism can do is help people focus their attention over time, not just in a narrow window of what’s going on right now,” he said. “How will what is emerging now fluctuate over the next decades?”