News Decoder started as an idea: Informing youth about global events. It evolved into something much more.

Nelson Graves’ brain child was born in Brittany.

His family was vacationing in the northwest region of France, known more for its megalithic monuments and rain than any particular news organizations. But that summer of 2013, the front pages of newspapers in stands all across the world reported the leaking of classified documents by CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden from Hong Kong, and widespread violence breaking out from Egypt to Kenya. Global politics was on the minds of Graves and his wife as well as their two daughters who had questions about the world’s changing landscape.

If the Graves daughters were trying to discern international affairs, it meant that other kids probably were, too.

“It occurred to me that one service that I could help provide young people would be to help them connect the dots among international issues,” Graves said. “In other words, try to understand why something happening far away from where you’re living may have importance for you.”

Big things start small.

Things sort of fell into place. Graves had worked as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters global newswire service for 24 years and had a network of people he could draw on for help.

“Because I had been a foreign correspondent, and because many of my colleagues at Reuters had either recently left Reuters, or were thinking of doing so, I saw this pool of talent out there,” Graves said.

Eventually, this would become the News Decoder of today, where not only correspondents analyze the affairs of the world, but so do young people.

But Graves had to start somewhere, and he had a pool of journalism expertise at his fingertips. So in 2014 he shot out an email to a few former colleagues. One of those emails landed in Betty Wong’s inbox.

Would she be interested in helping Graves’ brainchild?

First correspondents. Then students

All Wong had to do was decode news.

“He didn’t know exactly what it was going to be,” said Wong, who worked at Reuters for 23 years, her last role being global managing editor.

The correspondents were to write articles that simplified global matters and gave stories a signature News Decoder angle, linking local events to lives in faraway places.

“It was, very much in the early days, a push,” Wong said.

The correspondents had not seen each other for stretches of time, so reading their voices that emerged in emails — and, eventually, in phone calls and even shared bylines — was initially what made News Decoder unique.

“All of us were very excited,” Wong said.

Growing a startup

But News Decoder was only in its early adolescent stages as a startup.

“At the start,” said Graves, letting in a few bursts of laughter, “it was just two of us. I mean, actually, at the start there was one of us. There was me.”

After nine months of plotting, and six months with an intern helping out, Graves started a website. In 2017, there were only two permanent News Decoder members — a marked change from the eight person team handling daily operations, board of trustees, and an advisory panel that News Decoder depends on today.

Eventually, they manned a pilot program with eight high schools and eight universities leading to the Schools Program seen today, slowly introducing student voices on News Decoder’s pages.

“Our business model has always been at least partly based on the idea that we would work intimately with students using schools as the intermediary,” Graves said.

Finding an audience

Among the first major challenges was deciding what kinds of students, really, were News Decoder’s audience: University or high school students?

Graves decided, that 16 to 18-years old was the sweet spot.

“They’re at that age when they are really first discovering the rest of the world,” Graves said. “Moving outside their bubbles, they might be traveling, learning a foreign language. They might be reading the press, or having an interest in international issues. So they are very ripe to learn.”

News Decoder is based in Paris, even though the news organization operates entirely in English.

“Well, the dirty little secret is that I live in France,” Graves said, smirking.

It never really came down to a matter of convenience, though.

“There’s also a certain logic to not being in the media circuit in a place like Washington, D.C. or London — the big Anglo-Saxon media centers — because you tend to see the world in a way other journalists there see the world,” Graves said. “If you want to be globally-minded, you want to take off your national suit, your national clothing and try to put on global citizenship clothing.”

Journalism as a tool, not a goal

Everything News Decoder did was with the goal of building a sense of global awareness.

“I think it’s very important to make that point, that we don’t teach journalism,” Graves said. “Or, our goal is not to churn out journalists. Our purpose is educational, and it’s to use journalism, the techniques, the way of seeing the world, as a tool, if you will, for helping young people better understand the world and become better global citizens.”

But do do this News Decoder had to first create a credible, reputable site for news. “Journalism is a vehicle,” Graves said. “Looking beyond the borders, well, that’s the goal.”

Wong is an expert in financial journalism focusing on the stock market and company news. In fact, her rookie years were spent at the Wall Street Journal, after writing for her high school newspaper and studying journalism at NYU.

Despite having written about the international connectedness of financial markets and the economic value of investing in clean water for News Decoder, her greatest memory of the organization’s past nine years has been mentoring a student through a story on a free speech case that would ultimately go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Connecting students to experts

Lucy Jaffee, who was a student at La Jolla Country Day School in California, wrote an article for News Decoder about a cheerleader suspended from her high school for posting obscene language about the cheer squad on social media, off-campus. The student was asking for her freedom of speech to be protected (The Supreme Court would side with her in an 8-1 decision).

Wong helped Jaffee land an interview with the noted First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams while this case, not yet picked up by the Supreme Court, was shrouded in obscurity.

“It was a real journalism effort of working like a reporter and an editor,” Wong said, recalling their editing process over Google Docs due to Covid-19 restrictions at the time. “It was actually well read, well-written, well-reported.”

Later, major media titans like the BBC, the New York Times and PBS all picked up on the story. But it was notable that a student who was part of News Decoder saw the case before the Supreme Court agreed to hear it.

“Someone just had to identify it as an interesting story worth writing about, which she did, and others followed once the verdict was given,” Wong said. “She was the one who broke the story,” Wong said.

Finding the new(s) angle

Graves also got his start as a high school journalist. He later started a weekly newspaper in the U.S. state of Vermont that lasted 28 years. He believes News Decoder has passed a major milestone.

“Most startups fail within the first four or five years, so it’s gotten over the crunch period,” Graves said. “It has evolved. It has pivoted. Which I think is really important, not to be too wedded to a particular strategy. To be flexible, in other words.”

Once the director of daily responsibilities and president of News Decoder’s board of trustees, Nelson has now stepped down into a board member position, passing the board presidency to Christian Henry, and the managing director role to Maria Krasinski.

“I’m absolutely delighted, because the one thing I want to do is just leave it in other peoples’ hands and just see it thrive,” Graves said of his brain-child, equating it to a parent letting their child fly, and finding their place in the world. “That legitimizes the original concept, and it proves that it’s more than just the sweat equity of the founder that makes it go forward.”

Wong, who eventually went from correspondent to advisor to board member to treasurer of the board, has numerous ideas for the next few News Decoder projects.

“It would be great if the next version was a correspondent teaming up with more than one student, a couple of students from different parts of the world, working on a topic together,” Wong said.

As for Nelson Graves, he is the portrait of a man who is equally as passionate as he is modest about what he has achieved from a startup conceived in a tiny northwest corner of France. News Decoder has, effectively, brought youth in various corners of the world together.

But Graves is quick to wave off his role in the birth of News Decoder, crack a joke and smirk.

“Old people like me, we can help,” Graves said, shrugging. “But the real core of News Decoder is this pool of young people who interact with the experts, but also with each other. And who ask questions and who grow and develop under our watch. And that’s just fantastic.”

Kaja Andrić joined the News Decoder team as an intern in January 2024. She is a second-year Journalism student at New York University. She is also studying Romance Languages with a concentration in French and Italian. Andrić has written for both NYU’s Washington Square News and Cooper Squared publications. Previously, she was a correspondent for the Florida Weekly newspaper’s Palm Beach community chapter. In 2022, she was Florida Scholastic Press Association’s Writer of the Year.