When shadowing a journalist 13 years ago, award-winning independent storyteller Noor Tagouri took a picture sitting at the anchor’s desk and posted it as her Facebook profile photo. 

She told herself: “This is what my dream looks like, and I’m going to make it happen.”

Tagouri told attendees to the INMA World Congress of News Media in New York City last week that her dream was to be the first Muslim woman in a hijab as an anchor on a mainstream American network.

Inspired by her name, which in Arabic means “light,” her sister started a hashtag campaign: #LetNoorShine. It became her beat.

“My stories, the stories that I would pursue, the stories that I would investigate, were stories to shine light on the most misrepresented and misunderstood communities,” she said.

Now her dream has evolved into something more radical — and arguably more impactful.

Tagouri has become a leading voice in the growing wave of independent journalism, where storytellers are challenging traditional media institutions not with rivalry, but with authenticity, community, and collaboration.

“This idea of people trusting people, not institutions, reminds us that the relationship between the storyteller and the community is the new foundation of journalism,” she said.

Once she entered the industry, she started facing challenges in the kind of stories she wanted to tell, which eventually propelled her to found her own production and consultancy company, At Your Service Media, which focuses on telling stories through a lens of service and collaboration.

A shift in trust

The public’s trust in the media is not disappearing — it’s relocating. Tagouri said it’s shifting from established institutions to individual storytellers, particularly among younger audiences who crave transparency and human connection.

As a professor at SUNY New Paltz, she observes this every semester: “Ten out of 10 of my students get their information from individual journalists.”

It’s a shift that mirrors her own path.

After stints in traditional newsrooms, including local TV and digital platforms, Tagouri found herself constrained by institutional limitations. Stories that didn’t fit pre-approved formats or that required uncomfortable risk-taking often got shelved.

One such story — a block party in Baltimore that showed community resilience in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death — never aired on her station. So she published it on YouTube instead.

“I garnered more views than the actual broadcast itself,” she said. “And that was my first lesson in independent distribution.”

Breaking the mold

Airing the story herself planted the seeds for a new kind of journalism.

Soon after, Tagouri quit her job at the station to independently investigate Forest Haven, a long-abandoned asylum near Washington, D.C. Despite the risks and using only a borrowed broken camera, she produced a documentary that uncovered decades-old abuses and ultimately helped close a 40-year-old case.

It also led to unexpected opportunities: Shaquille O’Neal bought her US$10,000 worth of equipment, a digital news startup invited her to launch a documentary unit, and she began to see storytelling as a multi-platform tool — one that included fashion, live events, and intimate community conversations.

Journalism vs. storytelling

Tagouri distinguishes “journalism” and “storytelling.” Journalism, she says, is a method — a discipline rooted in ethics and fact-checking. Storytelling, by contrast, is a broader canvas, one that allows for vulnerability, emotion, and a closer relationship with the audience.

She rejects the outdated notion that objectivity means detachment.

“The myth of perfect objectivity has really harmed our space,” she said. For many marginalised communities, objectivity has never been neutral — it has been exclusionary.

Her independent storytelling company, At Your Service, takes a “story first, medium second” approach, choosing the format — podcast, documentary, virtual club, or fashion collaboration — based on what the story demands.

Her investigative series Rep: A Story About the Stories We Tell interrogated how Muslim and Arab identities have been misrepresented in American media. Produced in collaboration with iHeartMedia, it’s a testament to the power of combining journalistic integrity with independent vision.

Finding common ground

Despite her independent status, Tagouri doesn’t view traditional media as adversaries. Instead, she urges a collaborative mindset.

“I know a lot of media executives find independent journalism threatening, but that’s a false dichotomy,” she said. “We need each other.”

Media organisations, she argues, should not fear their talented staffers going independent. Instead, they should empower them — offer editorial autonomy, fair compensation, and shared ownership of their work. “Give them a reason to bring their community to you,” she advised.

At the same time, independent journalists should think like networks themselves: “A freelancer pitches to an outlet. An independent storyteller is the outlet.”

That shift in mindset influences everything — from funding models to creative control.

Storytelling as service

Many of the most pressing global stories — from the war in Gaza to ongoing crises in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Venezuela — are being documented not by major news networks but by independent journalists, often at great personal risk.

These are people, Tagouri noted, who “still pick up a camera when death is around the corner.”

One of them is her friend Motasem Mortaja, whose media company in Gaza, Record Media, was bombed three times. Recently, he burned the last of his documents for warmth. Still, he continues reporting.

“We’re not compromised by profit or by what our editors will sell,” Afeef Nessouli, another independent journalist currently reporting from Gaza, said in a voice note Tagouri played during her talk. “We do journalism purely for the cause of humanity.”

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