Syli

United Kingdom

Shereen has over 20 years of communications, creative, and innovation experience from her work with global advertising agencies, F100 Organisations, and as a founder. She is an ICF accredited integral coach, regenerative brand strategist, and business developer.

Beijing SourceEngine Technology

China

Xin Feng is the founder of Beijing SourceEngine Technology, a media and tech startup delivering AI-powered open-source intelligence solutions for businesses and individuals. An award-winning former journalist and 2018 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, she initially created SourceEngine to address information-gathering challenges in journalism, later expanding its mission to serve a broader range of industries.

Newspack/Automattic

Germany

Kim Bode is an audience and product strategist dedicated to advancing the mission of journalism through impactful and innovative approaches in audience and revenue growth. She currently leads the Revenue Development Program at Newspack. Her career spans a diverse range of product, audience, and editorial roles at organisations like Devex, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters, among others. Kim has worked as a consultant, coach, and adjunct professor with organisations such as the Media Development Investment Fund, Human Rights Watch, Deutsche Welle Akademie, the BBC, and New York University.

Planet Splice

India

Mili Semlani is the community manager for Planet Splice, the Splice community on Slack. As a new media professional, she has led digital transformation at newsrooms in India, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Singapore. She now spends most of her time seeding connections and nurturing impactful communities in the media development world. She is also managing and building the climateXchange community.

Cofact

Thailand

Mike Raomanachai is a lead trainer for Cofact Thailand, and a journalist with more than 13 years of experience in the media and tech industry. He currently trains journalists with the latest digital reporting tools such as artificial intelligence and online data investigation for Google News Initiative. Before joining the tech industry, Mike was a broadcast journalist at Voice TV in Thailand, covering the tech, business, and lifestyle beats.

Google

The Netherlands

Filip Shen is a News Partner Manager at Google, based in Singapore. He works closely with the news media community across the Asia-Pacific region, more recently with a focus on South East Asia. He leads multiple programs through the Google News Initiative (GNI) to support the digital advancement of the news ecosystem.

ICFJ Knight Fellow

India

Nikita Roy is a data scientist, journalist, and Harvard-recognised AI futurist. She is currently a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists, focusing on AI literacy in the news industry. She leads the AI Journalism Lab and serves on the AI advisory board at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Nikita is also the host of the globally acclaimed Newsroom Robots podcast incubated at Harvard Innovation Labs. It has ranked among the top technology podcasts in over 30 countries on Apple Podcasts.

Code for Africa

Italy

Jacopo is a computer scientist who works as Code for Africa’s Senior Strategist. As an ICFJ Knight Fellow in 2016-2019, Jacopo built teams and programs supported by the World Bank, Google News Initiative, GIZ, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His mix of technical skills, as a computer scientist and data journalist, has resulted in a series of projects published by, among others, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El País, and Internazionale. He worked on multiple projects supported by the Pulitzer Center and the European Journalism Center. He is a member of the European Press Prize preparatory committee, and a trainer with BBC Media Action.

Rest of World

India

Rina Chandran is a deputy editor at Rest of World. Prior to that, she was Asia tech correspondent at the Thomson Reuters Foundation's Context. Rina was a business journalist for more than a dozen years in India, Singapore, and New York, with Reuters News, Bloomberg and the Financial Times. She is based in Bangkok.

StoryFlow

Canada

David Caswell is the founder of StoryFlow, an innovation consultancy focused on AI in journalism. He was previously the Executive Product Manager of BBC News Labs and has held senior roles leading AI initiatives at Yahoo!, Tribune Publishing and The Los Angeles Times.

Mekong Review

Singapore

Kirsten Han is Managing Editor of Mekong Review, a quarterly Asia-focused literary magazine. She also runs We, The Citizens, a newsletter covering Singapore from a rights-based perspective. In 2024, she won the Portside Review Human Rights Essay Prize for her essay, Singapore Will Always Be At War, on Singapore’s harshly punitive drug policy.

The Reporter

Taiwan

Sherry Hsueh-Li Lee is the COO, Deputy CEO and Chief Editorial writer of The Reporter, the first non-profit media in Taiwan established by a public welfare foundation. The Reporter focuses on in-depth reportage and investigative journalism. She is the board of the Environmental Reporting Collective (ERC), a network of journalists dedicated to investigating environmental crimes. She won the Best Editor of the Year Award of Taipei International Book Exhibition for her book Fiery Tides (2020), a book on Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement. She is also on the faculty at the graduate school of journalism of National Taiwan University.

Jom

Singapore

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Jom, a digital weekly magazine about Singapore. His work is focused on amplifying the voices of people marginalised by dominant power structures. His areas of concern are inequality, corporate and political hegemonies, and social hierarchies.

ICFJ Knight Fellow

Italy

Mattia Peretti is a learning experience designer and project manager working in journalism and media. Through his ICFJ Knight Fellowship, he is building News Alchemists, a movement that helps everyone in journalism put people’s needs and curiosity, and the benefit of society, at the centre of everything they do.

University of Hong Kong

China

Yolanda Ma is an award-winning professional with extensive cross-disciplinary experience in digital media, data journalism, social innovation, and international development. She is currently teaching at the journalism school of the University of Hong Kong, with a focus on the intersection of frontier technology and media/ journalism. Before joining HKU, Yolanda worked with the United Nations in Bangkok and New York, where she worked on digital transformation and social innovation initiatives which impacted more than 100 countries. She was the first social media editor at the South China Morning Post, and later led pioneering data visualisation products at Thomson Reuters.

The Gathering

Singapore

Hidayah Salamat is the founder of The Gathering, a platform that hosts modern women's circles for radical personal growth and healing. She is also the author of GADIS GILA, a newsletter celebrating the lifestyles and triumphs of the women of the Nusantara. Hidayah has 17 years of experience in the Singapore and regional media industry, and is a seasoned advisor at a Singapore non-profit organisation for women.

Studio Zainal & Zainal

Singapore

Zakaria works with photographs and text. His practice straddles commercial and editorial assignments in the region. He is best known for the Singapore Gurkha trilogy.

Nieman Foundation

Philippines

Jaemark Tordecilla was a 2024 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he focused on studying AI, from its use to improve newsroom production processes to navigating the landmines of the nascent technology as it relates to journalism and the media industry. Prior to the fellowship, he spent nearly a decade as editor-in-chief of GMA News Online, the Philippines' top digital news organisation. His career began in tech before starting his journalism journey at the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism in 2009.

University of South Australia

Sri Lanka

Amantha Perera is a journalism academic, educator, and trainer focusing on building expertise on safe and professional digitally enhanced journalism workspaces. He is a PhD candidate at Creative, University of South Australia. He is the Project Lead at the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, Asia Pacific (a project of the Columbia School of Journalism). Amantha also teaches journalism and narrative writing at the School of Education and Arts, Central Queensland University. His journalism has appeared in TIME, the Guardian, Reuters, Washington Post, and Al Jazeera.

Reframing Disability

India

Priti Salian is an independent Indian journalist and the author of Reframing Disability, a fortnightly newsletter simplifying disability inclusion for content creators. Her work focuses on the intersections of disability, gender, global health and development, with reporting from India, Germany, and Uganda for outlets such as The Guardian, BBC, The BMJ, and The Lancet. As an accredited media trainer, Priti specialises in gender equality, diversity and inclusion, and solutions journalism. In 2022, she was a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, where she researched disability inclusion in India’s newsrooms and media coverage.