India

BehanBox

Saumya Kalia is an associate editor at BehanBox, where she reports on labour, care, and communities. She has previously worked with The Hindu and The Swaddle, and as a reporting fellow covered issues of health rights and civic liberties. Her work has been recognised by the James Beard Foundation and Laadli Media Awards, among others. Saumya is drawn to experimenting with new forms and futures of storytelling. 

India

Report for the World

Preethi Nallu is co-founder and executive director at Report for the World, part of the Groundtruth Project. She was a founding editor at News Deeply. Born in Iran, raised in India, Preethi's career spans 14 countries across the global north and south. She has researched, reported and campaigned about humanitarian and media development issues. Her films and reports won multiple Webby awards, Migration Media awards, and the Human Rights Press Prize.

India

Independent Consultant

Chitranshu has over a decade of experience in product and subscription roles in media. In his most recent role, he led the product and subscription business at Newslaundry — one of India’s leading reader-funded independent media organisations—where he oversaw teams that designed, built, and scaled forward-thinking products. His work was recognised with the WAN-IFRA Global Media Award for Best Innovative Digital Product. In 2024, he was among 25 media leaders globally selected for the AI Journalism Lab at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

India

Newslaundry

Jayashree Arunachalam is Executive Editor and Chief Community Officer at Newslaundry, an independent, reader-supported website in India. She’s been a journalist and editor for over 16 years, working at publications like The Hindu and Fountain Ink. In her current avatar, she works at the intersection of partnerships, community and events to drive a successful subscription model at Newslaundry.

India

Scroll Media

I talk to machines about journalism all the time. Here’s what they don’t understand, and what we can do about it.

Sannuta Raghu is a journalist and product manager. She heads AI at Scroll.in. With her colleagues, she is building Factivo, a multimodal versioning platform for users to consume the news in a form that best fits their needs. She was recently a 2025 Journalism Fellow at the Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, where she developed a metadata blueprint to codify journalism’s 'knowledge' layer. She was also a 2024-2025 ICFJ Knight Fellow, where she built the Directory of Liquid Content to map the structural layer of journalism. 

India

BOOM Live

Can journalists build products? What I learned making a word game in the age of AI

H R Venkatesh has either been building a journalism product or thinking about building one since 2016. This started after a memorable stint at New York's Newmark School of Journalism as an entrepreneurial journalism fellow, where he built NetaData—which failed. Since then, he launched WordSutra, a media literacy word game heading toward beta, and Teen Lab!, an AI and scam literacy initiative for teenagers. Venkatesh is Director of Training, Research and New Initiatives at BOOM Live. His work focuses on how news organisations can fight disinformation, bias, and polarisation across South Asia. A John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford and former ICFJ Knight Fellow, he founded Ekta News Coalition, India's first collaborative newsroom. He was a founding editor at The Quint and Senior Anchor at CNN-IBN. He was a Chevening scholar at Oxford University.

India

Ethereum Foundation

How investigative journalists can get funding after their stories result in outcomes

Devansh Mehta works on funding mechanisms at the Ethereum Foundation, a leading blockchain for smart contracts. As founder of VoiceDeck, he has focused on new ways for audiences to financially support the impact produced by investigative reporting. He has a masters in journalism and international relations from Columbia University. He has been published at numerous outlets including the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Columbia Journalism Review, International Journalists Network (IJNet) and more.