Carl Javier
Philippines
AI Ethicist
How I reset my life, found myself in AI ethics, and stumbled back into media
Carl Javier is a writer by training, but has a career that has spanned journalism, academe, publishing, development work, and more. He was the CEO of PumaPodcast for 4 years, the Managing Editor of Anino Comics for 5 years, and has been a teacher for almost 20 years. He is currently the Executive Director of Data and AI Ethics PH, where he advocates for Responsible AI adoption.
Darshini Kandasamy
Malaysia
Trident Media
How I took over a media business while grieving — and somehow made it work
Darshini Kandasamy is an award-winning journalist, media entrepreneur, and 2024–2025 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. She co-founded Between The Lines, Malaysia’s pioneering subscription-based newsletter known for its sharp, contextual coverage of politics and current affairs, and led it to 2023 through a period of profound transition after the loss of her co-founder and husband.
Khalil A. Cassimally
Mauritius
Consultant
Here’s how to build independence from the expertise you already have
Khalil is an advocate for more audiences-informed approaches in the media, and an audience development expert, with focuses on user needs, product work and AI. He's always happy to chat: he does consultations, and advises and mentors teams and individuals. He's also a long-distance swimmer, perhaps a natural consequence of living in the tropical island of Mauritius.
Sannuta Raghu
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.
Michael J. Oghia
United States of America
Journalism Cloud Alliance
Why you should support alternative tech infrastructure for journalism – and how
Michael is a Belgrade-based entrepreneur, tech sustainability consultant, and the founder of Oghia Advising, a consultancy providing strategic communications, project management, and ecosystem-building services to clients across the digital infrastructure, cyber resilience, Internet policy, and media development landscapes. He currently manages the Journalism Cloud Alliance, an initiative by GFMD and OCCRP that is making cloud-based infrastructure and services more accessible, secure, affordable, and sustainable for newsrooms and public-interest initiatives.
Sanne Breimer
Netherlands
Inclusive Journalism
How a leadership reset toolkit can rebuild your team's well-being
Sanne Breimer is the founder of Inclusive Journalism and a global media strategist, trainer, coach, and researcher. She helps journalists, storytellers, and leaders explore positionality, and apply media practices that challenge the status quo . She works with SembraMedia, Solutions Insights Lab (SIL), and the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), following a decade in senior roles at the Dutch national public broadcaster. She splits her time between Europe and Southeast Asia.
Nicolás Ríos
Chile
Documented
How Documented rebuilt its infrastructure and workflows to allow immigrant voices in every decision-making process
Nicolás Ríos is Documented's Chief Product and Education Officer. Nicolas has led engagement, research, product development and content creation with a community-driven focus on audience needs from underserved immigrants. Under Nicolás's lead, Documented has successfully integrated a community-driven model into its DNA and gained national and international recognition along the way. This approach allows newsrooms and organisations to identify audience needs and integrate them into their content creation and distribution strategies.
Venkatesh HR
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.
Marga Deona
Philippines
317 Group
What you can learn from Swifties and BTS Army about turning communities into diehard fans
Marga Deona is the Chief Operating Officer of 317 Group, an ecosystem of digital marketing, influencer management, and content creation ventures. She also serves as a consultant for the Media Development Investment Fund. Before 317, she spent over a decade at Rappler, where she led product management for multimedia, pioneering audience-centric formats. Her work bridges media, politics, and fandom, and she is on a mission to prove that the future of journalism belongs to those who understand how people feel, not just how they click.
Tessa Pang
Australia
Lighthouse Reports
Your reporting is nothing without impact. This is how you stand up for a community through journalism
Tessa is the Impact Editor at Lighthouse Reports, an investigative team leading global collaborations for deeply reported, public interest investigations. As the impact editor, Tessa shapes investigative strategies to ensure findings reach the right audiences and are strategically positioned to create meaningful change. Tessa predominantly focuses on issues of power imbalance within the world's food systems, but also works across the conflict, war winners, and borders newsrooms.
Devansh Mehta
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.
Madeline Earp
United Kingdom
Good Commons
How to stop reporting on your community and start working with them (feat. JamiiAfrica)
Madeline Earp helps people and societies express themselves safely and effectively in the digital age. She promotes infrastructure designed for healthy, informed communities as part of the public interest tech team at International Media Support, and shares community-building resources via Good Commons, an IMS collaboration with Splice and JamiiAfrica.
She has 18 years of digital and media rights experience in Europe and North America, including roles on the Asia and Tech desks at the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York, and managing Freedom House's Asia portfolio for Freedom on the Net. Earp has an MA in East Asian studies from Harvard and a BA in English literature from Cambridge.