The people of Beta 2025

Tanzania

JamiiAfrica

How to stop reporting on your community and start working with them (feat. JamiiAfrica)

Maxence Melo is an economist-turned-information architect. He leads JamiiAfrica, a regional non-profit entity on a mission to create a well-informed citizenry, promote responsive governance, and encourage active citizen participation. He has played an enormous role in revolutionising digital democracy while promoting transparency and accountability. Maxence was recognised by the African Union as one of the top 3 Leading African Innovators for Change in 2018 for strengthening the viability of whistleblowing policy tools in Africa.

United Kingdom

climateXchange

Why media needs advanced tools to re-shape climate coverage -- and that's where tech comes in

Shereen Daver is Programme Director and Innovation Lead at ClimateXchange (cXc), where she leads product and services at the intersection of journalism, technology, and data. With over 20 years in global communications and a focus on sustainability strategy, she led the creation of Maai, the world’s first Climate Narrative Intelligence Platform. Her work focuses on redefining climate storytelling through evidence, empathy, and systems thinking, empowering journalists to create reporting that informs, inspires, and drives real-world change.

Indonesia

Pulitzer Center

What the vanishing Thai mackerel taught us about rethinking journalism, action, and art

Intan manages the International Education and Outreach team at the Pulitzer Center, connecting journalism with audiences in the Global South. Before joining the Center, she led communications projects in Indonesia across gender equality, public health, and cultural relations. She is passionate about making information and knowledge accessible to build empathy, solidarity, and informed action.

Thailand

Multidisciplinary artist and curator

What the vanishing Thai mackerel taught us about rethinking journalism, action, and art

Pongpan Suriyapat is a multidisciplinary artist and curator known for transforming investigative journalism and community stories into immersive installations, including the acclaimed “I Miss You Pla Too Thai” project on Thailand’s vanishing mackerel. His exhibition work spans museums, public spaces, and world expos.

Indonesia

Tatkala.co

How a literary community in Bali survives the media apocalypse

Kadek Sonia Piscayanti is a writer, producer, playwright, lecturer, and researcher. She established the Mahima Community and the Mahima Indonesia Foundation to actively promote literacy and literature in Singaraja, North Bali. Her diverse literary contributions include the poetry anthology Burning Hair, the short story collection The Woman Without a Name, and the play Jayaprana Layonsari dan 11 Kisah Ibu. Expanding her influence globally, Piscayanti has spoken and performed at international events, such as the Oz-Asia Festival and cultural programs in France and the Netherlands, and founded the Singaraja Literary Festival in 2023.

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. 

Pakistan

TCM News

Talha is a founder & CEO of The Centrum Media, Pakistan's first digital news network. He is based between Islamabad and London.

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.

Syria

Lighthouse Reports

Bashar is an investigative journalist with a specialisation in digital investigations. He has participated in different teams that have produced groundbreaking reports on various issues such as the violation of human rights of asylum seekers at EU’s borders, Europe’s secretive phosphates trade with Syria, and tracking EU arms in conflict zones. In the past he has collaborated with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Forensic Architecture, BBC and Channel 4.

Myanmar

SOZO LAB

How to use AI to create testable prototypes for your community

Linn Htet is a digital product leader with over 12 years of experience turning ideas into human-centred tech solutions. He is passionate about education and digital development in emerging countries, and has led multiple innovation projects that helped organisations transform and digitise during the pandemic. At SOZO LAB, he designs and manages tools and platforms that help communities, startups, and nonprofits prototype faster and smarter.

Myanmar

SOZO LAB

How to use AI to create testable prototypes for your community

Kyaw Tun Sein is a creative technologist and education innovator with over 10 years of experience building full-stack digital solutions for social impact. At SOZO LAB, Kyaw leverages his decade of expertise to deliver scalable, user-centred digital products designed to solve complex social challenges. From ideation to implementation, he combines technology, pedagogy, and community insights to create responsible, impactful tools that enhance learning, inclusion, and digital resilience on a global scale.

Philippines

Amber Studios

How I dropped out of traditional media to build my own creative lab

Jacque Manabat has transitioned from a celebrated, decades-long career as a senior multi-platform journalist at the Philippines' largest broadcasting network to becoming an independent producer and creative entrepreneur. Jacque is the co-founder of Amber Studios, a vibrant post-production hub and creative lab dedicated to shaping the next wave of Filipino content.

Italy

Code for Africa

How to recalibrate your grant work in the post-USAID era

Jacopo Ottaviani 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 funded 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.

United States

Lighthouse Reports

Global funders come with agendas. We avoided those, and used our funding for community-driven investigations

Eva Constantaras is Data Editor at Lighthouse Reports. She has spent most of her career as an itinerant data journalist, setting up data teams in newsrooms in Global Majority countries. She is also a Google Data Journalism Scholar, a Fulbright Fellow, and a winner of the Sigma Data Journalism and Philip Meyer Award. She is currently based in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.