The people of Beta 2025

Myanmar

WIN WAN-IFRA

Producer, Splice Beta

Nyi is a Project Coordinator at WIN WAN-IFRA. She has more than ten years of experience in Communications and Project Management, cultivated through diverse roles in PR agencies, corporate environments, and NGOs. Nyi is doing her master's degree in Mental Health in Thailand. Besides her studies, she is passionate about helping young people and making positive social changes.

Italy

Code for Africa

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

Jacopo Ottaviani (X, Linkedin) 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. He worked on multiple grant projects supported by the Pulitzer Center and the European Journalism Center. He is a member of the European Press Prize preparatory committee and works as a trainer with BBC Media Action.

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. Here, she doesn't just produce her content, but also creates a diverse portfolio of content for other creatives, including an upcoming educational animation short series for Filipino children. Her passion for purpose-driven media is evident in the vodcasts she produces, which cover critical topics like animal rights, mobility rights, young entrepreneurship, and various social issues.

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.

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. At Stanford, she explored sustainable models for independent media and fostering inclusivity in journalism through the lens of trauma and neurodivergence.

Philippines

AI Ethicist

How I reset my life, became an AI ethicist, and returned to traditional 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.

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 an Indian journalist and product manager. She heads AI at Scroll.in. With her colleagues, she is building Factivo, a multimodal versioning platform that makes a news story structured, modular, and adaptive so that users can 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 '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. 

Since 2016, she has built, shaped and scaled Scroll.in's digital video newsroom, creating news products for platforms with 6 million to 200 million users. Sannuta speaks Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Konkani, and Gujarati, and listens to Indian classical music on loop.

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.

Serbia

Oghia Advising

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 – an independent consultancy providing strategic communications, project management, and ecosystem-building services to clients worldwide across the digital infrastructure, cyber resilience, Internet policy, and media development landscapes. He is currently managing the Journalism Cloud Alliance (JCA) – an initiative convened by the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that is making cloud-based infrastructure and services more accessible, secure, affordable, and sustainable for newsrooms and public-interest initiatives worldwide.

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. Formerly Director of Audience & Community, 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 organizations at large to identify audience needs and integrate them into their content creation and distribution strategies, elevating trust and expanding reach to communities that wouldn't otherwise be interested in news content. 

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.