International JSK Journalism Fellows named for 2016-17

Arif Elsaui — Nairobi, Kenya
East African correspondent, Al Jazeera Arabic
JSK Journalism Fellow

Arif Elsawi is a journalist in East Africa, focusing on Sudan and South Sudan. After the Sudanese government cracked down on independent media in 2008, he and other journalists created the Sudanese Journalists’ Network to campaign against censorship and advocate for laws protecting press freedoms. He was head of politics and economics coverage at the Al-Ahdath, an independent newspaper based in Khartoum from 2007 to 2009, when he relocated to Nairobi, Kenya, because independent Sudanese media was collapsing. Al-Ahdath was later shut down by the government. Earlier in his career, Elsawi was a reporter at Al Sahafa, for whom he covered peace talks between the government of Sudan and the Sudan people’s Liberation Movement, including the development, signing and implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. He has reported from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Uganda.  In 2014, he was a Sudanese Youth Leader Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.

Alina Fichter — Munich, Germany
distribution manager/journalist/moderator, Bayerischer Rundfunk
JSK Journalism Fellow

Alina Fichter most recently worked as a distribution manager for Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) which forms part of ARD, the main Public Service Broadcaster in Germany with a yearly budget of 7 billion Dollars. She was responsible for developing and implementing distribution strategies for video content. She previously was a media and tech reporter at DIE ZEIT, a German weekly national newspaper and a business editor at Süddeutsche Zeitung, a daily national newspaper. Fichter’s interest in journalism was piqued by her experiences as a high school exchange student in Honduras. She studied economics in Cologne and Paris and went to one of the best journalism schools in Germany. Before beginning college, Fichter spent a year volunteering in Latin America, mostly in a hospital for impoverished AIDS patients, as well as traveling through several countries. When she’s not working on story ideas or new strategies for delivering news, Fichter likes to hike, bike and dance.

Frédéric Filloux — Paris, France
editor, Monday Note 
JSK Journalism Fellow

Frederic Filloux used his time at the fellowship to find a way to surface journalistic quality from the web. The goal was twofold. One was to correlate the production costs of ambitious journalism to its economic value (currently, an expensive investigative piece carries exactly the same advertising price tag than the neighboring news wrap or listicle). Two, the system must be able to tackle the fake news problem (the United States had been the ground zero for fake news in 2016 while other democracies suffered from the same ailment the following year). To address that, Frederic isolated about 30 “signals” of quality, most of them to be collected automatically. The whole idea was to build a scalable system capable of handling large sets of information, leading to a reliable scoring system.

YooHee Hong — Tokyo, Japan
producer in chief, TV Tokyo Corporation
JSK Journalism Fellow

YooHee Hong is a reporter and a producer at TV TOKYO, part of the Nikkei Group. She has reported from more than 20 countries on a variety of international issues, economic news and business topics. From 2009-2014, Hong was a network correspondent in New York, reporting on information technology startups and tech innovations. She was part of the team that won the 2005 Galaxy Award, one of Japan’s most prestigious broadcast awards, for excellence in economic journalism. She was an individual finalist for the award in 2014 for her coverage of the pro-democracy protest movement in Hong Kong. Hong began her career as a local police reporter. She was drawn to journalism through her experiences living in Korea for six years, where she first encountered values different from her own and learned that broadening perspectives makes life richer.

Juan Pablo Meneses — Santiago, Chile
freelance journalist
Knight Foundation Latin American Fellow

Juan Pablo Meneses is founder of the School of Portable Journalism, an online platform he started in 2009 in Buenos Aires to host narrative writing workshops and help young writers with Latin American news publishers. The idea sprang from his own experiences as a young writer trying to find work as a full-time journalist. After a few years of juggling other jobs with writing, and dreaming of being a traveling reporter, Meneses in 2000 won a magazine writing contest. He used the $5,000 award to buy a laptop, a camera and a one-way ticket to Spain. He studied journalism at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and began working on his first book. After moving to Buenos Aires a few years later, he participated in workshops led by prominent Latin American journalists and writers. In time, he was asked to lead workshops and that prompted his creation of the School of Portable Journalism. More than 500 students around the world have been through the program, and Meneses has built alliances with several top Latin American news publishers.

Elizaveta Osetinskaya  — Moscow,  Russia
editor-in-chief, RBC Media Holding
Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Fellow

Elizaveta Osetinskaya was until May 2016 chief editor of RBC Media Holding, Russia’s leading privately owned media company. She led a transformation of RBC’s news operations from lackluster to high-quality journalism that resulted in increased audiences. She and two other senior editors were abruptly fired a few weeks after RBC was the only major Russian news outlet to cover the Panama Papers’ revelation that a Russian businessman with ties to President Vladimir Putin had funneled billions of dollars through offshore accounts. Before joining RBC, Osetinskaya was editor-in-chief of Forbes Russia, considered by many to be the only independent and reliable business magazine in Russia. She led a redesign of the magazine and its website. Early in her journalism career, she joined Vedomosti, which began as a joint venture between the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. She started as a correspondent, then became the energy and industry editor and ultimately editor-in-chief. Outside of work, her interests include running and cycling.