JSK Journalism Fellows named for 2017-18

Guilherme Amado — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
reporter, O Globo
Knight Foundation Latin American Fellow

Guilherme Amado is an investigative reporter for the Brazilian O Globo daily newspaper. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Amado investigated organized crime in South America, militia groups in Rio de Janeiro, and corrupt politicians in Brasília. He is passionate about cross-border journalism collaborations. He has traveled to many countries in Latin America to write stories related to organized crime and to encourage cooperation among investigative reporters. In 2014, he developed a WhatsApp-based social network, Narcosur Network, to connect Latin American reporters specialized in writing about organized crime. In 2016, he was the only Brazilian member of a multinational team of reporters who covered the Car Wash Operation, the biggest investigation of corruption in Brazil’s history. Amado has been the assistant editor of Lauro Jardim, Brazil’s most prestigious column on politics and economics, since 2014. In 2017, they published the story that revealed that the Brazilian President Michel Temer had been taped endorsing the payment of hush money to a politician jailed for corruption. Amado is also the vice-president of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism. He has received the two most distinguished awards in Brazilian journalism: the Esso Journalism Award and the Tim Lopes Investigative Journalism Award.

Roman Badanin — Moscow, Russia
editor-in-chief, TV Rain
Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Fellow

Roman Badanin is editor-in-chief of TV Rain, one of the few independent news outlets in Russia. Badanin has helped lead some of his country’s most important independent newsrooms over the past two decades. He headed the editorial department of RBC, the country’s largest independent publishing company, from 2014 to 2016. He and other leaders of RBC were forced to resign in mid-2016 under pressure from the government because of their reporting. Badanin spent several years working in leadership roles at Gazeta.ru, one of Russia’s first online news outlets. He joined Grazeta in 2001 as news editor and later headed its politics department. During the controversial parliamentary elections of 2011, Badanin was deputy editor-in-chief. After the editorial board came under intense pressure for its coverage of pre-election violations, he was forced to resign. He then became digital platform editor-in-chief of Forbes Russia. Badanin began his journalism career in 1996 at Izvestia newspaper.

Jennifer Dargan — Madison, Wisconsin
Ideas Network assistant director, Wisconsin Public Radio
JSK Journalism Fellow

Jennifer Dargan’s curiosity and passion for storytelling led her to Wisconsin Public Radio, first as a superfan, then as an employee. As the Ideas Network assistant director, she is responsible for programming and scheduling, and for ensuring editorial diversity and quality. She has also led the web team and managed on-air fundraising efforts. Previously, she worked in information technology for the Wisconsin State Legislature and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As a proud Canadian, Dargan is required to love winter sports. She also is passionate about roller derby, listening to public radio, and seeing the world through the eyes of her two children.

Don Day — Boise, Idaho
publisher and editor, BoiseDev
JSK Journalism Fellow

Don Day began his journalism career producing stories for a Boise television station’s nascent digital news operation. Over the next decade, Day moved through a succession of roles in the KTVB newsroom, including reporter, producer, editor, team leader and director. After more than a decade working on the content side of news, Day moved over to manage the sales and marketing teams of KTVB’s digital operations in 2010. It was a leap for a journalist with no sales experience, but Day immersed himself in understanding the business side of local journalism. He left KTVB in 2016 and later launched BoiseDev, an independent local news site. He funded his startup efforts by also operating a digital marketing consulting firm. Day is a proud fourth-generation Idahoan. He is engaged in the community, through volunteer work and service on the boards of several nonprofits.

Xin Feng — Beijing, China
reporter
Enlight Foundation Fellow

Feng was most recently a reporter with China Central Television’s English News Channel, where she specialized in in-depth reporting on public affairs and business. Her coverage ranged from high-profile political events and economic activities to the daily life of ordinary citizens in China. In 2016, she initiated a cross-country reporting series, “Rural Recovery,” probing the impact of the country’s rapid economic gains on rural China. During her time with CCTV NEWS, she also led a production team to launch a weekly business feature program, “New Money,” which explored innovative Chinese businesses and entrepreneurs. The show was among the earliest in the country to employ augmented reality presentations in studio discussions. Prior to working in TV, Feng was a multimedia reporter for the English-language newspaper China Daily. She created the country’s first bilingual current affairs webcast, “Digest China,” which examined some of the country’s most basic, yet underexplored, social issues. Feng also singlehandedly reported from China’s remote Xinjiang and Tibet regions as well as in Belgium, Kenya and Myanmar, producing multimedia stories for different platforms. She has won three national journalism awards and numerous organizational awards. She earned a Master of Arts in journalism from the University of Iowa and a Bachelor of Science in communications and media from the University of Leicester.

Michael Grant — San Francisco, California
creative director, San Francisco Business Times
JSK Journalism Fellow

Michael Grant started out designing print pages for newspapers, then pivoted to become a newsroom developer and interactive designer. Before becoming creative director of the San Francisco Business Times, he was a digital designer at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Earlier in his career, Grant was a web developer at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he led the newsroom’s digital initiatives and was a key player in its innovation incubator. Through digital storytelling Grant crafts beautiful user experiences that often incorporate data visualization and leverage new story forms. Grant has found a second calling training journalists in digital storytelling techniques and is focused on mentoring and encouraging young minority journalists to learn these skills and jump-start their careers. He is co-chair of the Online News Association HBCU Digital Media Fellows where, for the last two years, he has mentored and trained a small group of students from historically black colleges and universities in digital media. He also chairs the digital task force of the National Association of Black Journalists and is co-chair of the association’s HBCU task force. He regularly coaches and trains aspiring journalists and is a member of several professional journalism organizations.

Zeba Khan — Los Altos, California
independent writer and commentator, The Op-Ed Project
JSK Journalism Fellow

Through her work as senior facilitator at The Op-Ed Project, Zeba Khan has worked to ensure a wide range of perspectives is included in the media. Khan has trained thousands of women and other historically underrepresented voices on how to own their expertise and make a case across media platforms for the ideas and causes in which they believe. Born in Ohio to a Muslim family, she has grappled with what it means to be a minority in America her entire life. Her commentary, which has appeared in national outlets such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and TIME, focuses on how Islam intersects with race, identity and politics in the United States. Khan has appeared on radio and television, including on NPR, CNN and “ABC World News Tonight” and was the youngest person to appear on Intelligence Squared, the internationally renowned debate forum. In 2008 she founded Muslim-Americans for Obama, the only national organization to identify, organize and mobilize thousands of registered Muslim voters in support of Barack Obama for president.

Barbara Maseda — Havana, Cuba
freelance journalist
JSK Journalism Fellow

Barbara Maseda is a freelance Cuban journalist specializing in finding stories in unstructured data. She began her journalism education just as the collapse of the Soviet Union propelled Cuba out of isolation from the rest of the world and the arrival of the internet revealed a new kind of media outlet. Maseda gravitated toward this new world, covering information and communication technologies for a popular science magazine that was trying to adapt to the digital era. She also began freelancing for independent Cuban media, and as the U.S. and Cuba began re-establishing relations, her excellent English skills put her in high demand and gave her a front-row seat to this historic period. But Maseda wanted to focus on data journalism, so she sought out more training and in 2016, she received a master’s degree in online journalism from Birmingham City University in England. Since returning to Cuba, she has worked as a freelance journalist.

Julie Ann McKellogg — Washington, D.C.
senior editor, video audience development, McClatchy Video Lab
JSK Journalism Fellow

Julie Ann McKellogg is an Emmy-award winning video journalist who has covered everything from the first democratic elections in Tunisia to the world of dating for octogenarians. She is senior editor for McClatchy’s award-winning Video Lab, where she helped launch and build a national video network to serve and connect the company’s 29 newsrooms. She previously worked at The Washington Post, where she supported the launch of a social media-based online show, and developed a video brand built around the newspaper’s storied Reliable Source column. While there, she was also a member of a two-time Edward R. Murrow award-winning team and she won an Emmy for her interactive video series on a concierge of a five-star D.C. hotel. McKellogg began her career as the Charles Kuralt Fellow in International Broadcasting at Voice of America. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she serves on the alumni board for the School of Media and Journalism.

André Natta — Birmingham, Alabama
digital media producer, WBHM
JSK Journalism Fellow

André Natta is a journalist and columnist based in Birmingham. He contributes to a regular column about diversity in journalism for The Poynter Institute and reports and manages digital strategy for Birmingham’s NPR affiliate, WBHM-FM. He also serves as the digital media specialist for the Southern Education Desk, a multistate, Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded local journalism collaborative. Natta serves as an organizer for #wjchat, a 6-year-old weekly online chat about digital journalism and started an online publication about Birmingham and its progress, The Terminal, in 2007. The Bronx, New York, native attended the Savannah College of Art and Design, studying architectural history and architecture and has previously worked in both hospitality and economic development.

Soo Oh — Washington, D.C.
news app developer, Vox
JSK Journalism Fellow

Soo Oh is a journalist and web developer focused on making sense of the news through data, visuals and interactives. She trained as an arts reporter in college and graduated just in time for the subprime mortgage crisis. She rode out the first couple years of the Great Recession teaching English in Seoul, then joined the Los Angeles Times as a web producer. She signed up for coding classes a year later and eventually persuaded the right people in the newsroom to walk her through development of her first JavaScript and Django apps. She has developed features, analyzed data and built newsrooms tools for Vox, the Los Angeles Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Titus Plattner — Lausanne, Switzerland
reporter, Tamedia
JSK Journalism Fellow

Titus Plattner is an investigative reporter and editor for the joint investigative team of Le Matin Dimanche and SonntagsZeitung, Sunday newspapers in the French and German regions of Switzerland. Both belong to Tamedia, the largest private news organization in Switzerland. He is a driving force behind the Tadam Project (Tamedia Data Mining), which allows the newspaper chain to manage huge amounts of unstructured data and encourages journalists within the company to share their information. Since 2013, Plattner has been an integral member of the Swiss team that has participated in a series of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists collaboration projects: OffshoreLeaks, ChinaLeaks, Luxleaks, Swissleaks and the Panama Papers. He teaches investigative journalism at the Centre for Journalism Training and Media in Lausanne. Plattner is also co-founder and member of the board of the association Loitransparence.ch, which promotes the use of the Swiss equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act by journalists.

Tim Regan-Porter — Macon, Georgia
director, Center for Collaborative Journalism
JSK Journalism Fellow

Tim Regan-Porter is the founding executive director of the Center for Collaborative Journalism, a partnership between Georgia Public Broadcasting, The (Macon) Telegraph and Mercer University. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Peyton Anderson Foundation, the center leads collaborative efforts to engage the community around civic issues, train professional journalists in digital tools and educate future journalists using a hands-on “teaching hospital” approach. The New York Times called this initiative “one of the nation’s boldest journalism experiments.” Regan-Porter is a 2016 Scripps Howard Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellow. Previously, Regan-Porter was president and co-founder of Paste Magazine, the award-winning entertainment title that became the third-largest music magazine in the U.S. Recognized as a “C-Level Visionary” in the Folio 40, at Paste he directed a website that trailed only Rolling Stone among print competitors, conceived and developed the viral phenomenon Obamicon.me, oversaw a successful print-to-digital transition, and led social media efforts. Prior to Paste, Regan-Porter spent 10 years in web development at several firms, including IBM’s e-Business National Practice where he managed the engineering teams on some of IBM’s largest projects.  

Lisa Rossi — Des Moines, Iowa
storytelling coach, Des Moines Register
JSK Journalism Fellow

As storytelling coach at The Des Moines Register, Lisa Rossi pushes for innovative storytelling methods across the newsroom and provides oversight on their completion. She also takes a leading role in newsroom training efforts, many of them focused on how to tell meaningful stories and build communities on social media, with a focus on developing a digital-first mentality. Rossi’s responsibilities also include leading the development of editorial products for millennial readers and leading and launching a series of live storytelling events in Iowa. Additionally, she contributes to corporate-wide research projects designed to encourage innovation and serves as a board member on the nonprofit news organization Iowa Watch. Before joining The Register, Rossi was on the journalism faculty at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where she was news editor of American Journalism Review. Previously, she held leadership roles at AOL’s hyperlocal digital news product, Patch.com, as well as editing posts at two lifestyle magazines in North Carolina. Rossi started her career as a news reporter at The Register, where she spent five years covering a variety of beats, including higher education and the 2008 presidential campaign.

Phillip Smith — Toronto, Canada
news innovation consultant
JSK Journalism Fellow

Phillip Smith is a battle-scarred veteran from the front lines of digital publishing where, for more than a decade, he has provided unsolicited advice to innovative publishers around the globe. For the last two years, he has split his time between leading a small technology team at the award-winning online news site, The Tyee, and producing an international series of media entrepreneurship events in partnership with Google News Lab. Now, he is focused on advancing philanthropy for journalism innovation as the founding dean of the Uncharted Journalism Fund, as well as working on digital products that help solve the economic challenges of accountability reporting.

Mago Torres — Washington, D.C.
freelance journalist and consultant
JSK Journalism Fellow

Mago Torres’ work has focused on the research and application of the right to information and data journalism, and explores the connection between journalism, academia and civil society. Beginning in 2015, she worked for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as a researcher on the Panama Papers investigation. Previously, Torres coordinated the journalism program and served as a scholar in the department of communication at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. After the Panama Papers project concluded in 2016, she worked as research director for the Global Investigative Journalism Network where she created the GIJN Help Desk, a quality collection of resources for investigative journalists around the world. She is a co-founder of Periodistas de a Pie (Journalists on Foot), a network of journalists based in Mexico City, where she contributed to investigative projects such as Masde72 and organized events such as Migrahack Mexico and the Latin American Forum of Digital Journalism. She holds a Ph.D. in humanistic studies with a specialization in ethics.

Morten Warmedal — Oslo, Norway
executive editor, Norwegian Broadcasting Corp.
JSK Journalism Fellow

Morten Warmedal has held a number of editorial, executive and management positions in broadcasting, print media and public relations. He has worked as a reporter, editor, director, anchor and executive producer in leading Norwegian media outlets, particularly in television. He joined the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. (NRK) in 2003 and is executive producer of its flagship weekly investigative program and current affairs documentaries and series. He previously was executive editor of NRK’s features department. Warmedal has headed national and international documentary festival juries (Prix Italia, EBS South Korea). Several of the documentary projects he has led have been recognized with international awards. Warmedal has taught journalism and investigative journalism at the Norwegian School of Management and Volda University College. He has written or coedited several books, including a university textbook about investigative reporting.

Seema Yasmin — Washington, D.C.
staff writer, The Dallas Morning News, and freelance multimedia journalist
JSK Journalism Fellow

Seema Yasmin is a medical doctor, journalist and professor. She earned a medical degree from the University of Cambridge and served as an officer in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Epidemic Intelligence Service before training as a journalist. She has worked as a staff writer for The Dallas Morning News and as a medical analyst for CNN, in addition to being a contributor to NBC and Al-Jazeera. Her writing has also appeared in magazines such as Foreign Policy and Scientific American. Her reporting covers the breadth of public health from syndemics of disease and gender-based violence in West Africa to the arrival of Ebola in Texas. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist with the breaking news team at The Dallas Morning News in 2017, received an Emmy for her reporting on neglected tropical diseases and has received awards from the U.S. Public Health Service, the Center for Health Journalism and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.