JSK Journalism Fellowships names Class of 2019-2020

Motunrayo Alaka — Lagos, Nigeria
executive director/CEO, Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism 
JSK Journalism Fellow

Motunrayo Alaka is executive director/CEO of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism in Nigeria. At the centre, she has enabled the training of more than 700 reporters, and planned, commissioned and implemented 170 reports that have been published across the Nigerian media on issues including girls and women, education, oil and gas, and electricity. She started the Report Women! Programme under which she produced a documentary “Report Women: Untold Stories of Girls and Women in Nigeria” and developed the Female Reporters Leadership Programme, which is prompting conversations around gender issues. She has served on award boards for the UNESCO International Media and Information Literacy Award Committee and the British Broadcasting Corp. Service Trust.

Krista Almanzan — Seaside, California
news director, 90.3FM (KAZU)
JSK Journalism Fellow

Krista Almanzan is the news director and a reporter at KAZU, the NPR station for California’s Monterey Bay area. As a reporter, she has covered the fight to close one of the last coastal sand mines in the U.S., the children of Salinas Valley farm workers navigating their way to careers in Silicon Valley, and monks who train as firefighters to protect their remote monastery. She is the primary editor for KAZU’s tiny but widely respected news team. In her time leading the station’s coverage, reporters have earned 22 regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, one National Murrow Award, and numerous national honors from Public Radio News Directors Inc. She is part of an NPR reporting collaboration called Back at Base, a project that covers military issues. She is also a mentor for NPR’s Next Generation Radio Project. She started her journalism career in Iowa covering presidential elections, tornadoes and holiday parades for local television stations.

Omri Assenheim — Tel Aviv, Israel
investigative journalist and author, Uvda
JSK Journalism Fellow

Omri Assenheim is a correspondent and investigative filmmaker for UVDA, a weekly investigative and documentary program on Israeli TV. During his first year working for the program, he became the youngest recipient of the Sokolov Award, the highest award for outstanding journalism in Israel. He began his career working as a print journalist at Ha’ir and later at Maariv, where he specialized in investigating the Israeli Defence Forces. In 2012, his first book, “Tze’elim: The Trauma of Sayeret Matkal,” revealed an Israeli plan to assassinate Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. A film he directed based on the book won a gold medal at the New York Festivals World’s Best TV and Films. In 2016, his groundbreaking investigative documentary about a man whose two wives had died mysteriously 15 years apart led to the reopening of a police investigation and ended with a double-murder conviction. Later in 2016, he published his second book, “Catching a Murderer,” to articulate this story. His recent investigative piece about the former head of the Shin Bet, Jaacob Peri, which revealed dishonesties about his military service, led to Peri’s immediate resignation from the Israeli Knesset, the national legislature.

Garance Burke — San Francisco, California
national investigative reporter, The Associated Press
JSK-HAI Journalism Fellow

Garance Burke is a San Francisco-based national investigative reporter for The Associated Press. Often driven by data, her work has helped to shape presidential elections, inspired congressional hearings and prompted regulatory changes. In recent years, her stories have revealed plans to set up detention centers for toddlers separated from their parents, the discharging of immigrant recruits from the U.S. Army and the behavior of President Donald Trump toward women on the set of “The Apprentice.” She began her career at the Mexican financial newspaper El Financiero, then worked in Mexico City for The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. Her work has been honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, and received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, National Press Club Award for Diplomatic Correspondence, SPJ Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting and the RTDNA National Edward R. Murrow Award. She received dual master’s degrees from the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Journalism, where she has taught as a lecturer in basic data journalism.

Pamela Chen — San Francisco, California
creative director, Instagram
JSK-HAI Journalism Fellow

Pamela Chen is creative director at Instagram, where she built and led the editorial team responsible for content development on the platform. She collaborates with storytellers as they adapt across visual mediums: printed, cinematic, social, experiential, and at scale. Previously, she was a senior editor for National Geographic magazine and oversaw documentary photography and video journalism for the Open Society Foundations. She produced and edited documentaries at MediaStorm, and worked as a national newspaper photojournalist. As a sound designer, she has been commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, Showtime, Hulu and Wired. Her work has earned industry accolades, including national News and Documentary Emmys, and duPont, Webbys, and POYi awards in photography, picture editing and multimedia. She has served on professional juries and as an adjunct faculty member, and she has taught workshops across the country. She studied photography and mathematics at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and received a Fulbright scholarship in journalism to Taiwan.

Jim Colgan — San Francisco, California
executive producer, Audible
JSK Journalism Fellow

Jim Colgan is an executive producer at Audible, where he developed original programming. He moved to New York from Dublin, Ireland, as a student in 2000. His summer abroad turned into a full-time job as a staff reporter for a Manhattan newspaper, The Irish Voice. He covered the Sept. 11 attacks for Irish broadcast and print outlets in 2001. He then worked as a news reporter and producer for WNYC radio and for six years was a producer at “The Brian Lehrer Show.” While there, he launched the station’s ambitious crowdsourcing initiatives to better connect listeners to the news. He was part of the production team that won a Peabody Award in 2008 and later used SMS technology to fact-check New York’s mayor over claims about snowplowing, which won an Online News Association Award in 2011. He left WNYC in 2012 to work with technology companies such as Mobile Commons, a messaging platform, and SoundCloud, the social audio platform. At SoundCloud, he was head of audio, where he worked with radio creators to adapt to a social environment.

Divine Dube — Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
editor-in-chief, The Citizen Bulletin
JSK Journalism Fellow

Divine Dube is the editor-in-chief of The Citizen Bulletin, a regional, hyperlocal news outlet based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city. Prior to working for The Citizen Bulletin, he reported for Newsday, Zimbabwe’s largest privately owned daily. Before reporting for Newsday, he worked for two different regional news publications, the Southern Eye and Southern Star, where he covered local news beats and developed a passion for community reporting. His journalistic work appears on Newsday, Southern Eye, Bulawayo24.com and The Citizen Bulletin, among others. He also worked as a programming director for Getjenge FM, a community radio initiative covering ethnic minority communities in southwestern Zimbabwe.

Aaron Foley — Detroit, Michigan
chief storyteller, City of Detroit
JSK Journalism Fellow

Aaron Foley is the chief storyteller for the city of Detroit, where he managed a team of content creators who document life in the city for online and televised platforms. He is the first person to be appointed chief storyteller for a local government. He is also the author of the 2015 book “How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass” and editor of the 2017 book “The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook.” Prior to working for the City of Detroit, he was editor-in-chief of BLAC Detroit Magazine, a founding staffer of MLive Detroit and a copy editor and columnist at the Lansing State Journal. He has also freelanced for several national publications, including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, BuzzFeed, CNN and more. A Detroit native and resident, he has traveled the country and the world as a speaker and panelist discussing his hometown, and he is a frequent radio and television guest and an occasional consultant for Detroit-based projects.

Anna Gielewska — Warsaw, Poland
journalist, Wprost, and vice president, Reporters Foundation
Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Fellow

Anna Gielewska is a political and investigative reporter at one of Poland’s biggest weekly publications, Wprost magazine, and a commentator on prime-time TV and radio shows. She also serves as vice president of the Reporters Foundation, the first organization supporting investigative journalism in Poland and as the coordinator of VSquare Project, a cross-border investigative network in Visegrad countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. She is the co-author of the political bestseller in Poland “Antoni Macierewicz: An Unauthorized Biography.” She is also a teacher and trainer at the University of Warsaw and Reporters Foundation, where she leads courses on fact-checking, disinformation and Russian propaganda, fake news, and investigative tools. She has worked in media for 16 years and has covered politics in leading Polish newspapers, including Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and has  worked as a TV journalist at Polish Public Television. She is based in Warsaw.

Marcelle Hopkins — New York, New York
executive producer, The New York Times 
JSK Journalism Fellow

Marcelle Hopkins is the co-director of immersive journalism and deputy editor of video at The New York Times. She oversaw the Times’ innovative 360, virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality work, as well as international video reporting. She is an ambassador for Journalism 360, an initiative of thought leaders, practitioners and journalists dedicated to accelerating immersive storytelling in news. Before joining The Times, she produced and directed VR documentaries for FRONTLINE and Emblematic Group. She has received a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a Ford Foundation JustFilms Fellowship, a reporting fellowship from the International Women’s Media Foundation, and a United Nations Correspondents Association award. She spent seven years at Al Jazeera’s U.N. bureau, where she produced TV news packages, interviews, features and documentaries on international human rights and humanitarian crises. She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Matt Kiefer — Chicago, Illinois
data editor, The Chicago Reporter
JSK Journalism Fellow

Matt Kiefer is the data editor for The Chicago Reporter, a small nonprofit newsroom that investigates issues of race and income inequality, where he lead investigative projects, managed public records requests, and analyzed and visualized data. He also builds tools that augment the work of investigative journalism, including a suite of algorithms used to identify police named in civil lawsuits and frameworks to automate Freedom of Information requests. He frequently volunteers to lead technical training classes for journalists and focuses on building data analysis tools and shaping investigations for nonprofit newsrooms.  He has been a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors since 2011 and is serving his first term on the Chicago Headline Club board. His work has appeared on NPR and in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Crain’s Chicago Business, The Chicago Reporter, and Mother Jones.  He earned a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in education from Northeastern Illinois University.

Alastair Leithead — London, United Kingdom
Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya, British Broadcasting Corp.
JSK Journalism Fellow

Alastair Leithead is the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Africa correspondent. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, he traveled and reported widely across sub-Saharan Africa for the BBC’s TV, radio and digital outlets in the United Kingdom and globally.  In 2018, he produced a first for BBC News: a virtual reality documentary on a dam Ethiopia is building across the Blue Nile and its repercussions in Sudan and Egypt. The film’s awards have included a Rose d’Or.  Focusing on big theme reporting, he most recently covered Africa’s population growth, war in the Sahara, and the connections between wildlife crime and corruption. In 2017, he won a Foreign Press Association award for his coverage of the Chibok girls’ release in Nigeria.  Previously, he was the BBC’s West Coast correspondent, based in Los Angeles, covering the U.S., and Central and South America.

Natália Mazotte — São Paulo, Brazil
executive director, Open Knowledge Foundation
Knight Latin American Fellow

Natália Mazotte is the executive director of Open Knowledge Brazil, where she lead technology projects that hold government accountable.  She is the co-founder of the news startup “Gênero e Número,” the Brazilian Data Journalism and Digital Methods Conference, and the data-driven news agency J++ São Paulo.  She teaches in the digital journalism postgraduate course at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and works as a teacher assistant in courses for journalists at the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, and also lectures on topics related to digital methods, open data and access to information.  She earned a master’s degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s Communication Program and a bachelor’s degree from Fluminense Federal University’s Law School. She holds a specialization in digital strategy from the Pompeu Fabra University.

Joseph Poliszuk — Caracas, Venezuela
editor and co-founder, Armando.info 
JSK Press Freedom Fellow

Joseph Poliszuk is an editor and co-founder of Armando.info, a media outlet dedicated exclusively to investigative journalism in Venezuela. He has published findings about landmines on Venezuelan soil, local corruption and minerals’ trafficking.  He is a three times finalist of the Latin American Award for Investigative Journalism and has collaborated with the newspaper El Pais in Spain, where he had a scholarship. He has also worked for the Venezuelan newspapers El Nacional and El Universal.  Five years ago, he founded his own outlet when the newspaper where he worked was bought by an offshore company that changed the editorial voice in favor of the government and established censorship. Armando.info now includes nearly 20 professionals at the forefront of investigative journalism in Venezuela. In November 2018, he received the Knight International Journalism Award, which distinguishes excellent reporting that makes a difference in the lives of people around the world.

Bryan Pollard — Fayetteville, Arkansas
director of programs and strategic partnerships, Native American Journalists Association
JSK Journalism Fellow

Bryan Pollard is the director of programs and strategic partnerships and former president of the Native American Journalists Association. He is completing a master’s in journalism with an emphasis on documentary filmmaking at the University of Arkansas.  His first film, “A Shelter First,” about the homelessness crisis in Northwest Arkansas was released in October 2018. He is a board member for High Country News, a nonprofit environmental and land use newsmagazine based in Colorado, and he is a member of the Leadership Team for the Journalism Mentorship Collaborative sponsored by the Online News Association. Previously, he was the executive editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the tribal news organization for the Cherokee Nation based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He is the founder of Street Roots, a nonprofit newspaper focused on issues concerning the homeless and low-income citizens of Portland, Oregon. He is a certified high school journalism teacher and has served as a mentor for numerous journalism workshops, including the Oklahoma Institute for Diversity in Journalism, the Society of Professional Journalists Working Press, the UNITY News, the NAJA Student Projects and Project Phoenix.

Michael Rain — New York, New York
independent journalist
JSK Journalism Fellow

Michael Rain is a multiplatform storyteller, journalist and tech entrepreneur. He is the creator of The ENODI Project, which highlights the lives of first-generation people and American immigrants of African, Caribbean and Latin descent. His writing, photography, audio and film work have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, WURD Radio, Nieman Journalism Lab, Upscale Magazine, and the Harlem Arts Festival. Michael is a TED speaker and his talk, which was featured on the homepage of TED.com, has over 1 million views. He co-founded ZNews Africa, a media and technology startup which was selected as a member of Google’s Launchpad, Facebook’s FBStart and Microsoft’s BizSpark accelerator programs. He is a 2017 TED Resident and 2017 Tow-Knight Fellow at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY). He earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science with a concentration in international relations from Columbia University. He is Ghanaian-American, a lifelong New Yorker and a Brooklyn native.

Simon Willison — San Francisco, California
co-creator of Django and an engineering director, Eventbrite
JSK Journalism Fellow

Simon Willison is co-creator of Django and an engineering director at Eventbrite. He originally joined the platform through its acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator-funded company he co-founded in 2010.  He is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, and has been blogging about web development, programming and data journalism since 2002 at simonwillison.net.  He is the creator of Datasette, a new tool for publishing structured data as a web API. Datasette is based on his experiences working as a data journalist at the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, where his projects included the Guardian’s crowdsourcing application for analyzing expense claims by members of Parliament.

Jose Zamora — Miami, Florida
senior vice president/strategic communications, Univision News
JSK Journalism Fellow

Jose Zamora is senior vice president/strategic communications for Univision News, where he was responsible for ensuring that content produced by its news division had the widest possible reach and impact. He also managed the integration of media innovations into the newsroom and developed its partnerships.  Prior to joining Univision, he managed Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge, an initiative to spur media innovation. He is a former news executive with elPeriódico in Guatemala. He has a law degree from Universidad Francisco Marroquín, a specialization in media law from the University of Oxford’s Media Law Advocates Programme and a master’s in public affairs and a certification in mediation from the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a strategic marketing management executive program certificate from Stanford University.  He served on the board of directors of the Online News Association from 2012 to January 2019, and serves on the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism CUNY Foundation, and on the advisory board of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Natasha Zouves — San Francisco, California
news anchor and reporter, ABC7 (KGO-TV)
JSK Journalism Fellow 

Natasha Zouves is a three-time Emmy Award-winning journalist and a news anchor for ABC7 in San Francisco.  A multi-ethnic storyteller, she is passionate about journalism’s capacity to give a voice to the voiceless and news that affects local communities. She brings a strong science background to her reporting.  While working at ABC in San Diego, she fought to cover how mortality from breast cancer disproportionately affects women of color, as well as the rise of Zika-spreading mosquitoes, bringing in a Centers for Disease Control expert to survey largely low-income neighborhoods affected by the spread.  While reporting for ABC7, she earned her master’s degree in biotechnology enterprise and entrepreneurship from John Hopkins University. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism, where she earned a Bachelor of Science.