The Fact-Checking Innovation Initiative wants to support your next big idea

Cristina Tardáguila is the International Fact-Checking Network’s Associate Director. She was born in May 1980, in Brazil, and has lived in Rio de Janeiro for most of her life. Since 2014, Tardáguila has dedicated her professional life to verification. She is the founder of Agência Lupa, the first fact-checking initiative in her country, and also responsible for LupaEducação, its educational branch.

Julia leads the Integrity Partnerships team at Facebook.  Her work focuses on Facebook’s programs and policies related to combatting misinformation and disinformation on the platform; including Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program, elections programming, and new misinformation initiatives.  Previously, she supported the launch of the Facebook Journalism Project, and partnerships with journalists on Facebook and Instagram. Prior to Facebook, Julia worked at ABC News as a producer on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer where she oversaw the content creation for the evening broadcast, award-winning breaking news coverage, and original social-first programming.

Karen Rebelo is the Deputy Editor at BOOM Live, a fact-checking organization based in Mumbai. Karen is an investigative journalist and a fact-checker specializing in uncovering misinformation and disinformation in India.

She is also a verification trainer. In 2018, she spearheaded BOOM’s fact-checking workshops for journalists across India as part of the Google News Initiative. Karen is a former Reuters business news journalist and has reported about mining companies in the UK, the Indian stock market and the private equity space.

Mariano Blejman created the first news innovation contest in Latin America, called HacksLabs, which supported 20 projects and prototypes on everything from analyzing drug trafficking data to apps that help people better understand which politicians match their interests in elections.

Blejman is an editor and media entrepreneur specializing in data-driven journalism. Blejman expanded his Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires network, which connects journalists and technologists, to other parts of Latin America by running data boot camps and hackathons. To bolster these efforts, Blejman held his annual Media Party, a three-day event that attracts 500 journalists and technology innovators from around the world. for journalists and developers, each August from 2013 to 2015. At these events, journalists and technologists built and adapted tools that newsrooms can use to increase transparency and accountability.

Mark Stencel is co-director of the Reporters’ Lab at Duke University, where he teaches journalism and tracks the growth of political fact-checking. He also is a part of the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative, which develops tools that increase fact-checkers’ impact. 

He previously worked at National Public Radio, Congressional Quarterly, The Washington Post and North Carolina’s News & Observer. At the Post, he worked on early fact-checking experiments during four presidential campaigns starting in 1992.

Masato Kajimoto, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, the University of Hong Kong. He specialized in misinformation ecosystem research in Asia and news literacy education.

In 2019 he founded ANNIE (Asian Network of News and Information Educators) to develop teaching and learning materials specific to the region. As part of the initiative, he is currently leading a student-led fact-checking news website called Annie Lab (http://annielab.org) at the university.

Michael Bolden is managing director for the John S. Knight (JSK) Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University. Previously, Bolden served as the first editorial director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he managed Knight’s content operations across its core communities and main investment areas, including journalism, the arts, cities, and technology innovation.

Bolden is a longtime member of the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the National Press Club, NLGJA-the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honorary. He serves on the board of directors of the SPJ Foundation, the 501(c)(3) charity that supports a free press and the educational mission of SPJ.

Animal Politico’s Executive Editor. Coordinator of the project Verificado 2018, a collaborative initiative in which more than 90 allies, including national, state media, civil organizations and universities join to fight against dis and misinformation. Winner with this project of the Online Journalism Award in 2018 for Excellence in Collaboration and Partnerships, and the 2018 World Digital Media Award.

She has given fact checking and verification workshops to several media and organizations in Latin America; as well as in Mexican universities and several local media. From its beginning in 2015, she has led the fact checking project of Animal Político, the first of its kind in Mexico: El Sabueso.

She is a journalist who earned her bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Information Media from Tecnológico de Monterrey. She was born in Mexico City and she has worked in diverse media, such as El Universal, CNN and Forbes Magazine.

Yvonne Chua is an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines where she teaches investigative journalism, data journalism and fact-checking. A veteran journalist, she co-founded Vera Files where she later launched and led Vera Files Fact Check, a spinoff from the fact-checking activity her students undertook in the 2016 elections. 

In January 2019 she became the coordinator of Tsek.ph, a pioneering collaborative fact-checking initiative for the 2019 elections. Yvonne maintains the website and Instagram account FactRakers for her students’ fact checks. She has done research on disinformation, hate speech and dangerous speech.