Round 2: 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.

Tardáguila studied Journalism at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and got her master’s degree, also in Journalism, from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, in Madrid (Spain). In 2017, she added to her resumé an MBA on Digital Marketing, from Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-Rio de Janeiro), and is now considered one of the strongest media entrepreneurs in her country.

Venu Arora is the Founder/Director of Ideosync Media Combine, a New Delhi-based not for profit working on social & behavior change communication, community media, freedom of expression, and voice equity. She has extensive experience in Communication strategy development, Communication and Media research, Radio and video with script, direction and production credits on a number of broadcast radio and video series; and wide-ranging training experience for community media. Ms. Arora has worked with UNDP as a communication specialist; and with Equal Access International as their regional communication consultant, establishing their Nepal and Cambodia operations.  She holds an Advances in Health Communications certification from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and has received the MacArthur Fellowship for Leadership Development in 2002 for her work on Adolescent Reproductive and Sexual Health Communication. In 1998, she received a National Award (Rajat Kamal) for her film Nirankush, a multi-award winning fiction feature on female infanticide in Rajasthan. A published poet and lyricist, she is also the author of research papers, book chapters on Community Media, Radio and Gender and Manuals including CR: Learning the Skills (UNICEF, 20014); CR & Migration (with N.Ramakrishnan, UNESCO, 2016); and CR Sustainability (CEMCA/UNESCO, 2016). Her current work and interests are in participatory and community media including radio, Development Practice, Feminism and Evaluations, Gender and Media.  She also teaches Radio and Voice Equity at the Jindal School of Journalism, Jindal Global University, India.

 Mehmet Atakan Foça started journalism as a reporter for a local newspaper in 2009. After his internship in Bianet in the summer of 2011, he worked as an editor for the Refugee TV news site, which was launched by Amnesty International Turkey. During the internship in BBC Turkish, London in the summer of 2013, he met with topics such as mobile journalism, digital media and the future of journalism, and headed to this field. He led to the translation of the Verification Handbook to Turkish. Due to works of verification on his Twitter account, Foça was awarded by Transparency International. Foça founded Teyit in 2016 as a non-partisan and independent fact-checking organization. He has been announced as a fellow by Ashoka, the largest social entrepreneurship network in the world.

Christopher is a journalist and computer scientist focusing on automated fact checking, policy and ethics as Lead Technologist at Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab. Previously he has been a Knight International Journalism Fellow for two years working with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting project, based in Sarajevo, as well as a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow at the University of Missouri. Before returning to journalism in 2014, Christopher was a cofounder of a number of startups in New York City, where he currently resides.

Jay Jennings is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Temple University in 2015. He studies the media’s role in motivating, discouraging, and informing engagement with the political process. His current research is focused on the most effective ways to correct misinformation on social media. Jay’s work draws on the fields of political communication, public opinion, and political psychology to help us understand the ways the media influences political participation. His research has been published in academic journals such as Political Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Journal of Information Technology & Politics and has been highlighted in such outlets as the Washington Post, NPR’s Weekend Edition, Nieman Journalism Lab, and City Lab.

Masato Kajimoto, PhD, specialized in misinformation ecosystem research in Asia and news literacy education. In 2019 he founded a student-driven fact-checking initiative called Annie Lab that simulates a working newsroom with an aim to synthesize journalism training and news literacy curricula. Masato is also the chief producer of the online course on Coursera titled “Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens” and the YouTube series “Strapline: News Literacy for the Rest of Us”. He served as the leading researcher and co-editor for the paper “Information Disorder in Asia and the Pacific: Overview of Misinformation Ecosystem in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.” His recent publication includes an entry on News Literacy in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Communication. Before beginning a career in teaching and research, he worked as an online reporter and web producer for CNN International.

Milena Popovic joined Istinomer in January 2018 when she started working as a journalist. From January 2019 she works as Editor in Chief of Istinomer. Prior to Istinomer, she worked as a journalist for Serbian daily newspapers, and also as a freelance reporter for several Balkan media. Milena has been awarded with several journalism awards such as “Golden Nike 2015” for the best reportage published at the International Reportage and Media Festival INTERFER. Also, as the author of the documentary “Albanians are our sisters”, she received the award of the international festival “Mirdita, good day!”

Alan is co-founder of Singapore-based Splice Media, which aims to drive the transformation of the media industry by supporting media startups across Asia. A career journalist for two decades, Alan has worked in radio, television, news wires, magazine, and online across Asia, giving him unique insight into how various newsrooms get things done—and where they get stuck. He started his career as a reporter and grew into other operational roles at Bloomberg, CNBC, Kyodo News, Star TV and Channel NewsAsia. He eventually led one of the largest digital news teams in the industry as Yahoo’s Managing Editor for India and Southeast Asia.

Fabiola Torres is an investigative journalist from Perú. In 2018, as an ICFJ Knight Fellow for Latin America, she launched Salud con Lupa, a cross-border network for investigating health issues with the support of International Center for Journalists.

She is building collaborative alliances across newsrooms; spearheading cross-border journalism projects; helping media outlets adopt the latest digital and data journalism tools; and introducing new workflows that facilitate collaboration between multiple newsrooms.