Heaven Taylor-Wynn is a recent graduate of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, where she majored in telecommunication with a specialization in news. She previously interned at PolitiFact and returns to Poynter as a multimedia reporter with the MediaWise project.

Baybars Örsek is the Director of the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute. Before joining the International Fact-Checking Network; Örsek co-founded Turkey’s first fact-checking project Doğruluk Payı and Turkey’s open data platform Veri Kaynağı, as the founding chair of Turkey’s leading media non-profit İzlemedeyiz (On Watch).

Tom Jones is Poynter’s senior media writer for Poynter.org. He was previously part of the Tampa Bay Times family during three stints over some 30 years, and has also worked for the Tampa Tribune and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Through his sports columns, including his popular weekly critique of sports on TV and radio called “Two Cents,” Tom has established himself as one of the most respected and accessible columnists in America today. He has a superb knack for blending the expertise gained from his reporting and rich network of sources, with the sensibilities of his audience. The result is work that is smart, easy to read and wonderfully resonant.

Aaron Sharockman is the executive director of PolitiFact, the largest fact-checking organization in the United States. Aaron leads the growth and development of PolitiFact, manages its outreach and news partnerships, and oversees new initiatives and product development. Aaron has been with PolitiFact since 2010 and served most recently as the editor of PunditFact, a website dedicated to checking claims by pundits, columnists, bloggers and the hosts and guests of talk shows. Aaron was a 2016-17 Reynolds Fellow at the University of Missouri and taught a class on political fact-checking at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

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Katie Sanders is the managing editor of PolitiFact. Previously, she fact-checked talking heads and opinion-shapers for PunditFact as well as the Legislature and Gov. Rick Scott for PolitiFact Florida, reporting from the Tallahassee bureau of the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Florida, where she majored in English and journalism.

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Ren LaForme is the Digital Tools Reporter for Poynter.org. He runs Try This! — Tools for Journalism, which is an effort to find, share and provide training around the best digital tools for journalists.

He also frequently uses his vanity title, Executive Director of Awesome.

Ren is one-half of the duo responsible for 40 Better Hours, a project to improve the workweek. He is also the cofounder of ONA’s Tampa Bay chapter and cofounder of Tampa Bay Media & Digital, a meetup group for locals who work in news media or on the internet.

Josie Hollingsworth is PolitiFact’s audience engagement editor. Previously, she worked in audience engagement, expanding social platforms and website production at The Seattle Times and the Tampa Bay Times. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in Spanish literature and interactive multimedia journalism.

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Angie Drobnic Holan is the editor of PolitiFact. She previously was deputy editor, and before that a reporter for PolitiFact, helping launch the site in 2007. She was a member of the PolitiFact team that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2008 election. She previously worked at newspapers in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and New Mexico.

She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a master’s of library science from the University of South Florida. Her undergraduate degree is from the Plan II liberal arts program at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a native of Louisiana and attended the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts.

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Katy Byron is a third-generation journalist with more than 15 years’ experience in social media, TV, print and digital news. She joined The Poynter Institute as the Editor & MediaWise Program Manager in October 2018. The groundbreaking MediaWise project aims to teach teenagers media literacy and how to know the difference between reliable and unreliable information on social media and throughout the Internet.

Katy is passionate about news and the development of storytelling styles and techniques using innovative technology. Prior to Poynter, Katy was the first Managing Editor for News at Snapchat, overseeing coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election as well as all other domestic and international news on the platform. Under her leadership, Snapchat expanded its Our Stories news coverage beyond politics to include breaking news and international news, for audiences worldwide in more than seven languages. She spearheaded the app’s first news coverage of war zones through user-generated content with stories in 2016 about the invasion of Mosul, Iraq. Katy led the growth of viewership for Our Stories news to tens of millions of users worldwide and doubled the number of news stories on the platform. Katy also field produced the pilot episode of Snapchat’s first original show — Good Luck America, hosted by Peter Hamby — which won an Edward R. Murrow in its debut season. She also produced an interview with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the West Wing for the show.

Before her foray into mobile-first news, she worked at CNN for nearly 10 years covering breaking news, international news, politics and business news in New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. Katy won a George Peabody Award in 2011 for CNN’s Arab Spring coverage and another for CNN’s 2008 U.S. presidential election coverage. When she was just a cub assignment editor, Katy interviewed billionaire investor Warren Buffett on-camera for all CNN platforms. Later, she was the network’s lead producer for economics and business news during the 2012 election and helped develop the use of  the CNN “Magic Wall,” or touchscreen monitor, for business and economics news segments, including the monthly jobs report. She also did extensive reporting on the fiscal cliff and debt crisis in Europe.

In 2012, Katy moved to CNBC and produced for anchor and New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin on the network’s flagship morning show Squawk Box. While at CNBC, Katy produced interviews with countless Fortune 500 CEOs and lawmakers including former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and former U.S. treasury secretaries Jack Lew, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers.

Katy lives in Hoboken, N.J., with her husband, Patrick Poats, and their son, Teddy.

Barbara Allen is the managing editor of Poynter.org. She spent two decades in local media in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in education at her alma mater, Oklahoma State University.

Barbara spent 12 years as a writer and editor at the Tulsa World where she covered cops, courts and features, then became a features editor and helped direct an award-winning section aimed at local teenagers.

She took that interest in students to her alma mater, Oklahoma State University, and worked as the adviser to the school paper, The O’Colly, and an adjunct professor teaching courses in multi-media reporting and public affairs writing. In her nearly 10 years at OSU, Barbara helped the school reimagine its college media department from one that produced a single daily newspaper to eight separate digital properties. It is now a modern media company and Barbara advised students not only on news coverage and the practice of journalism, but also directed operations related to social media, advertising sales and marketing.

While realizing these ambitions for OSU, the paper, advised by Barbara, now counts four consecutive Top 10 finishes in the Hearst collegiate journalism competition.

Barbara is married to Billy Berkenbile, a professional drummer and music teacher.

Her daughter, Vivian Allen, is enrolled at the University of Oklahoma. She has two stepsons, Cal and Sam, who live in Portland and Dallas, respectively.

As director of training and diversity at Poynter, Doris Truong is responsible for overseeing in-person training — at the institute and in newsrooms — as well as online courses. She also is responsible for a diversity portfolio that includes helping newsrooms better cover their communities and providing the resources to recruit, retain and develop diverse journalists.

From 2013 to 2018, Doris was a homepage editor at The Washington Post. She drove the direction of washingtonpost.com on weekends, directed breaking-news coverage and used analytics to respond to real-time trends. Doris worked on all platforms at The Post over the course of nearly 15 years and is versed in journalism distributed on tablets, by push alerts and through email newsletters. She contributed to Pulitzer-winning projects including the Jack Abramoff investigative package and coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. Before The Post, she was a copy editor at The Dallas Morning News.

She is a former national president of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and past vice president of UNITY: Journalists for Diversity. Under Doris’s leadership, AAJA updated the “Handbook for Covering Asian America” in 2012. She was awarded the 2014 Spirit of Diversity Award from Wayne State University and received the American Copy Editors Society’s Robinson Prize in 2013. She is a member of AAJA’s MediaWatch committee and is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. She is an alumna of the Dow Jones News Fund and the Maynard Media Institute, and is a past board member of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Away from the office, she is likely to be collecting passport stamps or trying a new cooking technique at home. Find her at @doristruong on Twitter and Instagram.