The Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism has selected its Spring 2021 cohort of 20 media entrepreneurs. On March 23 they will begin the 100-day online program to develop newsletters, podcasts, local sites, and other niche news products serving communities around the world. The creators were selected from a pool of applicants from all over the world. The program’s first cohort completed the program in January.
The program is supported by a generous grant from the Facebook Journalism Project. Additional support for scholarships has been provided by Substack, LION Publishers, the Center for Cooperative Media, FJUM Forum for Journalism and Media, and Media Lab Bayern.
Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program Cohort #2
Anubha Bhonsle
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: India
Current location: New Delhi, India
Anubha Bhonsle has over 20 years of experience as a journalist, author & storyteller. She has held editorial and management positions at CNN-IBN, New Delhi Television. Anubha is now an independent journalist and founder of Newsworthy, a digital first storytelling platform dedicated to providing substantive information on stories with facts and linkages, and building a community that can engage and disagree with calm and context.
She received a Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship.
Irene Caselli
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: Italy
Current location: Lagonisi, Greece
Irene Caselli is the founder of The First 1,000 Days, a fully reader-supported platform that covers the foundational period of our lives that is too often overlooked. After working for a decade as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, in 2019 she became the world’s only First 1,000 Days correspondent for The Correspondent, a transnational member-funded journalism site. When The Correspondent shut down in December 2020, she launched her own platform. Irene has been awarded fellowships by the IWMF, the European Journalism Centre and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She speaks six languages, and is now learning Greek. In her free time, she writes stories for children that she likes to test out with her son Lorenzo.
She received a Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship.
Patrick Cox
Pronouns: He, him, his
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Current location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Patrick Cox is a journalist and podcaster specializing in language. He worked for The World public radio program (BBC/PRI) for 21 years, filing reports from more than 20 countries. While at The World, he founded public radio’s first language desk and podcast: The World in Words. In 2019, Cox left The World to launch a new podcast, Subtitle, co-produced with the Linguistic Society of America with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in the UK to Irish and English parents, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Tanmoy Goswami
Pronouns: He, him, his
Country of origin: India
Current location: New Delhi, India
Tanmoy left an award-winning career in business journalism to work in mental health driven by his personal history of mental illness. In 2019, he joined The Correspondent as the world’s first ‘sanity’ correspondent. After the platform shut down mid-pandemic, he launched Sanity by Tanmoy, a newsletter on the politics, economics, and culture of mental health. Within two months, it gained 1,200-plus subscribers, with a growing share of paying subscribers. Tanmoy dreams of building a sustainable media brand marrying the rigour of reporting with the soul of lived experience, and establishing mental health as an urgent social justice issue.
He received a Substack Scholarship.
Yoshie Ichijo-Kawado
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: Japan
Current location: Tokyo
Yoshie Ichijo-Kawado is a Japanese TV producer/journalist, who has 20 years of experience at Japan’s sole public broadcaster, NHK. With her passion for gender equality, she has launched TV shows addressing women’s issues. Among her works is the morning show “Asaichi,” which has won many awards. Yoshie is currently working as a content curator for digital platforms to reach out to younger and more diverse audiences. Yoshie was a member of the Japanese delegation to the International Public Television Conference in 2018 and 2019. She was also a visiting researcher at Stanford University, where she studied design thinking, storytelling and grassroots journalism in the Internet era.
Krystal Knapp
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: United States
Current location: Princeton, New Jersey
Krystal Knapp has been a journalist in New Jersey for more than two decades. She is the founder of the hyperlocal news website Planet Princeton, and is a partner and collaborator in the vaccinatenj.com effort. She is currently developing a newsletter called Lost in Transit that will feature reporting on public transit issues in the region. She will work on this project during her time in the Journalism Creators Program. A native of Detroit, Krystal is a graduate of Smith College and Princeton Theological Seminary. She worked at the Trenton Times for a decade before starting her own media venture.
She is supported by an award from the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.
John Keefe
Pronouns: He, him, his
Country of origin: United States
Current location: New York City
John Keefe is a graphics/multimedia editor at the New York Times. Before the coronavirus pandemic he was the investigations editor at Quartz and also led the Quartz AI Studio. Keefe was Senior Editor for Data News at public radio station WNYC, leading a team of journalists who specialized in data reporting, coding, and design for visualizations and investigations. He ran WNYC’s news division for nearly a decade. A self-described “professional beginner,” Keefe runs a tinkering and teaching company called Really Good Smarts LLC. Keefe has taught classes about online investigations, data journalism, machine learning, and journalism products at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Cara Kuhlman
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: United States
Current location: Seattle, Washington, USA
Cara Kuhlman is a writer, problem solver and an avid sailor. She has sailed offshore, raced competitively, worked for a boat builder, and currently lives aboard her 34’ sailboat in Seattle. Kuhlman is currently the editorial operations director at GeekWire, an independent technology news site. Her past responsibilities at GeekWire have included marketing, event administration and overseeing the membership program. She plans to spotlight the ongoing evolution of the Pacific Northwest maritime community where environmental, political and commercial concerns collide. During the program, Kuhlman will develop a plan for covering the surrounding waterways, the people who use them and the policies defining their future.
Leah Lemm
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: United States
Current location: Grand Rapids, Minnesota, USA
Leah Lemm is a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe living in Northern Minnesota and is an independent podcast/radio producer and host. Honoring and bringing to light the many stories shared with her is Leah’s greatest success. Leah seeks to combine her passion for amplifying Native voices and her degree in Economics to create programming that focuses on exploring the Native Economy. Her time in this program, along with a culturally-based approach, will help her strengthen and solidify how she moves forward in building the project.
Evi Mariani
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: Indonesia
Current location: South Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia
Evi Mariani is a co-founder of Project Multatuli, a journalism-in-public-interest initiative that serves Indonesia’s disadvantaged and underserved communities. Project Multatuli, set to launch in May, is a self-sustaining entity to ensure that its loyalty lies with the people. Before setting up Project Multatuli, Evi was a managing editor at the country’s largest English media outlet, The Jakarta Post, where she worked from 2002. Two of the collaborative works she led at the Post won three awards in 2020, including the SOPA Award for Excellence in Public Service Journalism for investigative work unveiling sexual abuses in universities across the country.
She received a Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship.
Edith Michaeler
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: Austria
Current location: Vienna, Austria
Edith Michaeler has long been dealing with digitization and media innovation. She works as a journalist and project manager for national and international and innovation projects and develops digital journalistic projects. Her core topics are entrepreneurial journalism, multimedia storytelling, and – at the format level – podcasts. She shares her research with colleagues in Austria and abroad. Since 2018 she has been producing and moderating the Vienna podcast Erzähl mir von Wien (“Tell me about Vienna”).
She received a FJUM Forum for Journalism and Media Scholarship.
Shaheen Pasha
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: United States
Current location: State College, Pennsylvania
Shaheen Pasha is co-founder and co-executive director of the Prison Journalism Project. She is also an assistant teaching professor at Penn State University, focused on mass incarceration and prison education. Previously, Shaheen was an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she launched an explanatory journalism class at the Hampshire County Jail that brought incarcerated and UMass students together to learn. Pasha was a 2018 Knight Nieman Visiting Fellow and is a veteran journalist with over 20 years of experience at outlets such as Thomson Reuters, CNNMoney and Dow Jones/WSJ.
She received a Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship.
Catalina Ruiz-Navarro
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: Colombia
Current location: Mexico City, Mexico
Catalina Ruiz-Navarro is a Colombian feminist and journalist, author of the book “Las mujeres que luchan se encuentran” (“Women Who Fight Find Each Other”), and weekly op-ed columnist for the newspaper El Espectador in Colombia since 2008. She is the co-founder and director of the Latin American magazine, Volcánicas, which is centered on feminist journalism, and one of the founders of the Colombian feminist collective Viejas Verdes. Her work as a journalist has been published in international newspapers such as The Guardian and The Washington Post. She studied Visual Arts with an emphasis in Fine Arts and Philosophy at the Javeriana University in Bogotá and received a Masters degree in Literature from the Universidad of Los Andes.
She received a Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship.
Eva von Schaper
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: Germany
Current location: Munich, Germany
Eva von Schaper is a German-American journalist. A trained biochemist, she’s written about a giant oil spill in Greenpoint, the neurobiology of marketing, and how to develop warning signs for nuclear waste sites that will endure 10,000 years. She was a business reporter for Bloomberg News, and her work has appeared in publications including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Washington Post and The International Herald Tribune. As part of the cross-border journalism project “The Inoculation,” she started a podcast and aims to show how fringe groups turned a question of science — vaccination — into a question of identity.
She received a Media Lab Bayern Scholarship.
Evangelista Sie
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: Austria
Current location: Vienna, Austria
Evangelista Sie’s purpose is to find stories that drive impact and change and to make them visible. Sie is an independent journalist, editor, and writing teacher. She has published in outlets including diepresse.com, Augustin, Radio Orange 94.0, managed print and online projects for media publishing houses, and conducted seminars for companies, NGOs, institutes. Sie holds a master’s degree in “Journalism and New Media” and “Economic and Society of East Asia.” During the program, Sie will develop a black-led, EU-wide, multilingual online magazine focusing on structural racism, possible solutions, and black personalities’ and communities’ achievements. The prototype, blackcitystories.org, has been awarded with the Stars4Media diversity prize.
She received a Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship.
Viola Stefanello
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: Italy
Current location: Rome, Italy
Viola Stefanello is an Italian freelance journalist. She writes for several national and international publications, including Euronews, Wired Italia, Rolling Stone Italia and Mashable Italia. She was a Google News Fellow at La Repubblica, where she worked on the content strategy to launch the publication’s TikTok account. She studied Journalism and International Affairs at Sciences Po Paris and has been looking into new formats for storytelling ever since. Having grown increasingly obsessed with the way online phenomena intersect with politics and human rights offline in the past four years, she will be focusing on setting up and scaling a newsletter focused on the past, present and future of the Internet for an Italian audience.
Paulo Veras
Pronouns: He, him, his
Country of origin: Brazil
Current location: Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil
Paulo Veras is a Brazilian journalist currently working as politics assistant editor at Jornal do Commercio, in Recife. He is also contributing to Folha de S. Paulo. Since March 2020, Paulo has been a volunteer at Brasil.IO project, making available data about COVID-19 in Brazil. He worked as a fact-checker at Projeto Comprova. Paulo joined the program to develop a journalistic venture and to tell stories using data about the Brazilian Northeast, the region with the most news deserts in Brazil.
He received a Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship.
Héctor Villa León
Pronouns: He, him, his
Country of origin: Venezuela
Current location: Lima, Peru
Héctor Villa León is a Venezuelan journalist specializing in Human Rights and Marketing with 10 years of experience. He has worked in television and print media. In 2017, he moved to Lima, Peru where he has been working as a freelance journalist. He is currently collaborating with the journalism project “Venezuela Migrante.” Additionally, he has been producing the podcast “Nación Migrante” to offer resources, data, and interviews with specialists to journalists and people interested in the subject of migration. Hector is also one of the co-founders of “Capsula Migrante,” a project that provides service information to the Foreign Community in Peru.
He received a Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship.
Abhishek Waghmare
Pronouns: He, him, his
Country of origin: India
Current location: New Delhi/Pune
Abhishek Waghmare writes data-informed stories at the Business Standard, a financial publication in India. His work focuses on public finance, financial markets, government accountability, and political economy. He loves to make charts interesting, and use data to contribute to debates on public interest topics. He intends to develop a data journalism newsletter in the program. In a world where technology will be the language of humanity, he thinks journalism needs to adapt. He sees hope in the future as more people demand quality journalism on the one hand, and tools to produce engaging journalism improve on another. He graduated as an electronics engineer and has a part-time Masters in Political Science.
He received a Substack Scholarship.
Kenya Woodard
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Country of origin: United States
Current location: Tampa, Florida, USA
In her nearly 20-year career, Kenya’s byline has appeared in several publications, including the Tampa Bay Times, ZORA, and Ebony magazine. Recently, Kenya has branched into broadcast and is the former host of “In the Know,” – a Tampa-based lifestyle TV magazine – and currently is a correspondent on “Mocha Morning Show,” a digital lifestyle show. Kenya comes to the program with The Woodard Report, a newsletter that centers political issues, stakeholders, and events that are important to the Black community. Kenya is a graduate of Indiana State University.
She received a LION Publishers Aspiring Entrepreneur Scholarship.