Speakers | Covid-19 Reporting: Ethics and Standards
Covid-19 Reporting: Ethics and Standards
Head of Strategy, El Diario, Spain
María Ramírez, a 2018 Nieman Fellow, is the director of strategy of eldiario.es. She is also a contributor to The Washington Post and The Atlantic and co-founder of Politibot. She was a Pritzker fellow at the Institute of Politics of the University of Chicago. Previously, she covered U.S. politics for Univision and was a long-time correspondent for El Mundo.
Founding Editor and Director, the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism, South Africa
Mia Malan is the founding editor and director of the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism in Johannesburg, South Africa. Bhekisisa has pioneered solutions journalism in the country and its reporting has helped to set the agenda on several social justice issues.
Under Malan’s leadership, Bhekisisa’s online readership increased 30 fold and its donor funding eight fold between 2013 and 2019. During this period, the centre expanded from three to fifteen permanent and part-time staff.
Malan has won more than 20 African journalism awards for her work and is a former fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.
Prior to starting Bhekisisa, she was a Knight Journalism Fellow and journalism lecturer at Rhodes University.
Between 2003 and 2006, Malan launched the first health journalism programme of the international media development organisation, Internews Network, in Kenya. During this time, she helped to develop a training curriculum that was also implemented in Nigeria, Ethiopia and India.
Malan holds a Master’s Degree in Science Journalism from the University of Stellenbosch.
News Director, Europe and Africa, The Associated Press
Anna joined AP in 2004 as a reporter in Chicago. From 2006 to 2009 she was a reporter and editor based in Cairo, travelling throughout the region to cover Iranian elections and the Iraq war, among other stories. In 2009, Anna became the assistant editor on the AP’s Central editing desk in Chicago, where she was part of a team that won awards for deadline reporting for coverage of the Joplin, Missouri, tornado and the shooting at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas. After transferring to the West region, she led award-winning breaking news coverage of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting and deadly wildfires in California and was a core leader of AP’s 2016 and 2018 campaign and elections coverage. In 2019, she moved to London, where she leads news coverage across video, photos and text throughout Europe and Africa. Anna has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri and a master’s from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Co-founder, fathm, London, UK
Fergus Bell is an experienced journalist, editor and leading expert in digital newsgathering, verification, newsroom innovation and collaborative journalism projects. He is also a strong advocate for higher ethical standards in digital journalism.
Fergus’ experience spans both the business and editorial sides of the news industry. He spent eight years at the Associated Press, where he became their first International Social Media and UGC Editor. He then headed up newsroom partnerships and innovation for digital newsgathering start-up, SAM Desk. Fergus founded Dig Deeper Media in 2015 and advises broadcasters, publishers and start-ups on social and digital newsgathering, newsroom transformation and innovation. In 2017 he launched Pop-Up Newsroom, a framework for collaborative journalism projects that has already seen success in the US, UK, Sweden and won an Online Journalism Award in 2018 for "Verificado" - an initiative designed to monitor for misinformation during the Mexican elections. Fergus was named as a 2019 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow. He is a faculty member of the European Broadcast Union’s Academy. He serves on the board of the Online News Association. He is the co-founder and CEO of fathm a media consultancy and news lab.
