2022 Christopher J. Georges Conference on College Journalism

S. Mitra Kalita is a veteran journalist, media executive, prolific commentator and author of two books related to migration and globalization. Recently, she launched Epicenter-NYC, a newsletter to help New Yorkers get through the pandemic. Mitra also recently co-founded a new media company called URL Media, a network of Black and Brown owned media organizations that share content, distribution and revenues to increase their long-term sustainability. She’s on the board of the Philadelphia Inquirer and writes a weekly column for Time. Mitra was most recently SVP at CNN Digital, overseeing the national news, breaking news, programming, opinion and features teams. Mitra has been a board member and visiting faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, teaching in its women’s academy, program for journalists of color and a seminar for new managers. She also teaches in the accelerator program of the Online News Association and has been an adjunct at Columbia Journalism School, St. John’s University, CUNY Journalism School and UMass-Amherst.

Earlier in her career, Mitra was managing editor for editorial strategy at the Los Angeles Times, served as the executive editor (at large) for Quartz and was its founding ideas editor. She also oversaw the launches of Quartz India and Quartz Africa. She has worked at The Wall Street Journal, was a founding editor of Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, and worked for The Washington Post, Newsday and The Associated Press. She additionally served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. In 2021, she was a visiting fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. 

@mitrakalita 

Sofia Andrade is a sophomore at Harvard College studying history and literature and women, gender and sexuality. Currently, she is the arts chair of The Harvard Crimson, where she helps lead the paper’s arts and culture coverage, as well as coverage of the Cannes Film Festival, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and other major events. A Miami native with roots in Ecuador, she writes about arts, politics, climate and culture through the lens of gender, migration and her own Latinx identity. Her cultural criticism has been recognized by the New England Society of Professional Journalists, where she was named a finalist for the Mark of Excellence Award. In addition to her work at The Crimson (where she previously served as culture editor) Sofia has worked at Slate, the Miami New Times, and WhoWhatWhy — a small national outlet through which she covered the 2020 presidential election. Her work has also been featured in The New York Times, Mother Jones and elsewhere.  

@bySofiaAndrade 

Caelainn Barr is an Irish journalist and the data projects editor at The Guardian in London, where she leads a team of journalists working on a range of assignments. Her reporting uses data to investigate complexities within the health care and justice systems. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and teaches data journalism at The Centre for Investigative Journalism. Her work has won a British Journalism Award, a UK Press Award and a Reuters Reporting Europe Award, and her collaborations with the ICIJ and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) have won numerous other international awards. She previously worked at The Irish Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London and has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and The Texas Observer. Currently, as a 2022 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she is studying how missing data in reporting can perpetuate inequality and underrepresentation in journalism. She is also examining how news organizations can build and better use data to report on marginalized communities. 

@caelainnbarr 

Bill Barrow has been a reporter on the national politics team at The Associated Press for more than eight years. From his base in Atlanta, he has covered President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, the Democratic Party and national political trends in a 13-state region that extends from Maryland to Louisiana. In previous roles at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama, he covered the rebuilding of south Louisiana’s health care system after Hurricane Katrina and the federal trial and conviction of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. As part of a team at Southern Exposure magazine, Barrow received a joint 2003 George Polk Award for a series on predatory lending. At Harvard as a 2022 Nieman Fellow, he is examining the intersection of movement and party politics in the United States, focusing on the institutional structures and prevailing social dynamics that are reshaping Democratic and Republican alliances in the early 21st century. 

@BillBarrowAP 

Jorge Caraballo Cordovez is a Colombian journalist and growth editor at “Radio Ambulante,” NPR’s only podcast in Spanish. Based in Medellín, Colombia, he leads online and offline engagement initiatives such as listening clubs and a membership program. He’s interested in understanding the underlying factors that help longform journalism podcasts connect with communities and what’s required to harness the power of that unique relationship. Caraballo holds a master’s degree in media innovation from Northeastern University. He was a Fulbright Scholar and a Google News Initiative Fellow. A 2022 Nieman Fellow, he is developing a toolkit for narrative journalism podcasts in Latin America, seeking to leverage the power of audio storytelling to strengthen community connections. 

@jorgecaraballo 

Raquel Coronell Uribe is a junior at Harvard College. She is the first Latinx president of The Harvard Crimson, the country’s oldest continuously published daily college newspaper. At The Crimson, Raquel previously covered the police accountability beat as a staff writer. She hosted a podcast about the roles that slavery and discrimination played in shaping Harvard over its 400 year-long history, which was named a finalist for the New England Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Award. Raquel also served as one of The Crimson’s social media directors and as an editor for the paper’s daily newsletters. She previously reported for South Florida’s public radio station, WLRN; worked on NBC News’ social media verticals; and wrote for multiple outlets in her home country of Colombia. 

@raquelco15 

Pranav Dixit is a technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News in New Delhi. He covers the impact of technology on people in India, a key growth market for American tech companies. His feature about how rumors spreading through WhatsApp destroyed an Indian village, which exposed the human consequences of Big Tech’s relentless desire to seek growth in developing countries, won a Mirror Award for excellence in media industry reporting in 2019. A 2022 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Dixit is examining the evolution of the American tech press and what lessons it offers for global media, and how newsrooms in developing countries can more effectively cover the intersection of technology, culture and democracy. 

@PranavDixit 

Jasper G. Goodman is a junior at Harvard College who currently serves as managing editor of the Harvard Crimson. A native of Waterbury Center, Vermont, Jasper has previously reported for The Boston Globe, The Hill, and VTDigger — a nonprofit investigative news outlet in Vermont. Before Harvard, he covered high school and college sports for the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and co-hosted a weekly radio show in Vermont about his beloved Boston Red Sox. At Harvard, Jasper served as a staff writer for the Crimson’s news and sports sections for two years before taking over as ME in December. An avid skier and hiker, Jasper is also a leader for Harvard’s First-Year Outdoor Program. 

@Jasper_Goodman 

Ann Marie Lipinski is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, home to an international fellowship program and an innovative group of publications about journalism, including Nieman Lab, Nieman Reports and Nieman Storyboard. Before coming to Harvard, Lipinski served as senior lecturer and vice president for civic engagement at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, she was the editor-in- chief and senior vice president of the Chicago Tribune, a post she held for nearly eight years following assignments as managing editor, metropolitan editor and investigations editor. As a reporter at the Tribune, Lipinski was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for stories she wrote with two other reporters on government corruption in Chicago. While editor of the paper, she oversaw work that won Pulitzers in international reporting, feature writing, editorial writing, investigative reporting and explanatory journalism. Lipinski is a trustee of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and a past co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize board. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was a 1990 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. 

@AMLwhere 

Kristen Lombardi heads the Columbia Journalism School’s postgraduate reporting program, Columbia Journalism Investigations, where she has the privilege of helping produce great investigative stories while training the next generation of investigative reporters. Under her editorial leadership, CJI fellows have dug into worker heat deaths, the mental-health toll of climate-fueled disasters, voter suppression in the 2020 elections and online-dating companies’ response to sexual assault. Recent CJI investigations have won accolades from the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, the South Carolina Press Association, the National Black Journalists Association and the Peabody Awards. Before joining the J-School full time in 2018, Kristen spent 11 years as an investigative reporter at the nonprofit newsroom, the Center for Public Integrity, covering environmental and social justice issues. She’s been a journalist for 26 years and has received numerous national and regional awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the Dart Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service. In 2013, President Barack Obama signed a law addressing problems exposed by her 2009-10 CPI investigation, “Sexual Assault on Campus.” She was a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and has a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University. She has taught investigative-skills classes at Columbia and serves as a master’s adviser for students in the investigative-reporting program. 

@klombardi1 

Pacinthe Mattar is a Canadian journalist based in Toronto. She previously spent a decade at the CBC, where she covered a range of topics including Middle East politics, pop culture, race, refugees and migration, Indigenous issues and more. Her work has been published by Deutsche Welle, BuzzFeed News, Toronto Life, Chatelaine and The Walrus. Her feature article, “Objectivity Is A Privilege Afforded to White Journalists,” was longlisted for the 2020 Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism. In 2018, she was selected as an Arthur F. Burns Fellow by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Mattar is the 2022 Martin Wise Goodman Canadian Nieman Fellow, sponsored by the Martin Wise Goodman Trust. She is studying how journalism can better foster, retain and promote Black, Indigenous and other racialized journalists. She is focusing on developing initiatives that lead to more representative newsrooms and coverage. 

@Pacinthe 

Jeje Mohamed is the program manager for free expression and digital safety at PEN America. She has over nine years of experience working on human rights issues, journalism and safety and security in the Middle East and internationally. Previously, she was a Next-Gen Safety Trainers fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation, developing more inclusive and trauma-informed safety and security training. She managed several campaigns and programs focusing on sex trafficking, racial disparities and human rights violations in Egypt and exile. She led and took part in the production of documentaries focusing on social issues and founded Witness Magazine, which covered human rights abuses in Egypt and the Middle East. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the American University in Cairo in multimedia journalism and international relations and completed a graduate degree in international media focusing on human rights and democracy in areas of conflict as an OSF Civil Society Leadership Award Fellow at American University. 

@JejeRMohamed 

Deb Pastner is director of photo and multimedia at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where she manages a 21-person department of photographers, videographers and editors. During her seven-year tenure as director, her department’s work has been recognized by World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International (POYi,) the Edward R. Murrow Awards and the Online News Association. She additionally has been named one of the best visual editors by both POYi and the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). Before joining the Star Tribune, Pastner was a photographer at newspapers in Massachusetts, Washington and Michigan. At Harvard as a 2022 Nieman Fellow. she is examining how the racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s death has altered the relationship between photojournalists and their subjects. She is exploring ways to reframe and renew that association. 

@debpastner (Twitter) 

@dpastner (Instagram) 

Hanaa’ Tameez is a staff writer for the Nieman Journalism Lab, where she covers innovation in the news media industry. She previously worked at WhereBy.Us as a newsletter editor and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as its diversity reporter. She had internships at The Wall Street Journal and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others, and she is a graduate of Stony Brook University and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
@HanaaTameez