Borja Echevarría, the managing editor of El País newspaper in Spain, is regarded as a pioneer of Spanish digital journalism. He began his career at El Mundo, then helped launch soitu.es in 2007 before joining El País in 2009. More than a decade on, in May 2020, his paper launched its digital subscription system at the tail-end of Spain’s first pandemic peak. By September 2020 it had more than 64,000 digital subscribers, accounting for nearly a quarter of all digital news subscriptions in Spain.

Co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Markup, Julia Angwin previously worked at ProPublic and the Wall Street Journal. She joins us on February 10th to speak about the first year of successes at The Markup, and an insight into some of their more creative projects to bring accountability to the tech industry.

Award-winning Zimbabwean journalist, documentary maker and Nieman fellow Hopewell Chin’ono was arrested twice in 2020: first on charges of inciting violence after reporting how government officials were profiting from deals to secure Covid-19 supplies, and again for sending a tweet that “impaired the dignity” of Zimbabwe’s Chief Justice. For these crimes, he spent six weeks in an overcrowded jail cell in Harare – an injustice that inspired the viral hashtag #ZimbabweanLivesMatter.

Former Director of BBC News and one-time youngest-ever editor of The Times James Harding speaks to us about his experiences co-founding Tortoise, a quarterly e-book for slower, wiser news.

BBC religion and digital culture journalist Sophia created the podumentary: The TikTok Election. She has 140k followers over 3M likes on TikTok (and counting), and made headline news in 2020 when she used her knowledge of the platform to show how Donald Trump was using it to campaign for the presidency, even while trying to get the app banned. She was named Edinburgh TV Festival’s Ones to Watch and is one of TikTok’s top 100 creators. She'll talk to us about the rise of journo-influencers, and share insights on how to use TikTok to build relationship and trust, and find news stories.

As director of strategic innovation at the Washington Post, Elite Truong uses emerging technology to help journalists tell stories in new ways, and creates new commercial opportunities that promote sustainable journalism. Before joining the Post, Elite was at VoxMedia for four years and led their off-platform distribution strategy. Join us on Jan 13 to hear Elite share some of the results of her storytelling experiments at the Post.

This year we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cyril Foster Lecture. For the past six decades, scholars and practitioners have delivered the Cyril Foster Lecture on the "elimination of war and the better understanding of the nations of the world”.
For this special anniversary we will be hosting a digital roundtable to reflect upon the past 60 years and how our understanding of international relations has advanced during this time. Moreover, we will tackle what are the core challenges to order and cooperation in the international system in the years to come.