Covering the cartels: the history and mission of Zeta

Adela Navarro Bello is an award-winning Mexican journalist and general director of Zeta, a weekly publication that is renowned for its coverage of organised crime in Mexico. Her work is so dangerous that in 2010 the government at one point assigned her seven soldiers as bodyguards after she received death threats from the Tijuana Cartel. She has been named one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 Global Thinkers, and as one the 50 most powerful women in Mexico by Forbes magazine.

Data and subscriptions: El Pais' lessons in pandemic coverage

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.

Arrested development: Zimbabwean journalism

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.

Building relationship and trust on TikTok – and finding news stories

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.

Experiments in innovation at The Washington Post

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.
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