In the span of three months in 2020, Belarusian and foreign journalists were arrested more than 310 times in the line of duty. As of April 2021, 12 journalists remain behind bars. Volha Siakhovich is a legal expert and human rights campaigner for the Belarusian Association of Journalists. She will tell us about the current climate, and what the international journalism community can do to bring attention to it.

Jessica Hamzelou reports on health and medical science for New Scientist. She has a BSc in biomedical science and was named BSME’s Best Digital Writer in 2018 and ABSW’s British Science Writer of the Year in 2017. In 2020, the biggest story her beat could conjure broke around the same time she found out she was expecting. Here’s how the story evolved for her, what it was like stepping back from it, and how she expects the coverage will evolve in 2021.

Samuel Getachew is a freelance journalist based in Addis Adiba with bylines in Quartz, CNN, the Huffington Post and the Globe and Mail. Ahead of the Ethiopian general election on June 5th, he'll be talking to us about the situation in Tigray, the ban on foreign journalists, and reports of massacres.

Toronto Star's former public editor believes a revival of this largely culled position in newsrooms could help restore trust in news and improve the diversity of content and staff.

Gustavo Faleiros is a journalist who specializes in geojournalism. In 2012, he launched InfoAmazonia, a digital news platform that uses satellite and other publicly available data to monitor information from nine countries of the Amazon rainforest.

Manisha Pande is executive editor of Newslaundry

Editor in Chief and Founder of Newlinesmag.com, Hassan Hassan served as a contributing writer at The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy, and co-authored ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror with Michael Weiss. He's joined by senior editor Kareem Shaheen, former Mid East correspondent for the Guardian, to discuss the challenges and oppprtunities of new journalism in the Middle East.

A unique group of Journalism Fellows from Kyrgyzstan, India, Hungary, Norway, Finland, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kenya, Egypt, Nicaragua and Brazil present the lessons learnt in an Oxford lockdown.