Announcement
We are excited to announce our selection of Transatlantic Media Fellows for 2023 - including our first Global Development Policy Fellows!
Each year, we sponsor a select number of journalists from the US and Europe for an independent transatlantic trip to research stories relevant to our work on Democracy & Society, Foreign & Security Policy, Technology & Digital Policy, and Climate & Energy Policy. Fellowships are selected annually and are open to journalists in any medium. This year is our first year supporting journalists working on Global Development Policy.
Inaugural Global Development Policy Fellows
Jazmín Bazan is a magna cum lade historian from the University of Buenos Aires and studied for a Master's Degree in Journalism at the University of San Andrés. She has also taken seminars on Education and Public Policies, at Flacso, the University of Torcuato Di Tella, ColumbiaX, HarvardX, Amnesty International, Reuters, and The Knight Center. She was a scriptwriter and columnist on national television, has produced and starred in history videos for social networks, and collaborated with local and foreign newspapers, like elDiarioES. She specializes in gender and education, and is a part of a Latin American network of young journalists (Red LATAM). For the past four years, she has worked for Clarín, the most important newspaper in Argentina. She is a Rosalynn Carter Center fellow and has also won several awards (from the World's Editors Forum and the Argentinian Society of Medicine) and grants from the International Women's Foundation and other institutions, such as Unesco and the UN. She has participated in programs supported by the US Embassy for young leaders, held by the "Fundación Universitaria del Río de la Plata", the American Chamber of Commerce, and the University of Colorado Boulder. Throughout her career, she has held various positions at national and international media outlets. Her goal has always been the same: to bring science, environmental, historical, and gender issues, to the non-expert public; and to generate content that makes an impact, pushing for social changes. Recently, she has been chosen as a young woman leader by Vital Voices South America.
Jazmín will report on the connections between American and Argentine feminism.
Emilio Godoy is an investigative journalist focused on environmental, climate, and energy issues, based in Mexico. In December 2022, he won the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Award for coverage of climate change, biodiversity and water, awarded by the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA).
Emilio will research the supply chain of electric vehicles.
Elias Meseret is an award-winning professional journalist with more than 10 years of experience working with international media outlets, notably with the Associated Press (AP), in his native country of Ethiopia. He has worked with other media outlets like DPA, The Mail and The Guardian, Devex, The Africa Report and others. He has several years of experiences in background researching, writing, editing and proofreading news stories, articles, and features. He also founded Ethiopia Check, now the largest fact-checking desk in Ethiopia, in June 2020 which is operating currently in three languages. Elias also served as President of the Ethiopian Mass Media Professional Association from 2020 until 2022.
Elias will explore disinformation in Ethiopia and its relationship to diaspora communities.
Democracy & Society Fellows
Jessica Bateman is a Berlin-based freelance journalist covering social and human rights issues around Europe. She is a regular contributor to the BBC and has reported several radio documentaries for its World Service, one of which was a finalist in the New York Radio Awards Best Documentary category. Her feature writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Economist 1843, Wired, The New Republic, The Nation, Foreign Policy and many more. In 2022 she received an International Women's Media Foundation grant to support her research on how US anti-abortion groups export their tactics worldwide, and she has also previously been awarded grants and fellowships from the International Journalistin Programme, journalismfund.eu and the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung.
Jessica will be working on a story about US faith leaders who are trying to root out white supremacy from their communities.
Lara Mo Lorenz is a freelance journalist based in Berlin, who specializes in audio storytelling. Their work focuses on topics surrounding gender, queerness, and social justice. Lara Mo works as a reporter and editor for Deutschlandfunk Nova and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. They are part of the podcast collective mimimi.kollektiv and have co-produced the podcast "Drag Stories", that won Spotify’s 2020 Sound Up Program. Lara Mo’s background is in Gender Studies and Political Science, with a Master’s Degree from Freie Universität Berlin.
Lara Mo will use the fellowship to travel to Texas and explore how the escalating anti-trans-bills by the Republican party affect the lives of trans people and their families.
Sarah O’Neal is a freelance writer based in Oakland, California. Sarah’s work grapples with the impact of historical trauma on familial memory and the way systems of oppression impact the most intimate detail of our lives. Her work is informed by interests in mourning rituals, queer poetics, and Black liberation. Sarah's writing has been featured in Teen Vogue, The Ex-Puritan, the Institute for Palestine Studies and elsewhere.
Sarah will explore historical memory and reconciliation effots led by descendants of the Maghreb living in diaspora in Europe.
Sonja Smolenski is a social scientist and journalist based in Cologne. She writes for taz, renk.Magazin and formats such as KARAKAYA TALKS. In 2021/2022 she was a mentee of the New German Media Makers (Neue Deutsche Medienmacher*innen). She is the founder of the Instagram project @boycott_dl, which is nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2023. In her work she deals with anti-Semitic and racist continuities in Germany and post-migrant alliances.
Sonja will write about resistance, anti-Semitism, and the transatlantic diaspora.
Foreign & Security Policy Fellows
Brett Simpson is a freelance climate, science, and human rights journalist and current Fulbright scholar based between San Francisco, California and Berlin, Germany. Working across print and audio, she has covered communities on the frontlines of climate change from the Norwegian Arctic to the Mojave Desert. Her reporting has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The World, and more, and has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Overseas Press Club Foundation, the Council of the Advancement of Science Writing, the U.C. Berkeley Human Rights Center, and the 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship. In 2020, her two-part KALW audio series on California water contamination won a White House Correspondents Association prize. Brett received a bachelor's in English Literature from Princeton University in 2016 and a Master's in Journalism from U.C. Berkeley in 2021.
Brett will report on how Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine is affecting climate science in the Arctic.
Jordan Michael Smith is a Contributing Editor at The New Republic. The author of a bestselling e-book about former President Jimmy Carter called Humanity, his writing has appeared in print and online for many publications, including the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Esquire, BBC, Globe and Mail, and MSNBC.
Jordan’s story on a series of murders in Australia won the 2021 award for Excellence in Feature Writing from The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. His look at a controversial program in Germany that aims to prevent child sexual abuse was listed as a “Notable Essay” in the 2022 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, and his profile of a professor studying sex offenders was selected for inclusion in the 2019 edition. His essay on antisemitism was a finalist for the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing. He was a finalist for PEN America’s Writing For Justice Fellowship, short-listed for the MIT Technology Review Covid Inequality Fellowship, and twice a finalist for the Richard J. Margolis Award for social justice journalism. He has been awarded grants or fellowships from Type Investigations, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Solutions Journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Two of his stories have been optioned for films.
Jordan has reviewed more than 125 books for the Boston Globe, Slate, The New Republic, the Globe and Mail, and many other outlets. Formerly a Contributing Writer for Salon and the Christian Science Monitor, he has appeared on many radio and television programs in Canada, the United States, Russia, and Iraq. He lives in Toronto with his dalmatian/basset hound mix, Penny.
Jordan will report on how the war in Ukraine has made Brussels into a hotbed for defense lobbying.
Technology & Digital Policy Fellows
Alexandra Kelley is a reporter covering emerging technologies and policy for Nextgov based in Washington, DC, with a focus on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data privacy and security, and quantum information sciences. She has previously held positions at The Hill and Market News International, and graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in English in 2017.
Alexandra will travel to Europe to report on Quantum Information Science and Technology and transatlantic partnerships related to it.
Atifa Qazi is a trainee at KULTURAUSTAUSCH, a Berlin-based journal for international cultural and political perspectives. She previously worked for the artist collective Centre for Political Beauty (where she collaborated with the art intervention “Holocaust Memorial” and curated a book project for the collective). She has also worked in the cultural department of the Goethe Institute in Brussels. She holds a master’s degree in International and European Relations from Linköping University in Sweden. As part of her master's thesis, she explored the EU’s external border policies and western artistic activism from a postcolonial perspective. Her interests include international politics, topics relating to inequality as well as music cultures, in particular the French rap scene.
For her Transatlantic Media Fellowship Atifa plans to travel to Canada to explore how emerging technologies such as AI can be used to preserve Indigenous knowledge, for example in the food system.
Gopal Ratnam is a Washington, DC based senior staff writer for Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call, where he writes about US policies and legislation addressing a wide variety of modern technologies. Previously he was a reporter for Foreign Policy magazine as well as a Pentagon reporter for Bloomberg News. He has reported from more than 20 countries, covered the war in Afghanistan, US national security policies, international arms trade, and Fortune 500 companies. A native of India, Gopal has a graduate degree in journalism from the American University in Washington D.C., and lives in Oakton, Virginia.
Gopal will report from Europe on the implementation of data protection laws in the European Union and US and EU digital policy differences as they relate to China.
Climate & Energy Policy Fellows
Inga Dreyer is a freelance journalist, editor and research associate from Berlin. She reports on science communication for Wissenschaftskommunikation.de and is part of a research project on health communication. As a freelancer, she writes about sociopolitical and cultural issues as well as rights of nature. Her work is published in numerous media, including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, Südwest Presse, ZEIT Online, die tageszeitung, enorm Magazin.
In a team with David Schmidt, Inga is currently working on a series of articles at the intersection of human rights and the rights of nature. Together they reported on the struggles of indigenous people in Ecuador against environmental destruction. Their next project revolves around the oil development project Willow in Alaska and the indigenous people of the North Slope.
Hannah Hoag is a journalist and editor with two decades of experience covering science, energy and climate. She is the deputy editor and the energy and environment editor at The Conversation Canada, and was previously the founding managing editor of Arctic Deeply. She was a 2022-23 William Southam Journalism Fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto. She has written for Nature, Science, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Atlantic, Wired, Hakai, Undark and more.
Hannah will report on hydrogen and peatlands in Europe.
Gabriela Ramirez is a multimedia journalist and storyteller researching the intersections of journalism, innovation, and product strategy. She has worked for local and international media, with a focus on reporting about migration, human rights, health, reproductive rights and climate and environmental justice. She is also the Engagement and Multimedia Editor at Unbias The News, a feminist cross-border newsroom, where she develops social media and content strategies to tell stories audiences engage with. She holds a Master in Interactive Journalism and is driven to explore new multimedia narratives and formats to build a more innovative journalism.
Gabriela will report on the impacts and discussions surrounding possible deep sea mining.
David Schmidt led a team of moderators through the jungle of comments at ZEIT ONLINE and wrote about hate speech and online communities In the earlier part of his career. Today he prefers the chatter of more than human beings in real-life jungles like the Amazon rainforest.
Together with Inga Dreyer, David is currently working on a series of articles on the intersection of human rights and the rights of nature. For their research, they went to Ecuador and reported on indigenous people’s activism, a lawsuit filed by nine girls from Sucumbíos against the state's gas flaring activities and other conflicts caused by extractivism. With support of the Böll-Stiftung, David and Inga's next big research project revolves around the Willow project and the indigenous people of the North Slope, Alaska.
Joseph Winters is a reporter for the environmental news site Grist, where he covers plastics and greenwashing, among other topics. He formerly wrote Grist’s daily newsletter on good climate news, The Beacon, and his writing has been syndicated in outlets including Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Salon, and Slate. Before Grist, Joseph reported for Living on Earth and Oregon Public Broadcasting, and was senior U.S. editor for the Harvard Political Review. He now lives in Seattle.
Joseph will report on how France is addressing the threat of plastics.
David Zipper is a freelance journalist and a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government, where he examines the interplay between transportation policy, technology, and society. A contributing writer at Bloomberg CityLab, his writing has also been published in outlets including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, and Vox.
David will travel to Norway to find out why reducing all driving, not just vehicles running on fossil fuels, is part of their strategy to reduce greenhouse emissions.