Panel 2: Journalists as Targets
Moderator
Sewell Chan joined the Columbia Journalism Review as executive editor in September 2024. A longtime journalist, he is passionate about journalism ethics, new business models for news, and the urgent need to support working journalists who face unprecedented challenges. Previously, Chan was editor in chief of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom based in Austin, from 2021 to 2024. During his tenure the Tribune won the National Magazine Award and the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, all for the first time. He began his career at the Washington Post in 2000 and worked at The New York Times from 2004 to 2018. From 2018 to 2021, Chan was a deputy managing editor and then the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversaw coverage that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.
Widlore Mérancourt is editor-in-chief of the independent Haitian Creole-French-English news organization AyiboPost. Based in Port-au-Prince, he is also a regular contributor to The Washington Post.
Katie Stallard is Senior Editor, China and Global Affairs, at The New Statesman and the author of Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea (Oxford University Press) – selected as a political book of the year 2022 by the Financial Times, Sunday Times, and BBC History magazine. She is also a non-resident global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and has written for publications including The Atlantic, Times Literary Supplement, Wall Street Journal, Sunday Times, and Foreign Policy.
Previously based in Russia and China as a foreign correspondent for Sky News, she has reported from more than twenty countries to date, covering conflicts, natural disasters, and some of the world’s most repressive regimes.
Polina Ivanova is a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times covering Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia. Her reporting is focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and on developments inside Russia, from the Kremlin’s crackdown to the effect of sanctions and attempts to evade them.
Previously, she covered Russia and Ukraine for Reuters as a Special Correspondent on the investigative team. She joined the FT in 2021 and was shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2022.
Lunchtime Conversation: A Dialogue on War Zones
Jodie Ginsberg is the President of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a position that she has held since 2022. A journalist by profession, Ginsberg previously served as Chief Executive Officer for Internews Europe, part of the Internews alliance, one of the world’s largest international media development nonprofits. She was also the CEO of the renowned freedom of expression campaign group, Index on Censorship. A South African and British national, she worked for more than a decade as a foreign correspondent and newsroom leader at Reuters news agency.
David Kaye is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. He regularly lectures and has published widely in academic and non-specialist journals on issues related to human rights at domestic and international levels, accountability for serious human rights abuses, international humanitarian law, and the international law governing use of force. His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression.
Amy Wilentz teaches in the Literary Journalism Program at UCI and is a co-founder and co-director of the Forum for the Academy and the Public. She is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1990), Martyrs’ Crossing, a novel (2000), and Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (2013), among other books. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. In 1990 she was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction for The Rainy Season. She won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for memoir for Farewell, Fred Voodoo, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in general nonfiction in 2020. Wilentz is MacDowell fellow, the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation.
