Madeleine Bair, a journalist and human rights documentarian, wants to bridge the divide between mainstream and ethnic media. She will prototype El Tímpano, a mobile news bulletin for working-class Latino immigrants in northern California, and develop tools to help others engage with underserved news audiences.

Fergus Bell, co-founder of Pop-up Newsroom, and his project partner Tom Trewinnard, will develop and test a playbook that helps journalists collaborate on breaking news events such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks and protests. The playbook will make it easier for reporters to tell more accurate, evidence-based stories in real time.

Meredith Broussard teaches data journalism at New York University. She’s interested in “future-proofing” the news by establishing an archive for hard-to-save, born-digital content that can be viewed on tomorrow’s devices. Broussard’s project was inspired by the investigative reporting software she wrote as part of her new book, “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.” Broussard will work with her own team at NYU, as well as Edward McCain, RJI digital curator of journalism.

Simon Galperin, founder and director of the Community Information Cooperative, will address underperforming local news ecosystems by building special taxing zones called community information districts. Info districts let geographic communities design and fund their ideal news and information sources.

Nicolette Gendron, a freelance writer and strategist at TheNew York Times, will evaluate the barriers to news access at small-town high schools while in residence at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her goals are to help news organizations get a better understanding of how news is consumed and shared among teenagers and to help students see more of themselves in the media they consume.

Jarrad Henderson chairs the Visual Task Force for the National Association of Black Journalists. During the fellowship he will develop a digital resource guide offering best practices, ethical considerations and tools for visual journalists bridging the gap between editorial video and documentary filmmaking.

Michael Morisy, co-founder of MuckRock, will improve and deploy his nonprofit’s latest tool, MuckRock Assignments. It’s a simple, re-usable crowdsourcing platform that helps newsrooms manage user submissions while helping turn raw documents into clean data sets.

Thomas Seymat is an immersive journalism and VR editor at Euronews in France. While in residence at RJI, he will develop a tool to gather research on how audiences respond to 360 videos and other VR content. This information will allow news organizations to improve their immersive stories and advertisers to monetize this type of content more effectively.

Kelly Whitney is chief product and partnerships officer for iCivics, a nonprofit civics education organization that reaches five million students each year. Working with teachers, RJI’s network of news experts and the iCivics team, Dr. Whitney will develop classroom tools to help high school students find reliable, journalistically sound information when conducting online research.