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.

Before coming to Missouri for his fellowship, Thomas Seymat was the VR editor of Euronews where he led the implementation of an innovative immersive journalism workflow and orchestrated the production of more than 145 VR/ 360° experiences since June 2016. He has trained journalists and spoken at conferences throughout Europe, and is an ambassador of … Continued

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.

Jarrad Henderson is an Emmy award-winning videographer, photographer and filmmaker who currently works as a multimedia producer at USA Today. Henderson also currently chairs the National Association of Black Journalists’ Visual Task Force. Before coming to USA Today, he was a video producer/director at Virginia Tech and photographer/videographer at the Detroit Free Press. While in … Continued

Nicolette Gendron, a freelance writer and strategist at The New 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 … Continued

Simon Galperin is the founder and director of Community Information Cooperative, which plans to develop community information districts that would fund community news and information projects through fees shared by community members, similarly to the funding of sanitation and library services. Galperin is also a customer success lead at GroundSource, an engagement and platform and … Continued

Madeleine Bair is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker, and an expert on human rights video advocacy, verification of online footage, and citizen video. Bair is also the founder of El Tímpano, a local Spanish-language reporting initiative prototype, which she plans to continue developing during her RJI Fellowship. The goal of El Tímpano is to apply … Continued

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.