spring 2023 cohort

Laila Al-Arian is a Washington DC-based journalist and the executive producer of Fault Lines, an award-winning current affairs program on Al Jazeera English. She has produced documentaries on subjects ranging from the Trump administration's Muslim ban to the impact of the heroin epidemic on children and an investigation into conditions in factories producing garments for Walmart and Gap in Bangladesh. For her work, she has been honored with two News and Documentary Emmys, a Peabody Award, two Robert F Kennedy Awards in journalism, Overseas Press Club award, and has been nominated for 18 News and Documentary Emmys. She is co-author of the book Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.

Raney Aronson-Rath is the editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, PBS’ flagship investigative journalism series, and is a leading voice on the future of journalism. Under Aronson-Rath’s leadership, FRONTLINE has won every major award in broadcast journalism including News & Documentary Emmy Awards, the first Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Gold Baton to be awarded in a decade, and the series’ first-ever Peabody Institutional Award. The 2022 recipient of the New England First Amendment Coalition’s Stephen Hamblett Award and the 2019 Hearst Digital Media Lecturer at Columbia Journalism School, she is a member of the Board of Visitors for Columbia University’s journalism school, and serves on the Advisory Board of Columbia Global Reports. Aronson-Rath joined FRONTLINE’s staff as a senior producer in 2007 after producing notable FRONTLINE documentaries including News War, The Last Abortion Clinic, The Jesus Factor, Law & Disorder, and Post Mortem. She was named deputy executive producer by the series’ founder, David Fanning, in 2012, and then became executive producer in 2015. Prior to FRONTLINE, Aronson-Rath worked at ABC News and The Wall Street Journal, and she earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and her master’s from Columbia Journalism School.

Nicole Childers is the Executive Editor of the Business, Technology, and Innovation unit for NBC News where she oversees a team of journalists that produce business and technology coverage for NBC News (The Today Show, Nightly News with Lester Holt), MSNBC, NBC News Now, and NBCNews.com. Childers oversees the disinformation/misinformation coverage across networks reported by the imitable Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny. In 2021, Childers became an IWMF fellow for its inaugural Next Generation Safety trainer program where she was trained as part of a cohort of women and non-binary people to counter the disparity that exists in the security advising and training space in providing safety training geared towards women journalists, LGBTQIA+ and journalists of color. In 2020, she wrote an article about the business case for diversity that was picked up by the Harvard Nieman Lab. Childers started out her career at ABC News where she worked with Diane Sawyer and then World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. She was an Executive Producer at both NPR and at Marketplace, where she oversaw the Marketplace Morning Report, increasing its audience by more than 50% in 9 months. Childers was a regular on-air contributor for the BBC, providing on air analysis of business and tech news on “Business Matters,” its daily one-hour live show. Childers lives in Los Angeles and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

Edward Felsenthal is the Editor in Chief and Executive Chairman of TIME. He is TIME’s 18th top editor since its founding in 1923 and led the organization as Editor in Chief and Chief Executive Officer from 2018 to 2022. Under Felsenthal’s leadership, TIME has grown from a magazine and website into a global media company with a vastly expanded suite of products and platforms, returned to growth with its highest year-over-year revenue increases in well over a decade, and increased the impact, relevance and reach of its world-class journalism.

Today, in addition to its iconic magazine and digital platforms reaching 100 million people around the world, TIME includes an Emmy-award winning film and television division TIME Studios, a fast-growing global live events business built around its TIME100 and Person of the Year franchises, an industry-leading web3 division, an award-winning branded content studio, the website-building platform TIME Sites, and the sustainability and climate-action platform CO2.com, and more. In 2022, Felsenthal was named one of Most Powerful People in Media by The Hollywood Reporter.

Felsenthal joined TIME in April 2013 as editor of TIME digital, and led a major expansion of TIME’s digital footprint, including the establishment of a 24/7 newsroom and video operation. During that time, TIME’s audience tripled, with monthly video streams exceeding 100 million across platforms and social media followers exceeding 50 million.

In 2016, Felsenthal was named Group Digital Director of News and Lifestyle at Time Inc., a role in which he led digital content and growth across a dozen titles, including TIME, Health, MONEY, Real Simple, Southern Living, Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine.

Felsenthal began his career at The Wall Street Journal, rising to deputy managing editor in 2005 and serving as the founding editor of Personal Journal, where he led coverage that won two Pulitzer Prizes. Earlier in his career, he covered the U.S. Supreme Court in the Journal’s Washington bureau.

In 2008, he was the founding executive editor of The Daily Beast, a role in which he built and managed a digital newsroom that quickly grew from a startup to a nationally known brand.

A native of Memphis, Felsenthal graduated from Princeton University. He has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a master’s in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts. He is admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia and Tennessee.

He is on Twitter @efelsenthal

Peter HAmby is an Emmy and Murrow Award-winning political journalist based in Los Angeles. He is the host of "Good Luck America," Snapchat's award-winning original series about American politics. He is also a founding partner of Puck News, where he writes about politics, media and technology and hosts Puck's daily podcast, "The Powers That Be." Hamby joined Snapchat from CNN in 2015 as Head of News to build the platform's media products for a generation of younger news consumers. Prior to Snapchat, he spent a decade at CNN, covering five election cycles for the network and winning an Emmy Award for his reporting on the 2012 presidential campaign. He was also a contributing writer for Vanity Fair before helping launch Puck in 2021. Hamby is the author of "Did Twitter Kill The Boys On The Bus?," a Shorenstein Center study on how Twitter forever changed politics and the press, which The Washington Post called "the definitive work" on how social media upended American politics and journalism.

Alan Henry is an author and journalist who writes and commissions stories that help readers make better use of their technology and embrace a healthier relationship with it in their lives. He is currently Special Projects Editor at WIRED. He was previously the Smarter Living editor at The New York Times, and before that the editor in chief of the productivity and lifestyle blog Lifehacker. He is based in New York City.

Molly Jong-Fast is a special correspondent at Vanity fair and host of the fast politics podcast. She is on twitter as mollyjongfast.

Silvia Killingsworthis an executive editor at Bloomberg News, where she oversees the Americas Editing Hub and The Big Take. Previously, she was a senior editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, and the managing editor of The New Yorker. For two years, she served as editor-in-chief of The Awl and The Hairpin, and has freelanced for The Cut and Bon Appetit. Since 2018, she has served as the series editor of Harper Collins's Best American Food Writing.

Sipho Kings is a founder and the Editorial Director of The Continent, an African weekly newspaper with subscribers in 130 countries. His background is in climate and environment reporting. For that work, he won a dozen awards and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. He is on the advisory board of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Charles Ornstein is managing editor, local, at ProPublica, overseeing the nonprofit news organization’s local initiatives. From 2008 to 2017, he was a senior reporter covering health care and the pharmaceutical industry at ProPublica, and then worked as a senior editor and deputy managing editor. Prior to joining ProPublica, he was a member of the metro investigative projects team at the Los Angeles Times and a reporter at the Dallas Morning News. Ornstein is a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

Mat Skene is the Executive Producer of premium long-form content at Vice World News. In his role, he works with journalists across Vice to develop their reporting into feature-length documentaries and limited series. Prior to Vice, Mat worked at the New York Times, where he helped launch and lead the Emmy Award-winning TV series “The Weekly” on FX and Hulu. He has over 20 years experience in leading news, current affairs and documentary teams, including a decade at Al Jazeera where he worked in Qatar, Malaysia and Washington, D.C. Mat was a 2018 Harvard Nieman Fellow, and is the recipient of multiple Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, two Columbia Dupont Awards, and a Robert F. Kennedy Award. He currently lives in Atlanta with his wife Sophia and their two sons.

Robyn Tomlin is a veteran journalist, media executive and leader in local news transformation efforts. Tomlin is currently vice president for local news at McClatchy where she supports local newsroom leaders across the U.S. in their quest to build sustainable digitally-focused local news operations. Prior to taking on that role, Tomlin was the president and editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., and southeast regional editor for McClatchy. Tomlin also served as the VP/Managing Editor of The Dallas Morning News and VP of communications/chief digital officer at the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. She was the founding editor of Digital First Media’s Project Thunderdome in New York City. Prior to that, she spent a decade with the New York Times Regional Media Group, serving as the company’s director of editorial innovation and as the top editor of three dailies: the StarNews in Wilmington, N.C., the Ocala (Fla.) Star-Banner and the TimesDaily in Florence, Alabama. She currently sits on the boards of the News Leaders Association, the National Press Foundation, the UNC Hussman School of Media and Journalism’s Board of Advisors and the NC Open Government Coalition. She is also a faculty/coach in the Poynter Institute's Media Transformation Challenge (MTC) program.

Lisa Tozzi is the Rolling Stone’s Digital Director. She oversees the daily news report and operations of the website as well as newsroom logistics. Before coming to Rolling Stone, she was global news director at BuzzFeed, where she led a team of more than 60 journalists based in Los Angeles, London, New York, D.C., and Toronto. From 2000 to 2013 she worked at The New York Times, leading the newsroom’s transformation from a print to a digital focus.

Jennifer Williams is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and the host of The Negotiators, a podcast from Foreign Policy and Doha Debates. Before joining FP, she was the senior foreign editor at Vox and co-host of Worldly, Vox’s weekly foreign affairs podcast.

Jennifer was a senior researcher at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and the deputy foreign policy editor for Lawfare. Her work on jihadist groups, terrorism, and the Middle East has appeared in numerous publications including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest.

She was an inaugural Sié Fellow at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where she received her M.A. in International Studies.

Keith Woods is Chief Diversity Officer at NPR. For more than a decade, he has led the public radio network’s efforts to bring greater diversity to its audience, content and staffing while creating a workplace where a diverse staff can grow and thrive. He is a resource for leadership and staff at NPR and more than 250 Member stations across the country. Before joining NPR, Woods was Dean of Faculty of The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. There, he led a dynamic faculty and taught in seminars on race relations, diversity, ethics, reporting and personal essay writing. His career began at his hometown newspaper, the New Orleans >Times-Picayune, where he rose from sports writing to become the newspaper first Black City Editor and editorial writer. He is co-author of The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity. Woods has trained professionals, faculty and students at dozens of journalism schools, radio stations, newspapers and television stations across the U.S. and Canada. While at Poynter, he chaired two Pulitzer Prize juries. He holds an undergraduate from Dillard University and a Masters from Tulane University.