Category: Speaker-23

Stanislau Ivashkevich

Stanislau Ivashkevich is the founder of Belarusian Investigative Center (registered in Czech Republic), producing over a dozen of investigations of corruption per year.

Stanislau Ivashkevich received national Free Word awards for a journalistic investigation in 2018, 2019 and 2020 (annual competition held by Belarusian Association of Journalists) and Show of the Year award (2019) from Belsat TV for the investigative TV program. In journalism since 2009. Before engaging in journalism Stanislau worked for market intelligence companies Euromonitor International Plc and Marcus Evans Plc.


After the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, Stanislau went missing for a few days. The independent journalist was incarcerated for alleged unlafwul activities. He spent days in a prison cell that fits 3 people. Then, it hosted 13 detainees, some of them injured by the security forces. For two days, all these people received no food, apart a single loaf of bread for all of them. Stanislau was released from custody after the journalist community undertook active efforts to seek his release. He was fined for participating in ‘unsanctioned activities’. The court refused to look at Stanislau’s evidence on the fact that all he was doing was reporting.

Twitter: @StasIvasBIC

Tina Xu

Tina Xu is a journalist based in Berlin creating in-depth immersive multimedia experiences. In 2023, she coordinated a cross-border investigative team of ten journalists reporting in eight countries for a VR interactive on the proliferation of unmarked graves of people who lose their lives trying to come to Europe. She has been nominated for the Refugee Reporting Award from One World Media, the Innovation Award of the European Press Prize. She received the Excellence in Environmental Reporting Award from the Society of Publishers in Asia. She nerds out about how innovative forms of storytelling can imbue age-old journalistic issues with increased human depth and contextual richness.

Twitter: @tinayingxu

Benjamin Hindrichs

Benjamin Hindrichs is an award-winning freelance journalist from Germany. His coverage focuses mostly on the global far-right, migration, sexual violence, and human rights. He currently lives in Barcelona.

Twitter: @BHindrichs

Elena Ledda

Elena Ledda is an independent journalist from Sardinia who practises constructive and solutions-focused, narrative, long-form, and slow journalism from a feminist perspective around human rights related issues. Ledda is a professor of Social issues journalism and Ethics from an intersectional perspective at the BCN_NY Master Degree in Journalism (collaboration between Universitat de Barcelona and Columbia Journalism School). She also works as a journalism project manager and at present is the Southern Europe coordinator of the Oasis Project. In 2022-2023 she coordinated the IJ4EU and JournalismFund funded project “The Bankers of irregular migration.”

Twitter: @Ele_nedda

Marcus Pfeil

Marcus Pfeil is the CEO of Vertical52 GmbH in Berlin – the first news agency from space. Together with his co-founder Michael Anthony, he is developing a platform for searching, analysing and visualising satellite and radar data. In this way, they provide journalists, publishers and broadcasters with convenient access to space. They are also building a non-profit academy to enable journalists in exile or from countries with limited press freedom to uncover environmental crimes or human rights abuses. Vertical52 is supported by European Space Agency (ESA), Creative Impact Fund, WPK Innovationsfonds, IJ4EU, Journalismfund.eu, EJC, Medieninnovationszentrum Babelsberg (MIZ), MediaLab Bayern and Stiftung für Medienvielfalt.

Twitter: @MarcusPfeil, @Vertical_52

Lutz Kinkel

Lutz Kinkel represents and manages the ECPMF. Lutz worked in the German press for more than twenty years, giving special focus to the areas of politics and media. He was an editor at Spiegel-Online and tagesschau.de and more recently head of the stern-online office in Berlin. He did his master’s degree at Hamburg University in history, politics and economics. His dissertation examines the life of Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl. Lutz teaches journalism at the Akademie für Publizistik, Hamburg.

Twitter: @l_kinkel

Timothy Large

Timothy Large is Director of Independent Media Programmes at International Press Institute. He is an award-winning journalist, editor and media development specialist who runs the IJ4EU programme for IPI, which leads the IJ4EU consortium. Before joining IPI in 2020, he was Founding Editor of the Reporting Democracy cross-border journalism platform and Editor of the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Prior to that, he was Director of Reuters media development programmes, setting up independent news services in countries in transition, Editor-in-Chief of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Editor of the Reuters AlertNet global humanitarian news service, and a Reuters correspondent.

Twitter: @timothylarge

Flutura Kusari

Flutura Kusari leads the legal support programme and advocates with international organisations to improve legislation to defend freedom of expression. In addition, she advises journalists on pre- and post-publication legal matters such as defamation, access to information, contempt of court, and privacy. Kusari previously worked for various civil society organisations including the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Kosovar Stability Initiative on human rights, media, rule of law, and the judicial system. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Law from Ghent University, Belgium.

Twitter: @fluturakusari

Zlatina Siderova

Zlatina Siderova works as Programme Lead Grants at the European Journalism Centre (EJC). She joined EJC in 2018 and has fourteen years of project management and consulting experience in the public, private, and NGO sectors, including programmes implemented with the financial support of the EU.

Andreas Lamm

Andreas Lamm is part of the management team and responsible for project development and organisational tasks. He advocates for the mission and values of ECPMF amongst partners and external organisations. As art director, he supports external communication with strong visuals to strengthen the voice of ECPMF and is responsible for all visual and graphic content and for corporate design. In addition, he takes care of HR and supports the boards. He is an accomplished photographer, videographer, and website designer, who also lectures at the journalism department of the University of Leipzig. Andreas gained his MA in Communication and Media Science, American Studies, and Psychology.

Twitter: @AndreasLamm