Category: Speaker

Anna Babinets is the editor-in-chief of SLIDSTVO.INFO investigative agency based in Kyiv, Ukraine and a regional editor of Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
As a journalist Anna specialises in discovering high scale corruption, money laundering schemes, and crimes. She is part of the Panama Papers team. Several stories about Ukrainian president`s Petro Poroshenko offshore companies were written by her. One of authors of Killing Pavel documentary, which is about the murder of a famous journalist in Kyiv. The documentary won a DIG Award (Italy) and IRE Medal (USA) in 2018.
Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Anna and Slidstvo.Info focus on covering war crimes, reporting from the fields (Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities), researching on and identifying Russian military members in Ukraine.

Twitter: @Anna_Babinets

Max von Abendroth is the Executive Director of Dafne – Donors and Foundations Networks in Europe, soon converging with EFC to become Philea, representing 10.000 public benefit foundations across Europe. Philea will host the Journalism Funders Forum. Max developed the interest representation of Europe’s philanthropy sector vis-à-vis the EU institutions to further strengthen the operating environment for donors and foundations across Europe. He is the initiator of PEX, a European collaboration network of more than 70 philanthropy infrastructure organisations. In 2020 he started the Philanthropy Coalition for Climate and co-created the International Philanthropy Commitment on Climate Change.

Before joining Dafne, Max set up and ran the European Magazine Media Association, EMMA, representing 15.000 press publishers vis-à-vis the EU institutions. He is also the founder of the Future Media Lab. (2012-2017), an innovative European advocacy platform for media, technology, journalism, academia and politicians.

Max studied Economics and Business Administration at the Witten/Herdecke University in Germany.

Twitter: @bxlmax

Roman Dobrokhotov was born 1983 in Moscow, graduated from Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and has a PhD in political science. He started to work as a journalist in 2005. In 2013, he founded the online internet magazine The Insider focusing on investigations and debunking of fake news. The Insider won many international awards for its investigations.

Twitter: @Dobrokhotov

Sanita Jemberga is editor in the Baltic Center of Investigative Journalism “Re:Baltica,” which is based in Riga but works across the Baltics and beyond (mostly in ex-USSR countries but also on OCCRP and ICIJ investigations). Re:Baltica is a non-profit, which produces journalism in public interest in Latvian, English, and Russian since 2011. Sanita was lead editor in IJ4EU-supported investigation “Belarus Sanction Busters,” where journalists from Estonia (Delfi), Latvia (Re:Baltica), Lithuania (Siena), and Belarus (BIC) exposed people fronting interests of sanctioned Belarussian oligarchs and circumventing EU sanctions.

Twitter: @jemberga

Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck is the founder and Executive Director of Lie Detectors, an award-winning organisation that works with more than 250 professional journalists to promote critical media literacy among schoolchildren and teachers. She directs Lie Detectors’ development and strategy and designed its concept and training approach. Juliane advises the European Union institutions, including within the EU Expert Group on Digital Literacy and  High Level Expert Group on Digital Disinformation and Fake News. She has advised politicians and lawmakers on anti-radicalisation and lateral literacy in an age of media pluralism. To create Lie Detectors, Juliane put aside an award-winning journalism career, during which she wrote for The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Reuters, MLex, and Spiegel Online among others, reporting from Europe and the US as well as from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Arctic. She is an alumna of New York City’s Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Edinburgh. She speaks German, English, Spanish and French.

Twitter: @LieDetectorsOrg

Jochen Spangenberg is Deputy Head of Research and Cooperation Projects at Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle. The topical focus of his work over the past decade has been on social newsgathering, analysis, and verification of digital content, and relating all these to news reporting. He led the research projects REVEAL, InVID, and WeVerify for DW. He is DW’s product lead for Truly Media, a collaborative verification platform. Jochen lectures at the Free University Berlin in Media & Communication Sciences, is on the Advisory Board of EDMO (European Digital Media Observatory) and serves as Chairman of the CEDMO Advisory Board. He is the author of the book The BBC in Transition and a number of articles, papers and book chapters. Jochen supports Lie Detectors in its quest to bring media literacy into classrooms and raise awareness among young people on (news) media issues.

Twitter: @jospang , @WeVerify

Nico Schmidt is part of the European journalistic team “Investigate Europe.” As an investigative reporter, he has lately dug into the failed state of military integration in the EU as well as the effects of the little known Energy Charter Treaty on the EU’s ambitions to phase out fossil fuels. For this work he was recently nominated for the German Reporterpreis.

Hristio Boytchev is a freelance investigative health and science journalist based in Berlin. He is the project leader of the “Follow the Grant” project, which investigates conflicts of interest in science and medicine. Hristio was named European Science Journalist of the Year 2021 by the European Federation for Science Journalism.

Twitter: @hristio

Eva von Schaper is a German-American journalist living in Munich. Her work has appeared in major publications in both English and German. In early 2020, she set out to explore the link between the drop-in measles vaccination rates in Europe and the rise of populist parties. As the pandemic unfolded, she began to see the patterns in covid-denialism that mimicked what we had seen with anti-vaxxers. Together with her co-host, she started The Inoculation podcast and the Inoculated newsletter to explore disinformation, anti-vaccine groups, and covid-denialism.

Twitter: @EvavonSchaper