A co-founder of Coda, Natalia is an Emmy-nominee and award winning journalist. Originally from Tbilisi, Georgia she started her career freelancing in West Africa. Since then, she had been BBC’s resident correspondent in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East, Washington DC and India. She has covered the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the war in Eastern Ukraine and reported undercover from Burma, Yemen and Uzbekistan. Her investigations into human rights abuses in Central Asia, Iraq and the United States have won her a number of awards. In addition to a career in broadcast journalism, Natalia has also written for the Guardian, Forbes magazine and the New Yorker among others.

Executive director of The City, an award-winning, nonprofit digital news outlet in New York City. Nicholas was previously the deputy executive director for Media at Human Rights Watch. He has also served as chief content officer of Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest news organization and editor-in-chief of South Africa’s leading investigative and political title, the Mail & Guardian. He is also a co-founder and a director of the Mail & Guardian Center for Investigative Journalism, a non-profit set up to support major reporting projects, advocate for freedom of information and provide training to journalists from across Southern Africa.

A co-founder of Coda, Ilan was a 2015 Tow-Knight Fellow at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and a New York City-based magazine and newspaper writer. Ilan was a visiting public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC. He was a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong and has since written for the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Slate, and Foreign Policy among other publications. Ilan teaches writing at the Globalization and International Affairs Program at Bard College.

Liz is a digital media executive and journalist who has spent her career specializing in the intersection of reporting, storytelling and digital innovation. Currently, she consults on digital media strategies — for the Knight Foundation and others — after serving most recently as the Executive Editor of The Huffington Post. At HuffPost, she led a nimble, digitally-savvy newsroom of reporters, editors and video journalists. Before joining The Huffington Post, she ran the news and journalism partnerships team at Facebook. Previously, Liz was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal in charge of news for mobile, social media, audience development and multimedia. Prior to that, Liz was Social Media Editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was on ABCNews.com’s audience development team, increasing traffic, interactivity and engagement through SEO, social media and blogs. Before ABCNews, Liz spent five years at the Washington Post as an editor on the Foreign, National Security and Local desks, developing strategies to cover the news using social media, curation and interactivity; running multimedia projects, live-blogging major international news events, and developing new blogs and partnerships.

A journalist in Asia for 35 years, Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital-only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler’s executive editor and CEO, Maria has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government. In 2021, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work “to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Maria was also named Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, and is the recipient of the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, the Tucholsky Prize, the Truth to Power Award, and the Four Freedoms Award. Before founding Rappler, Maria focused on investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia. She opened and ran CNN’s Manila Bureau for nearly a decade before opening the network’s Jakarta bureau, which she ran from 1995 to 2005.