Advisory Council

Brant Houston
Is the Knight Chair in Investigative & Enterprise Reporting and a professor at the University of Illinois. From 1997 to 2007 he served the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a professional association of more than 4,000 journalists and journalism educators. He is co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and chair of the Investigative News Network, a consortium of 60 nonprofit newsrooms. He is co-author of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook and the author of Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide. He worked as an award-winning investigative reporter for newspapers in the USA for 17 years and continues to consult with newsrooms and journalists on investigative and computer-assisted reporting stories.
 
David Kaplan
David E. Kaplan is editor-at-large for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. From 2008 to 2011 he served as director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an award-winning network of 100 reporters in 50 countries. During this time he oversaw investigations into the tobacco, asbestos, fishing and energy industries, working with the BBC and other leading media. Until 2007 he worked as chief investigative correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, then a two-million circulation newsweekly, where his stories included exposés of racketeering by North Korean diplomats, Saudi funding of terrorist groups, and the looting of Russia. Kaplan has reported from two dozen countries and his stories have won or shared more than 20 awards. He is four-time winner of the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, including three medals, IRE’s highest honor. His work has also been honored four times by the Overseas Press Club. Kaplan’s books include YAKUZA, widely considered the standard reference on the Japanese mafia.
 
Edem Djokotoe
Edem Djokotoe is a 48-year-old Ghanaian-born journalist, writer, newspaper columnist and media trainer who has been living and working in Zambia for over 22 years. He has worked as UN Information Officer in Lusaka and as a correspondent for Gemini News Service. Djokotoe was the first Training Editor of Post Newspapers Limited in Zambia and was responsible for starting the Business Post, a weekly newspaper supplement. During his time at the Post, he undertook a number of investigative assignments as a way of motivating his crop of trainees on the newspaper. He has been involved in journalism training at pre-service, in-service and in-house levels. He is a founder member of the Southern African Media Trainers Network (SAMTRAN) and has undertaken extensive media training and communication consultancy in the SADC region. Apart from the chapters he has contributed to a number of titles on journalism and media studies, he has also written two books: An Issue-Based Journalism Handbook and Show Me The Money, a study of how government spends and accounts for public money in Zambia.
 
Gwen Ansell
Gwen Ansell is a freelance media trainer and journalist. In  her former capacity as Executive Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in Johannesburg, South Africa, she commissioned the report ‘Patriots or puppets’ that became the founding document of FAIR, and also hosted FAIR’s founding meeting at the IAJ in 2003. Ansell now conducts training for South Africa’s major media groups, including the Mail & Guardian, Avusa and Media24. She is the  author of the country’s most widely used journalism primer, Introduction to Journalism, and of the Southern African Human Rights Reporting Handbook. She was also editor and contributing writer for FAIR’s Investigative Journalism Manuals and for the South African National Editors’ Forum’s Reporters’ Handbook on Reporting the Courts. She serves on the South African national curriculum development body for journalism under the MAPP-SETA.  Ansell is also one of the country’s most widely-published arts journalists, specialising in indigenous music.
 
Joe Hanlon
Dr Joseph (Joe) Hanlon is a senior lecturer in the Development Policy and Practice department of the Open University in the UK. Before taking up this post, he lived and worked for more than twenty years as an investigative journalist and author in Mozambique. He is a research specialist on the subjects of civil wars, international financial institutions, the aid industry, and debt. In 2000, he advised the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel poor country debt. He has been writing about Mozambique since 1978, and is the editor of the (free) Mozambique Political Process Bulletin.
 
John Githongo
John Githongo is a former Kenyan journalist who has extensively investigated bribery and fraud in his home country. In 1999 he founded and subsequently ran the Kenyan chapter of Transparency International, a non-governmental agency devoted to fighting corruption. In January 2003 he was appointed to the position of Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics by the incoming president Kibaki, who had been elected on an anti-corruption platform. In 2005 Githongo left that position, later accusing top ministers of large-scale fraud. As a result of his resignation international aid to Kenya was cut. Githongo remains a powerful advocate against corruption and is currently working as a lecturer at Oxford University in the UK.
 
Mark Hunter
Mark Lee Hunter is the principal author of Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists (UNESCO, 2009) and five other books.  He has won the Investigative Reporters and Editors, Society of Professional Journalists, National Headliners, H.L. Mencken and Clarion Awards for his reporting and research on journalism.  He has investigated financiers, the Extreme Right, a murder case that implicated high French government officials, and other subjects.  He is currently an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD, where he teaches communication and does research on stakeholder media.
 
Nixon Kariithi
Dr. Nixon Kariithi, Pearson Chair of Economics Journalism, has been an economics and financial reporter and editor in Kenya, Britain and the United States for 13 years. He has also published widely on economics journalism, media economics and African media issues. Dr. Kariithi holds a PhD (Political Science) from the University of Houston, USA. In 2003, he was Visiting Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College, City University of New York, USA. He coordinates the African Economic Editors Network and is currently Head of Media Studies in the Literature and Language Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
 
Patricia Made
Patricia A. Made is a Zimbabwe-based journalist, independent editor and media trainer . She has worked in the media in Zimbabwe, regionally and for international media for more than 15 years. Ms Made has published several articles on the media, and gender issues and co-authored two publications: Women in Industry in Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985) and Beyond Beijing: Strategies and Visions Towards Women’s Equality ( published by SADC Press Trust in 1996). She was instrumental in the development of a gender editorial policy and a pioneering Gender and Media Programme of work for Inter Press Service(IPS) international news agency, which is based in Rome, and served as its first female Director General (May 2000-May 2002).
 
Tito Ndombi
Tito Ndombi is a veteran journalist and editor in both print and broadcast media in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He led editorial teams at the main DRC TV channels and edited two newspapers: la Cité Africaine and La Libre Expression, before joining the Academic Institute for Information and Communication Sciences (IFASIC) in Kinshasa, where he now teaches courses in Print Media and Journalism Ethics. He divides his time between the Institute and the respected Congolese daily Africa News, which he presently edits.
 
 

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