The International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) announces new appointments to its governance structure, with Dr. Julie Posetti, Nanjala Nyabola, Pascal Lamy, and Gina Chua, joining Maria Ressa and Mark Thompson.   

As co-chairpersons of the management board-elect, Mark Thompson and Maria Ressa said the candidates are an important addition to IFPIM’s strategic planning. “We are thrilled to welcome colleagues who bring a wealth of knowledge and diversity of experiences to this work.”  

The responsibilities of the management board-elect include strategy development, organizational performance, spending priorities and supporting the IFPIM team on partnership engagement, resource mobilization, and advocacy. 

Nishant Lalwani, IFPIM’s Chief Executive Officer, said, “Julie Posetti, Nanjala Nyabola, Gina Chua and Pascal Lamy are advocates for a more inclusive, equitable, secure and sustainable global news media. I look forward to working with them to fulfil the Fund’s mission to support and strengthen public interest media organisations while encouraging the development of a more diverse and pluralistic media ecosystem.”  

About IFPIM’s new board candidates 
    

Dr. Julie Posetti is a multi-award-winning Australian journalist and academic based in Oxford (UK). She is Deputy Vice President and Global Director of Research at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), where she leads a team producing critical research on the contemporary crises and opportunities within the field of journalism.  

Dr. Posetti is the author of UNESCO’s landmark global study, Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age (2017), which found that the legal frameworks to protect confidential journalism sources are outdated and inadequate. She is also the lead author of the groundbreaking study The Chilling: A global study of online violence against women journalists (UNESCO, 2022), co-author of the report Finding the Funds for Journalism to Thrive: Policy options to support media viability (UNESCO, 2022) and co-editor of both Journalism, Fake News And Disinformation (UNESCO, 2018) and the UN Broadband Commission study Balancing Act: Countering Digital Disinformation While Respecting Freedom of Expression (2020).  Dr. Posetti’s journalism has been published by the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, CNN, BBC, ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald and others.

Prior to joining ICFJ, Dr. Posetti was a Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where she led the Institute’s Journalism Innovation Project. She remains academically affiliated with the University of Oxford, and she is also a Senior Researcher with the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield. 

Nanjala Nyabola is a writer, researcher and policy advocate. Her work focuses on the intersection between technology, politics, media and society. She publishes frequently in academic and non-academic platforms as a researcher, commentator and analyst. She is the founder of the Kiswahili Digital Rights Project, a member of the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, and a founding member of the Africa Digital Rights Network (ADRN).  

Nyabola is a fellow at the Digital Forensic Lab at the Atlantic Council, The Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University, and the Centre for International Cooperation (CIC) also at NYU. She has also held fellowships at the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology (CIPIT) Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya, the Inclusive Global Leadership Institute at the University of Denver and other institutions.  

Nyabola is the author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya (Zed, 2018), Traveling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move (Hurst, 2020), Strange and Difficult Times: Notes on a Pandemic (Hurst, 2022), and Digital Identities and Border Cultures: The Limits of Technosolutionism in the Management of Human Mobility (Atlantic Council: forthcoming), as well as a co-editor of Where Women Are: Gender and the 2017 Kenyan General Election (Twaweza, 2018), The African Migration Review (2020), and Vertical Atlas (ArtEZ: 2022). 

Gina Chua is the executive editor of the digital media start-up Semafor. She has extensive experience leading newsrooms, having recently served as the executive editor of the Reuters news agency and previously as editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Asian Wall Street Journal/Wall Street Journal Asia.  She was a correspondent in Singapore for Reuters and in Manila and Hanoi for the Journal; she started her career in radio and television at the then-Singapore Broadcasting Corporation.    

Chua is interested in new forms of storytelling and is passionate about creating a more diverse and inclusive newsroom. A Singaporean by birth, she attended high school in the Philippines, graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s in mathematics and from Columbia University with a master’s in journalism.  She is one of the most senior transgender journalists in the industry. 

Pascal Lamy is President of the Paris Peace Forum, the European Branch of the Brunswick Group and coordinator of the Jacques Delors Institute in Paris, Berlin and Brussels.  

Lamy previously served two consecutive terms as director-general of the World Trade Organisation. He has also held senior positions in the French government and the financial sector. 

Lamy holds degrees from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) in Paris, the Institut d’Études Politiques (IEP) and the Ecole Nationale d’ Administration (ENA).