Sravanti Tekumalla

Hi, I’m Sravanti!

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I’m a current senior at Wellesley College studying computer science and I’m interested in the intersection between technology and journalism — specifically, how to apply my computer science knowledge to create tools that can help journalists parse data in a meaningful, clear way, whether that be through data analysis tools or data visualization tools.

I’m coming to this class after finishing up a stint as Editor of my college paper, The Wellesley News. During my time at The News, I also started  an online team which created, and now maintains, our website as well as our social media presence.

Skills-wise, I have some reporting and editing experience from the journalism side. From the tech side of things, I’m good with Java, Python, JavaScript and web development-related things. I’m excited to learn a lot in this class, and to create with all of you!

Raafat Majzoub

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Hey!

I’m a Lebanese architect, artist and writer. I am invested in creating a network narrative system where the writing of imagined fiction is coupled with a research and construction process that scripts it into reality — writing as architecture.

My work revolves around a borderless Arab World and has taken various forms as outlets such as film, video, interactive performance, public installation, journalism, erotic and children’s literature. My novel “The Perfumed Garden: An Autobiography of Another Arab World” will hopefully be published soon.

One of my previous projects that is most relevant to journalism is The Outpost, a magazine of possibilities in the Arab World. I co-founded the magazine with Ibrahim Nehme, its editor-in-chief, and was its creative director for the first two years. You can find some info on it here: 

Links:

raafatmajzoub.com

236m3.com

theperfumedgarden.info

the farewell chronicles (weekly column)

Mónica Guzmán

monipicHey all! I’m a 2016 Nieman Fellow this year, and to sum it up: I’m out to learn and show how building closer ties with the public makes journalism stronger and more sustainable.

Most recently I’ve been a freelance columnist, writing about technology and culture for The Seattle Times, GeekWire, the Daily Beast and The Columbia Journalism Review. I serve as vice-chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee, and until I came to Boston was the emcee of Ignite Seattle — a fun community speaker series where anyone and everyone can learn how give a great 5-minute lightning talk to a room full of 800 people.

Here’s my longer bio with more resume bits, awards, the braggy stuff. Among the bigger projects I’m proud of: I wrote the closing chapter in Poynter’s New Ethics of Journalism, called “Community as an End,” and for a couple years I ran weekly meetups for readers of my Seattle news blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. That’s how I became convinced that getting to know readers leads to the best ways to serve them.

On that note, I’m excited to get to know you all, see what we learn together, and get to work making it real 🙂

Brittany Parker

Brittany Parker At the risk of outing herself as a flack among hacks, Brittany Parker comes to #PartNews from the world of strategic communications where she once managed “spontaneous tweets” for a group of former congressman on budget reform. A recovering campaign staffer, she has worked on local, statewide, and national races from Arkansas to Tel Aviv. Most recently, she served as press secretary for a think tank on US policy in the Middle East — which was the straw that broke the camel’s back into graduate school.

Now at the Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy, Brittany studies communications and civic participation, primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to learning and working with with the impressive collective of MAS 700, she looks forward to telling her mother — a former reporter — about the future of news.

Brittany is a StartingBloc fellow and holds a BA in International Relations and Arabic from Washington University in St. Louis. You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Jorge Caraballo

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I’m a Colombian journalist interested in covering the transformations that digital media have triggered in our communities.

In 2015 I received a Fulbright scholarship after presenting a project that wants to answer one question: How can digital media contribute to the reconstruction of social cohesiveness in Colombia, a country that has suffered an armed conflict for more that sixty years? Thanks to Fulbright I came to the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University. After finishing my studies I want to go back to my country to create a media experiment that supports a reconciliation process among its people.

My skills are in storytelling, multimedia production and community engagement. I enjoy telling stories using different formats –writing, audio, photographs, video–, and building active communities around information.

“Knowledge is what makes us good”, said to me an elder from a native Colombian community where I lived for a week. I liked that relationship between information and goodness, and that’s why I’m excited to be part of this course: I want to learn and imagine new digital tools that help us to create a better understanding of what we are.

Nemmani Sreedhar

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Nemmani Sreedhar

Hello, I am Nemmani, friends also call me Sree. I am a second-year Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy student at The Fletcher School with specializations in International Security Studies, Human Security, Negotiations, Conflict Resolution, Gender Studies, and International Communications.

Before coming to the Fletcher School, I worked as a Journalist (Senior Reporter) in India’s noted newspaper, The Hindu, for three years, and before that I worked in Indian Air Force as a Photo Specialist for 15 years. I did my Post Graduate Diploma in Journalism from India’s premier J-School, Asian College of Journalism, with a specialization in New Media stream. I also have a Masters in Economics.

I love Martial Arts, Mountaineering, and other outdoorsy activities. Currently, I am also in the process of setting up a new media venture along with some of the best and most creative minds at the Fletcher School. Looking forward for an exciting semester in Ethan’s class.

You can find me on : Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, among others…

Nemmani (Sree)

Anika Gupta

Hi!

I’m Anika Gupta, a researcher and journalist (and currently a CMS master’s student). I’ve written about science, technology and entrepreneurship for various publications around the world (links to articles here, in case you’re interested in that kind of thing) but these days I’m more interested in the links/interfaces between news organizations and users. I’m doing a thesis that looks at issues related to online comments in context of the evolving relationship between news organizations and audiences.

I am also very interested in the globalization of news. I spent five years working as a journalist and product manager in New Delhi, and started Hacks/Hackers New Delhi (now Hacks/Hackers India). I’m really looking forward to meeting and learning about the other people in this class! My skills include: user research, product management, mutilingual/multicultural audience development and traditional narrative journalism!

My Twitter.

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Portrait of Creative Technologist

Joy Buolamwini | Media Lab Graduate Student – Civic Media Group

@code4rights @jovialjoy

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My mission is to show compassion through computation and ensure all who aspire to be creators are provided pathways to become full participants in the creation of the future. To realize this mission, I founded Code4Rights to empower individuals to create meaningful technology for their communities. Code4Rights builds on my work in Zambia facilitating the development of the Asikana Network Women’s Rights App available to all Zambia Airtel subscribers.

I am an entrepreneur, Rhodes Scholar, a Fulbright Fellow, a Stamps Scholar,  a Google Anita Borg Scholar, Astronaut Scholar, and a Carter Center technical consultant recognized as a distinguished volunteer. At the Carter Center, I created an android-based mobile surveying solution that was initially deployed to survey nearly 40,000 people in Ethiopia to help eliminate blinding Trachoma for over 17 million people. The tools are now used in Nigeria, South Sudan, Mali, and Niger to combat other neglected tropical diseases. I adore athletics and am a former Varsity Blues pole vaulter for Oxford University where I earned a master’s degree in Learning and Technology. I currently serve as a Business, Entrepreneurship, and Fellowships Resident Tutor at Harvard University. Excited to see where this class takes us all.

Assorted Related Links:

 

Meet Gideon Gil

Kitty Eisele / MAS 700 / Profile Classmate

3/1/2015

 

Meet Knight Science and Journalism Fellow Gideon Gil.

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The Boston Globe is his professional home, where he’s been Health and Science Editor since 2003.

In Boston, where the health, science and tech industries have enormous footprints, that’s no small task.  He has a lot to tell us about, among other things, whether Harvard can clone humans or what happens to unused embryos, stories about which helped his editorial team win the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

Do you remember the many medical stories that came out of the Boston Marathon bombings?  Those were was under his watch, too.

As at many news organizations, the Globe has contended with cutbacks — its dedicated science section was eliminated in 2009, and Gideon’s reporters’ stories now appear throughout the paper and online.

He points out that you can always argue for strong science stories – but concedes the paper may not be doing as much to cover the non-life, and more basic, sciences.

 

This year at MIT Gideon is looking at how Big Data from health care can inform the stories his journalists tell.

He’s also challenging himself in the classroom:  he teamed with some bio-engineering and MBA students to build a version of the Eye-Wire project that works with Minecraft.

You can see some of that fusion of science and art as far back as the mid-1970s, when he wrote lively columns about on-campus speakers for the Harvard Crimson (“I’m afraid to go back and look”) as an undergraduate bio-chem major.

(That’s an undergraduate Gideon, below, doing something important with pipettes for a professor at Harvard Med).

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In fact Gil thought he’d become a scientist.  But he spent the summer before his senior year at the Quincy Patriot Ledger, and discovered it was “a blast.”  And journalism had one other big benefit.

“Myself and another (Crimson) columnist had a following of groupies.  Some Wellesley women tracked us down – and that was tough to do in those pre-Internet days.  So the dating potential of these columns was my first recognition of the non-journalistic purpose of newspapers,” he said in a recent interview.

Gil went on to study for a master’s in journalism at Columbia before giving up the side benefits of the profession to marry Lisa Huber in 1985.  The family lives in Wellesley with this guy

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while their 21 year-old daughter Liana is off at Syracuse, getting a degree in television, radio and film and doing some other neat things.

Want to know Gideon better?  If you want to fish out the microfilm, you can read through two decades of his stories for the Louisville Courier Journal, where he covered the development and use of the artificial heart.  Online or in print you can check out some of his own Globe reporting from here in Boston; or from this class, enjoy his compelling portrait of a Massachusetts ER at night.

Or you could just scan his Twitter feed @GlobeGideon to see the range of his interests and the many science topics he follows.

“What I try to do,” he explains, “is to help staff do deep narrative and explanatory pieces about what’s happening in the world of medicine and science.”

Does he succeed?  Let’s hear from Beth Daley, a former Globe science and environment writer, who calls herself one of his biggest fans.

The best anecdote about Gideon is being edited on a series many initially pooh-poohed at the Globe: Lyme disease.  Gideon, in his calm, thorough and mellow way went to bat for me, doing his own research to convince the higher-ups this seemingly odd story to focus a year on was one of the most important of our time. Not because we were writing about a disease, but because Lyme Disease represented a far more important point: A reluctance by the medical establishment to try and deal with uncertainty. It was classic Gideon – taking a small point to illustrate something even bigger.

He is also incredibly thorough – maddeningly so, virtually every reporter who works for him will tell you. For years, I would be tapping my foot at 9:30 p.m., front page editor yelling for copy before the presses ran, and Gideon would, ever calm, be going through a story line by line. He invariably would catch major errors, and add in context from some recess of his brain.

He’s very gentle, incredibly loyal.

 

That’s high praise from a reporter for an editor.   If you’re interested in good science writing, you should probably try to get to know him too.

Kathleen McLaughlin, “Staying Safe in China”

A long time correspondent of NPR in Beijing, China, Louisa Lim, describes her as the one “who kept of my secrets and offered unstinting moral support” in her book, “The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited” which was published early last year.

The Chinese immigration official sees her as a fashion reporter, working for a publication with a very industrial title, “Women’s Wear Daily” which based in New York City, covering non-political events such as the Miss World beauty pageant at the city of Ordos, near Mongolia.

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