Since the inception of the ICFJ Knight Fellowships in 1994, 356 fellows from 53 countries have helped strengthen journalism for communities across the world.
Working with journalists and newsrooms, they have developed tools, resources and training in everything from storytelling and audience engagement to editorial workflows and business models. They have created media outlets that continue to thrive and expand today. And they have built over a dozen transnational networks that have themselves equipped thousands of journalists to innovate and serve their own audiences.
Fellows have experimented, built, failed, tried again, succeeded, innovated and learned – all in service of sustainable, trustworthy journalism that serves the public interest.
At the heart of the ICFJ Knight Fellowships was a simple but powerful idea: that the world's best journalism solutions often come from outside the places of greatest privilege, and that sharing those solutions across borders would strengthen journalism everywhere. This cross-pollination has helped media outlets around the world adopt sustainability strategies tested in Latin America, fact-checking innovations born in Argentina, and disinformation response tools pioneered in Africa and Asia.
The fellowships, which ended this year, have been generously supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Knight Foundation is now backing ICFJ+’s Plus Hub. ICFJ launched ICFJ+ in 2025 in partnership with Code For Africa and the India-based PROTO. Those organizations were launched by ICFJ Knight Fellows Justin Arenstein and Nasr ul Hadi, assisted by other fellows on the program.
Here are several of the projects created by ICFJ Knight Fellows.
Catherine Gicheru
I really value the fellowship because it has given me the opportunity to try, fail, succeed.
Through her ICFJ Knight Fellowship, which she embarked on in 2016, veteran Kenyan editor Catherine Gicheru created the Africa Women Journalism Project (AWJP), a network of women journalists and data analysts who team up to produce data-driven coverage of underreported health, gender and economic issues.
Gicheru leads a team of editors, mentors, data specialists and designers who work with journalists in seven countries across Africa, offering training, support and mentorship to improve the skills of African women journalists.
Fabiola Torres
With the support of ICFJ’s Knight Fellowships, I was able to develop a solid approach to covering health.
In 2019, just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, ICFJ Knight Fellow Fabiola Torres developed the health reporting platform Salud con Lupa (“health under a magnifying glass”), Latin America’s first news site devoted exclusively to health reporting. Since then, Torres and her team have achieved major impact, for example:
- Following a Salud con Lupa investigation that found that harmful pesticides were widely present in produce sold across Peru, a new bill banning dangerous pesticides was introduced to Congress, and the Ministry of Agriculture banned two of the substances.
- After Salud con Lupa looked into a group of nearly 500 Peruvian elites who received preferential access to early COVID-19 vaccines, the country’s anti-corruption office launched an investigation into Peru’s Sinopharm vaccine trial.
Shubhranshu Choudhary
The simple ability of tribal citizens to communicate with each other and the outside world gives them a powerful voice they’ve never had before.
Shubhranshu Choudhary launched CGNet Swara in 2010 as part of his ICFJ Knight Fellowship. A citizen-led local news platform, it allowed people in India’s remote regions, often left out of major coverage areas, to report and listen to news in their native language by using basic mobile phones. Between 2010 and 2015, CGNet Swara grew to encompass over 46,000 callers who recorded more than 5,800 stories and called over 430,000 times to listen. The stories produced hundreds of positive impacts on lives in the communities.
Today, Choudhary is working on a CGNet Swara 2.0, an AI-driven radio station that would proactively interview people to find out what their main community issues are, and create a daily 5-10 minute news bulletin.