KSJ fellows Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Knight Science Journalism / April 6th 2026 / KSJ News & Events

Knight Science Journalism at MIT Announces 2026-27 Fellowship Class

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT is pleased to announce the 11 science journalists who will make up its 2026-27 fellowship class. Ten academic-year fellows and this year’s Africa and Middle East Fellow were selected from a combined pool of more than 200 applicants.

The group comprises award-winning journalists who have covered global issues ranging from AI to climate change. Many have also covered areas where science and technology interact with critical social and health issues, including immigration, changing views on autism, and military technologies. Their work has reached audiences through a variety of platforms, including print, audio, and video.

“I’m thrilled to welcome this unique and fascinating group of journalists to spend a year at MIT,” said Usha Lee McFarling, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program (KSJ). “The work they have done, and the work they plan to do, showcases the importance of science journalism in our increasingly complex and technological world.”

The academic-year fellows will join KSJ for the 2026-27 academic year. The Africa and Middle East fellowship is a fall-semester appointment. All the fellows will be in Cambridge studying at MIT and other leading research universities in the Boston area. They’ll also attend seminars by leading scientists and storytellers, take part in workshops, visit world-renowned research laboratories, and take field trips to learn more about scientific research. Each journalist will also pursue an independent research project focused on a topic that advances science journalism in the public interest.

“This is really a one-of-a-kind opportunity for the science journalists who come here,” said Knight Science Journalism Program associate director Ashley Smart. “And it’s a chance for them to do work that can have a lasting impact.”

Now in its 43rd year, the Knight Science Journalism Program is supported by a generous endowment from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is recognized around the world as the premier mid-career fellowship program for science writers, editors, and multimedia journalists. Since its founding, the program has hosted over 400 journalists representing media outlets from The New York Times to Le Monde and from CNN to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In addition to science journalism fellowships, the program publishes the award-winning digital magazine Undark and administers a national journalism prize for local science journalists, the Victor K. McElheny Award. The Knight Science Journalism Program’s academic home at MIT is the Program in Science, Technology and Society, which is part of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

The 2026-27 Knight Science Journalism Fellows

Daniel Ackerman is an award-winning journalist focused on how science and technology influence the economy. Most recently, he reported for Marketplace, a nationally syndicated public radio show. Previously, he covered offshore wind and the fishing industry in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for GBH News. His work has been featured on NPR, Planet Money, 99% Invisible, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and Scientific American. He won first place in Audio Scripting from the Public Media Journalists Association for his reporting on the history of industrial lubricants. Ackerman holds a Ph.D. in arctic ecology.

Sam Fellman is the deputy editor for defense at Business Insider, where he leads coverage of military affairs and works with journalists based around the world. A US Navy veteran who served in Iraq, he earned a master’s degree on the GI Bill at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and has worked at Harper’s Magazine, BuzzFeed News, and Military Times. His journalism has changed biased military rules, spurred the discarding of a dangerous uniform and the fast-tracking of a safer replacement, and examined the modern battlefield in ways that gave voice to troops and their loved ones.

Smriti Mallapaty is a senior reporter for Nature magazine based in Sydney, Australia. She covers the Asia-Pacific region and reports on infectious diseases, biological sciences, and the environment, among other issues. Before joining Nature, she worked as a freelancer in Kathmandu, Nepal. Mallapaty won the inaugural Best Science Journalist award at the Samsung Australian IT Journalism Awards in 2025. She has an M.Sc. with a focus on environmental technology from Imperial College London.

Karem Monzer is a Lebanese journalist and filmmaker, and Managing Editor at Beirut Today. His work focuses on climate change, environmental systems, and migration, with an emphasis on translating scientific research and data into accessible public reporting. He has produced documentaries and explanatory reporting on water resources, wastewater systems, waste management, and food systems, examining how environmental conditions shape public health and affect vulnerable communities. He has covered United Nations climate conferences (COP) and reported on labor and migration, including domestic workers and displaced communities. He holds a B.A. in Communication Arts and an M.A. in Migration Studies from the Lebanese American University. As a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, he will develop a documentary on wastewater surveillance as a public health early warning system.

Eman Mounir is an award-winning Egyptian freelance investigative and data journalist specializing in climate change and environmental justice across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Her work blends rigorous data analysis with human-centered storytelling to expose the social, economic, and political impacts of ecological degradation. A 2023 Pulitzer Center Ocean Reporting Fellow, 2024 National Geographic Explorer, and 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellow, she has dedicated these fellowships to cross-border investigations into the environmental impacts of desalination plants in the GCC, phosphate extraction, and large-scale land reclamation projects. Her reporting has earned international honors, including being named Emerging Journalist of the Year by Covering Climate Now in 2024, the New Media Award, and the Nile Media Award. Her work has also been nominated for the True Story Award, One World Media, and the Fetisov Journalism Awards.

Matt O’Brien is a technology reporter who writes about artificial intelligence for The Associated Press. He’s been tracking AI and robotics research and entrepreneurship for the AP since 2017. His reporting has explored the implications of AI development on work, culture, privacy, society and the environment, with a focus on the people building and shaping these technologies or having their lives altered by them. Prior to joining the AP’s Rhode Island bureau, he was a tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury News. He spent more than a decade reporting for California newspapers, including the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times, producing award-winning stories on immigration, government accountability and other topics.

Helen Pearson is a journalist and editor for Nature, based in London. She has more than 20 years’ experience in science journalism, including five years as Nature’s Chief Magazine Editor, leading the journalism and opinion team. She is an Honorary Professor at University College London, where she teaches science writing and journalism. Her first book, “The Life Project,” was a book of the year for The Economist and was longlisted for the Orwell Prize. Her second book, “Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works,” will be published in April 2026. She has a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Edinburgh, and her awards include Editor of the Year 2022 from the Association of British Science Writers and European Science Journalist of the Year 2025.

Fletcher Reveley is an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Undark, Slate, Mother Jones, Longreads, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. He won a National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication in 2024, and he has received support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado. His work explores the human impact of scientific, technological, medical, and environmental phenomena.

Lucia Torres is a Spanish science and environmental journalist and producer. She is the Video Managing Editor at Mongabay, where she spearheads multimedia storytelling on climate solutions, biodiversity, and environmental justice, and also serves on the board of the Spanish Association of Science Journalists. She holds a B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Bordeaux, France, and an M.Sc. in Science Journalism & Communication from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. Her accolades include the 2025 European Media Leaders Climate Solutions Fellowship from the Solutions Journalism Network and the European Journalism Center, as well as the Poynter Institute’s Leadership Academy for Women in Media in 2024.

Myriam Vidal Valero is an award-winning bilingual science journalist from Mexico covering the life sciences, mental health, policy, diversity, and disability, with a special interest in the environment and health. She holds an M.A. in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in New York City. Her work has appeared in Nature, Science, C&EN, El País, The New York Times, Slate, and The Xylom, among others. She received the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in 2019 and the European School for Oncology’s Cancer Journalism Award in 2020. In 2022, she also received a Diversity Summer Fellowship from the NASW. Since 2021, she has been coordinating, alongside a team, the Mentorship Program for early-career journalists at the Mexican Network of Science Journalists.

Africa and Middle East Fellow

Mohammed El-Said is a science journalist and researcher in human geography. He is the science editor of The Daily News Egypt. His work spans international, regional, and local media platforms, including Scientific American Arabic Edition, Nature Middle East, Nature Africa, Al Jazeera, Al Araby Al Jadeed, and SciDev. He covers various scientific topics, including water, climate change, the environment, and geoscience. He holds a master’s degree in human geography from Mansoura University and a professional diploma in media translation from the American University in Cairo. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in human geography at Cairo University.

El-Said is the third recipient of the Africa and Middle East Fellowship, which honors pioneering Egyptian science journalist Mohammed Yahia and launched in 2024.

by Jamie Jiang / April 3rd 2026 / Fellowship Life

Stephen Robert Miller, On the Careful Work of Reporting on Disasters

Stephen Robert Miller wants to know why people do things they know will hurt them. That question underlies his 2023 book “Over The Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature” — a tight, meticulously researched debut about “maladaptations,” feats of engineering that are meant to prevent disasters but fail spectacularly.

It takes three stories to get the picture: Seawalls that betrayed Northern Japanese towns during the 2011 tsunamis get rebuilt, even though the science shows they’re not going to fare much better this time around; levees and embankments forced on the Ganges River Delta by European colonizers to create and protect farmland become the enablers of catastrophic floods; enormous systems of waterways, dams, and canals in Arizona route Colorado River flows toward industries and the wealthy, leaving a worsening drought in the wake.

Miller has since written widely on climate change — about the sudden profitability of the long-derided field of geoengineering; about a “green” startup that pivoted to selling pesticides; about the politics of geothermal energy. In his stories, people jump at the chance to solve the climate crisis. But Miller finds they often move too fast or, in some cases, are blinded by greed or ignorance.

It’s the kind of beat that can wear a person down. “I’m taking a sabbatical year,” said Miller, who arrived at MIT in August to spend the academic year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. “I needed a break from writing about climate disasters and climate change, so I decided to try something different.”

In between the philosophy and evolutionary biology classes he took in the fall semester, he sat with me to reflect on his book, disaster reporting, and what drives him to a story. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jamie Jiang: So much of your book is about the power of Indigenous knowledge and how these colonial systems are not working, and yet we’re still going forward with them. Did you know that was the ground you wanted to cover?

Stephen Robert Miller: No, I don’t think I did. I knew that was going to be a pretty substantial piece of the Bangladesh picture. I did not realize that it would be such a substantial piece of the Japanese story, or even the tie-in with the Diné people in Arizona. It’s an area that I’ve reported on quite a bit and have always been interested in.

As a writer, I’m always worried about touching on a topic like this and having it feel flippant or like I’m just checking boxes. In this case, I think it grew organically out of the material. There’s no way to look at what happened in the Ganges River Delta without recognizing the imprint of the Dutch and the British colonizers and their persistent attempts to create an environment that really just worked for their own interests at the expense of the people there.

I cannot look at a disaster today without wanting to look a hundred years in the past and think about how we got there.

*Miller, on a shark-tagging expedition in Miami. Photo courtesy of Nola Schoder and University of Miami Shark Research and Conservation Program (*sharktagging.com).

JJ: What’s the reaction to the book been like?

SRM: It’s been really positive.

When I wrote it and pitched it to the publisher, I thought my audience was people like me. Since the book has come out, my audience has been city planners and developers and engineers, which is not who I expected.

I often get people who come to me and want to know if I think their watershed or embankment proposal is a maladaptive decision. I’m also often asked about how to explain the science behind some of the things that they’re working on.

Everybody asks me what the solution is. Some people have a hard time with my book because it’s not a book of solutions. It’s a book about how solutions fail.

I came out of working as a senior editor at YES! Magazine, when my job was to do solutions journalism, so I’ve been editing solution stories and writing solution stories for years. In solutions journalism, you’re trying to do a lot in a little bit of space. To do, I think, the necessary dive to understand whether it’s a really good solution — it’s hard as a writer to provide that nuance. The readers often don’t want it.

I have a lot of respect for it, and I recognize the value. But I think there are so many times where we want the solutions to work so bad we get blinded to the realities of their failures. That’s kind of where the book came from.

JJ: How do you communicate the science to a wider audience?

SRM: Stories are huge. Instead of, like, 15 chapters on some esoteric term and then an explanation, I just told three stories.

I think a lot of Americans expect disasters to happen in Bangladesh. That’s been the story of Bangladesh for generations. But I wanted to show another aspect of the story, which was the long trail of colonialism, and to show how local people had built out really ingenious ways of dealing with this problem that ultimately really heavily relied on a different way of thinking — not just doing things differently, but ultimately, thinking about flooding and rivers differently than we think about them anywhere else, almost, in the world.

In Arizona the goal was to come back home. I always say, if you’re going to go around the world and tell everybody else that they’re doing it wrong, you better be willing to come back and look at yourself and say the same thing. So that was my goal, coming back home to Arizona where I grew up, and to show the same thing happening there.

I was so thankful for the local journalists who had been reporting these stories day after day for years, especially in places like Bangladesh…

JJ: What are you interested in now? Is climate your focus?

SRM: I’m taking this semester to explore human nature. Something totally different, but it comes from the same place. There’s a fundamental aspect of the last book of people doing things that work against their own best interest. Why do we do things that don’t benefit us?

It’s part of my frustration with the climate story. I report a lot on agriculture, and I talk to farmers who feel the effects of climate change more directly than somebody in Brooklyn does, and yet they continuously vote for people and for policies that don’t do anything to address it.

I’ve been trying to, in my reporting, imagine a world in which it’s beneficial to conservative voters to support climate progress. On the other hand, the last story I did before I came here was all about conservative people squashing a solar plant that would have helped them hugely.

This is why I’m taking a break.

JJ: What keeps you writing?

SRM: Interest, curiosity. Everything I’m working on, every story I’ve ever written, it’s really just started from a place of wanting to understand something. And when it becomes hard, suddenly the idea surpasses a personal interest and becomes a public necessity.

I think that’s what journalism is, right? This is something that people need to know about, and if I wasn’t aware of it, then there’s lots of other people who aren’t aware of it. You have a platform, whether it’s big or small. You’ve got to use it.

We need to keep doing the work, so that when we come back to a time where people can use the information, the information is there. That’s something I definitely learned reporting stories out of the book. I was so thankful for the local journalists who had been reporting these stories day after day for years, especially in places like Bangladesh, where the government is notoriously corrupt and infrastructure is lacking. Reporters were still keeping a record of what was going on so that somebody like me could come along and try to understand it. I think that’s just necessary work.

Jamie Jiang is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. She writes about wildfires and other disasters.

by Ana Georgescu / March 13th 2026 / Fellowship Life

Sarah McBride, on Unearthing Human Stories in Silicon Valley

Sarah McBride has built her career on finding the human stories behind Silicon Valley’s biggest technologies. A longtime business reporter who has worked at Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently Bloomberg News, McBride has covered early-stage startups, tech behemoths, and everything in between, chronicling how personality, capital, and power shape innovation. She’s documented the trials and triumphs of one of America’s most polarizing innovators, Elon Musk, investigating the safety lapses of his tunneling venture, the Boring Company, and reporting on his biotech company, Neuralink, as it seeks to link brains and machines.

McBride approaches the work with a level head and steady hand — skeptical but not cynical — and with an understanding that bold corporate claims often crumple under real-world limits. She’s interested less in hype than in how ideas hold up once put into practice.

McBride is now at MIT, where she is a 2025–26 Knight Science Journalism Fellow. In an interview edited for length and clarity, she spoke with me about her path to journalism, navigating hype cycles, and finding the human elements of technology stories.

Ana Georgescu: You started out aiming to be a foreign correspondent. How did you end up finding your way into business and tech reporting?

Sarah McBride: When I came out of journalism school, I wasn’t averse to being a business journalist. I was somewhat interested in it, but mostly I was interested in going overseas. I got a great internship first at the Kuwait Times. Then I went to The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C., which was a great place to be an intern.

After my internship, I was offered a news assistant job. It was mostly sorting mail and faxes, which they don’t really have anymore, but just that task took up over two hours a day. I remember thinking, “I have a master’s degree and I’m sorting the mail.” It was dispiriting at times, but it was also a foothold at a very prestigious institution. When you do find the time to write, you’re learning a lot because you’re getting edited by amazing editors.

I did that for about a year and a half before a better job [with the Journal] opened up in Hong Kong. I spent six years there. First, I was on the overnight desk, then I started reporting on Asian mutual funds and stocks. I’ll be honest, I had to kind of develop an interest in it, but it was good for me. It taught me things like how to read a balance sheet and certain language involved with covering businesses.

AG: I love that you’re being honest about having also followed an open position as opposed to always knowing you wanted to specialize in business reporting. Was it a difficult transition?

SM: Business is full of basic human stuff: battles for power, people who succeed and then fail spectacularly. It’s got all the same tension and drama as anything else — you just have to get the vocabulary straight before you can report on it. Once you do that, you can tell all kinds of interesting personality stories.

And business journalists aren’t immune to economic trouble, but it’s a more marketable skill. It’s much easier to get a job in business journalism, and then you can think of it just as any other type of human drama.

You can write about someone like Elon Musk without understanding the financial basis of his companies, but it really helps. You can tell a deeper, richer story if you understand the pressures he’s under from shareholders and how his companies are structured. Nobody truly understands that structure, but having a sense of it lets you tell a more nuanced story.

McBride, on a shark-tagging expedition in Miami. Photo courtesy of Nola Schoder and University of Miami Shark Research and Conservation Program (sharktagging.com).

AG: Many of your stories explore accountability at the edge of new technology, how do you approach reporting on those frontiers?

SM: You have to go into everything being super skeptical about whether it’ll work. For journalists, that can be hard, because then people think, “Oh, you’re out to get us.” But it’s not that, it’s about being practical and realistic about the challenges.

Somebody very committed to their technology often appreciates that skepticism. It forces them to show why they think obstacles can be overcome. But it can be hard to get to the bottom of those challenges, especially if you don’t have the technical knowledge. Then you have to go find other people who do.

Other entrepreneurs love talking smack about their competitors, not on the record, but that can be useful. Sometimes you can get an idea of what competitors think the problems are, and then go to an academic. I remember calling an expert here at MIT about tunneling who really doesn’t have any skin in the game. I showed him a photo from the Boring Company, and he immediately said, for vacuum conditions, you’d need this and that, so no, [their claim] isn’t possible. Having people like that is invaluable.

AG: After years of covering startups, what red flags do you look for?

SM: One thing is always to set up a legal alert on the companies you’re following, so you can see if they file a lawsuit or if someone files one against them. Another is to dig into funding. Startups will announce they’ve raised money, but you have to ask: Is it real? Are they getting all the money now, or do they have to hit revenue or scientific targets first?

And then there’s scale. Entrepreneurs will say, “Once we scale up, the cost per unit will be this,” but there are so many things that have to happen successfully between proof-of-concept and scaling that it’s often insurmountable. When there’s so much money in the system, it can make it hard to see which companies really deserve funding.

I once covered a company making pizza with robots and the pizza was actually good! But you have to ask, “Do we really need robot pizza?” He solved a problem, but for this vast sum of money. When there’s so much money, people can lose sight of the mission.

Startups will announce they’ve raised money, but you have to ask: Is it real?

AG: I was going to ask about the funding landscape more broadly. It feels like there’s been this pullback after those highs a couple of years ago. How are you seeing that shift play out?

SM: Silicon Valley works in cycles: Sometimes VCs operate with incredible largesse, and sometimes they pull back their purse strings a little bit. A lot of it is luck. When everyone’s getting funding, you’re allowing some subpar companies to keep going far beyond where they should. In that case, even good companies will have a harder time, because all the talent they would normally be able to hire is spread out among all these mediocre companies. So you have to know, where are you in the funding cycle?

Speaking of red flags earlier, companies who throw money around are another one. They want to be first out of the gate and hire the best talent, that seems to never work well. You can see that happening with AI now. Putting all the ethics questions aside and just talking about money, people are going to lose huge investments because it’s not possible for all these companies to sustain their model of doing business.

AG: You’ve also reported on AI. How do you feel about the way journalists are covering it right now?

SM: I think a lot of tough questions are being asked, and that’s great. But there’s also a hysterical component to some of the coverage that isn’t helping. There’s too much focus on the big, far-away thing, like “one day machines will run everything,” and not enough attention to the incremental, scary things that AI will make commonplace. Many of the problems that we have already, like tracking or income inequality, can be intensified by AI.

Those are less sexy, but more pernicious. Reporters need to work hard to make their stories compelling without relying on that super-scary, futuristic stuff.

AG: Has covering frontier technologies changed how you personally think about innovation?

SM: I’m open to technology, but with skepticism. I’ll never be the first patient to get anything, but if I feel like it’s working, I’d be open to it.

My mom has dementia. If we could get a chip put in her brain that would help preserve her memory circuits, I would totally urge her to consider it. I think a lot of people are more open to these things than they realize. Think about how crazy LASIK sounded when it first came out: “you’re going to put a laser in my eyeball? No, thank you.” But now it’s routine. If brain implants end up being done regularly and safely, I think people will come around faster than we expect.

Ana Georgescu is a science writer originally from Romania. She is interested in physics and biotech and is currently a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Zoe Beketova / February 20th 2026 / Fellowship Life

How Technology Reporter Liza Lin Navigates China’s ‘Black Box’

For Singapore-based Wall Street Journal technology reporter Liza Lin, journalism is more than just storytelling. It is an act of persistence, perseverance, and truth-telling. After nearly two decades covering China’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, Lin has learned that writing about authoritarian regimes involves as much courage and tenacity as it does writing skill and talent. She has mastered the arts of reading documents between the lines, analyzing government data, and verifying anonymous information from sources.

Now at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, Lin is reflecting on what it means to report about countries where information is often hidden and controlled by the government. She is also learning more about China’s technological development, exploring topics such as biotechnology and generative artificial intelligence.

I sat down with Lin last fall to discuss the lessons she has learned. She spoke to me about digital surveillance, anonymous sourcing, and the challenges of doing investigative reporting under difficult political constraints. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Zoe Beketova: What made you choose a career in journalism?

Liza Lin: Most people don’t go into journalism for the money, and they definitely don’t stay in journalism for the money. The thing that drew me to the profession is that there’s a lot about society that policymakers don’t see, either because they’re too detached from the ground or because there are vested interests surrounding them.

ZB: What differences do you see between doing investigative journalism in China and in the U.S.?

LL: The biggest difference is access to data and sources. In a democracy like the U.S., press freedom is valued and guaranteed. If you need government data, you can file a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] or there are public databases that you can tap into. In a place like China, certain data that would have been public in any other country is hidden under the guise of national security. Government contracts which were freely available in China about a decade ago, and are openly available in most other countries, have been pulled because the Chinese government does not want you to know what sort of software they’re buying, or how many surveillance cameras they’re buying.

Another big difference is the repercussions. In the U.S., a lot of people freely speak to journalists. In China, speaking to a journalist could land [a person] in a detention cell. The Chinese government is proactive in trying to figure out who’s been talking to journalists. A lot of messaging software is heavily monitored to make sure that you’re not talking about certain areas that the government considers a national secret. The line as to what the Chinese government considers a national secret is also often very gray. In times of economic downturn, certain economic data could come under the umbrella of a national secret, and you can’t freely talk about such topics. The line is gray and shifting all the time. That makes it really difficult to understand how to protect your sources and make sure they’re safe.

A lot of credit needs to go to reporters in autocracies who are actually nationals of that country because they run a much bigger risk of state harassment…

ZB: So, to prevent putting sources in danger, do you tend to rely more on data and documents in your reporting?

LL: I think the best practice is always to use data to try and verify what a source is saying. That’s played out in a lot of my reporting, because over the past six years I’ve been trying to report about China from outside of China. China is increasingly becoming a black box.

An interesting example is when I was looking into China’s digital surveillance state about eight years ago. China was trying to pioneer AI to use facial recognition to find people of interest. We had just reported about the buildup of the Chinese surveillance state, and I spoke to some researchers in the field and realized that a lot of China’s surveillance equipment came not just from the West, but from one particular spot: Silicon Valley. This information was just from someone telling me this. To prove it, I went through hundreds of government contracts which would break down the specific brands and the specifications of the equipment they needed. So I figured out what they were buying, and which brands they were using.

ZB: I assume this source wished to stay anonymous. How do you handle any danger toward your sources, or even yourself as a reporter, when covering sensitive topics?

LL: A lot of credit needs to go to reporters in autocracies who are actually nationals of that country because they run a much bigger risk of state harassment than a foreign correspondent like myself. One of the things that journalists in Western democracies don’t think about is the repercussions to writing a good story in autocracies. Governments often go after journalists, and not just the journalists but their families, to make sure that the journalist is shaken up and doesn’t write about the topic again. As a foreign correspondent, it’s easy to talk about what I do in China, because, I mean, the biggest repercussion would be that I would be barred entry to the country. But for the mainland Chinese who are trying to do hard-hitting journalism, they have a lot at stake. They are often called in for “tea chats” with public security officials in China. Public security officials are just state police. Just as a reminder that, you know, we’re there, and we’re watching what you’re doing.

Foreign correspondents’ movements are also tracked by public security officials. When you buy a plane ticket or check into a hotel, they often send minders to turn up and see what you’re doing. On the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, China is ranked consistently among the lowest, and that really plays out in regular reporting. So I think the onus is on the reporter to, if you’re citing an unnamed source, make sure whatever that source is saying is validated, either directly by data or indirectly by other sources.

I think it’s about constantly making new sources, meeting people, catching up. Shoe leather journalism. I don’t know a better way of saying it.

ZB: Do you ever have to deal with any unconventional sourcing?

LL: It’s important to think outside the box when sourcing. Many years ago, I was in Sichuan, where a colleague and I were trying to verify that kids in a school had had their DNA collected by the Chinese police. It was very difficult to speak to the kids as they were coming out of school because they are minors. Instead, we tried to do our reporting at a noodle stand or a convenience store just outside the school where the kids would stop by with their parents, so it wouldn’t cross the line by trying to speak to minors who are too young and might give you the wrong information. It was good to speak to their parents instead to verify certain information.

ZB: What’s been your main takeaway in reporting in difficult press landscapes, then? What’s helped you the most with navigating reporting in and about China?

LL: You know, when I was a young rookie reporter, I was wondering how these journalists broke so many stories. Now I know, but it took me several years. It’s about sticking to a beat for a long time, developing expertise, making sure people trust you. People trust you when you’re a responsible reporter and you do good work. If you can stick it out in a beat for years, the person that you met eight years ago, who was just a manager of a certain division, might have risen the ranks to a much more senior person with access to more information.

I think it’s about constantly making new sources, meeting people, catching up. Shoe leather journalism. I don’t know a better way of saying it. In the end, we’re reporters, not data scientists, not researchers or analysts, so we should use that to our advantage. We speak to people, and then we mine the data.

Zoe Beketova is a master’s student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. Outside of MIT, she reports on mental and public health systems.

by Julia Vaz / January 16th 2026 / Fellowship Life

For Environmental Journalist Paula Moura, Context Is Everything

Paula Moura grew up riding horses and investigating bugs in an agricultural town in Brazil so small it did not even have a local newspaper. Moura often filled the void, taking on writing as a way to connect to her community. That passion for journalism eventually led her to São Paulo, the country’s densest city, where just taking the elevator up and down the towering buildings would make her dizzy.

Since then, Moura’s reporting career has continued to expand the boundaries of her world. She has reported from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest for National Geographic, The New York Times, and ProPublica. And she worked as a field producer for the Peabody and Emmy-award-winning documentary “The Territory,” among other projects. Moura’s stories feel both specific and universal. They highlight the unseen everyday conflicts over nature, rights, and land — and they reveal how those dynamics influence the way science is communicated across cultures.

Moura, who is now spending a year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, sat down with me to discuss her approach to science journalism, the challenges of cross-cultural reporting, and the need for innovative ways to report on climate and environment. This interview was conducted in Portuguese and edited for length and clarity.

Julia Vaz: The work of journalists is often compared to the task of translation. As someone who has worked across different languages and cultures, is that how you think of your work?

Paula Moura: Yes, I think so. But it also goes beyond translation. I think journalists are responsible for digestion. They should be able to chew on dense information and present it in a more easily digestible form to readers, especially when talking about science journalism. After working for a long time, it’s expected that the scientific jargon would become more natural for a science journalist. But science journalists need to approach that information through the eyes of readers that are encountering it for the first time. Being able to do that is like translation in the sense that it’s a craft, something that you need to be always practicing.

I also think that it’s important for science journalists to go beyond translation and provide context, and to present information in a way that is relevant for people’s daily lives instead of just repeating what the scientists are saying. I think explaining is the essential part — and explaining why something is important.

Moura, at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. (Credit: Samira Hamza.)

JV: You have covered climate and environment extensively. What shapes your approach to reporting on that topic?

I think we can have great investigations, but we also need to present solutions. That’s something I always try to add to my work. It’s easy for people to forget they have agency. I think it’s so important for science journalism, especially related to climate and environment, to highlight that. What are people doing to solve this? What are other people doing to solve this? There is not a single solution.

JV: You have been a part of international reporting teams covering environmental topics in Brazil. How did you understand your role in those teams and how do you approach creating stories that can bridge cultures?

PM: I think it’s very challenging but there is a greater opening now for journalism in the U.S.A. that speaks of different cultures and that sees those cultures as sources of knowledge. I benefit from the foreign journalists before me that fought to bring their perspectives to this country so that we can value our own cultures and highlight perspectives that are not Eurocentric.

In those reporting experiences, I’ve been that person that could bring context. I’ve always felt very proud to represent my country in these international teams and to bring everything that I’ve learned about Brazil and bring [a] critical lens.

At the same time, I feel like I play special role, now living in the U.S.A. I have access to bigger platforms, where it can be interesting to bring the Brazilian perspective to topics of conservation and climate. I’d really like to continue being a bridge of communication between the two countries because I believe that can be fruitful.

I think we can have great investigations, but we also need to present solutions. That’s something I always try to add to my work.

JV: Many of your projects have also been multimedia. What do you think can be achieved through video or audio that can’t be fully captured in writing?

PM: I always thought it was a cool way to engage an audience in a way that text can’t. Different people react differently to different mediums. I like radio more than video, but I think video is the most engaging one and also where you can be the most creative.

As a journalist, you are always playing catch up with the audience. That’s extremely necessary. So my experience was a mix of professional necessity but also genuine personal interest.

Julia Vaz is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. She has covered environment and climate change for Heatmap News, Inside Climate News, and New Hampshire Public Radio.

by Ashley D’Souza / January 2nd 2026 / Fellowship Life

Yvette Cabrera, On Covering the ‘Broccoli’ of Environmental Beats

Yvette Cabrera was working as a criminal justice reporter in 2015 when she began to wonder if there was a link between lead exposure and juvenile crime. She spent the next several years digging around in the soil of Santa Ana, California, collecting samples and investigating the environmental health implications of toxic lead contamination, which she discovered was rampant in the city’s low income neighborhoods. She has been covering environmental justice ever since.

Cabrera never expected to end up on this beat, which she calls the “broccoli of the environmental beats” because its emotionally heavy topics are important to cover but hard to swallow. But she loves her work and manages to find hope in it. “I approach this beat by looking at these communities as agents of their own change,” Cabrera says. “They’re not sitting there letting things happen to them; they are out there talking to their city council members, to legislators, to policymakers, making sure that they are heard, and that’s really important.”

Over the years, Cabrera has become an influential voice not only on the environmental beat, but in advocating for diversity in journalism more broadly. She is a founding member of The Uproot Project, a network for environmental journalists of color, and past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Cabrera’s work has now brought her to MIT, where she is spending the 2025-26 academic year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. I spoke with her about how she got here, how she builds trusting relationships with sources, and what it means to have diversity in journalism. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Ashley D’Souza: What was your path to environmental justice reporting?

Yvette Cabrera: I originally started as a general assignment reporter. Around 2010, I started covering criminal justice issues and was doing stories around the juvenile justice system in Orange County, California. I serendipitously ended up on this beat through my criminal justice reporting.

As I was covering these issues and talking to mothers around Southern California, I kept hearing commonalities in their experiences with their sons. That they had trouble focusing in school. A lot of them had ADHD. I came across a story in Mother Jones and this hypothesis that there’s a connection between lead exposure and ADHD, and I had this “aha” moment and took a step back. I was covering the criminal justice system and the environment that these young boys were growing up in — like the poverty they faced, the violence, the high police presence — but I wasn’t considering the factor of the actual environment, the soil. And so, it led me down this path.

This story launched this phase of my career covering environmental justice issues. What communities that seek environmental justice are looking for — at the core — are what everyone else wants: clean air, clean water, clean soil. From this point on, I’ve covered environmental issues across the country from contamination in places like Flint to how climate change is affecting neighborhoods with existing pollution, and how increased flooding may be re-mobilizing that contamination. So a whole range of issues.

I never would have expected to go down this road. I always joke that working with soil would be the last thing I’d expect in my career because as a kid, I hated working in the dirt.

I am always on the lookout for details that help show the bigger picture of what these neighborhoods are really like.

AD: When writing about sensitive topics like lead poisoning in young children, how do you build trust with your sources in order to tell their stories?

YC: When I was working on stories in Orange County, I would spend time in the neighborhood, not just reporting, but showing up to events like street fairs. I would show up and I wasn’t there to report a specific story. I had my notebook in my purse if I needed to take notes, but I was really just there to show my face and hear and see and feel the atmosphere that I was writing about.

So many people make assumptions about these neighborhoods because they have high levels of violence, like there’s not anything beyond that. I am always on the lookout for details that help show the bigger picture of what these neighborhoods are really like: They have street fairs, they have get-togethers, and yes, they have all these other issues, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s important that we not go into these neighborhoods assuming that we know anything. I’m Mexican-American and I fit right into these neighborhoods, but I don’t make assumptions about anything. My goal is always to come in and try to understand what these kids are facing, what these parents are facing, what the challenges are, and to tell a story that is true to the situation they’re facing.

AD: There’s the question of who exactly gets to tell the stories of minority and marginalized communities. Is it always better for a journalist who is a member of said community to report on it?

YC: I believe that if you’re a journalist who is prepared and sensitive to nuances, and you come with an understanding of the language and culture of the people you’re writing about, the community, the neighborhood — that you can write that story.

Are there certain advantages I have because I’m Latina and Mexican-American like so many of the residents in Santa Ana? I think it does come with some advantages, but it doesn’t mean that someone else can’t come into these neighborhoods and write stories with sensitivity. As journalists, we have to tackle so many different issues, and we are not experts in a lot of these issues. You become an expert because you take the time to talk to the people that can provide you with the knowledge to get a better understanding of what’s happening.

I’m a big advocate for making sure we have diversity within journalism as a whole and amongst environmental reporters, because we don’t have enough journalists of color covering these issues. But I’m also a firm believer that we should all have the tools to step in to cover a story, as long as you do it with sensitivity and an acknowledgement that you don’t know everything and you’re there to ask questions and learn. So many of these communities have been under-covered or not covered accurately, so it is important that we do tell the truth of their experiences. Ultimately, I think that’s what’s most important.

We need people from that vast array of different backgrounds, including from rural areas and urban areas. We need that mix.

AD: I’m a member of some journalist affinity groups like The Uproot Project and the Trans Journalists Association. In these groups, I’ve felt supported and uplifted, but also a bit isolated from the rest of journalism. What would it take for journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to feel supported in the larger field of journalism, and not only in these affinity groups?

YC: I think it’s important to look for support amongst people that share our backgrounds and experiences, but I also think it’s important to be part of the larger journalism community. The Uproot Project came about because an editor from Grist brought together multiple journalists of color for a convening in Seattle, and one of the things we talked about was not feeling welcomed at other conferences.

It took off from there. Are these other journalism conferences as welcoming to us as they could be? Maybe in the past, they haven’t been. And I think that’s true, but the most important thing we’re asking for is that space — both in our own space, and space within these larger groups. I think the approach needs to be a mix: Find that space where you feel supported, but also make sure other people see us doing this work, because I do believe we belong everywhere.

I think it’s important to speak up and ask for help when you need it and seek the support from people that get you and people who may not get you, because we’re not going to change the system unless we’re in the system. That’s how I believe we’ll find success.

AD: In your time as a journalist, have you seen the system changing in this way?

YC: Yes, I would say The Uproot Project is proof of that, and I still think we have a long way to go. If I look at the industry as a whole, the numbers are still dismal. We don’t have enough journalists of color, but to me, it’s not just journalists of color — when I speak about diversity, I’m also talking about where you’re from, geographically, where you grew up, I’m talking about class. I don’t think we have enough journalists from working-class backgrounds in the industry.

We need people from that vast array of different backgrounds, including from rural areas and urban areas. We need that mix. All of those different backgrounds are what make our country so beautiful, and we need people with those backgrounds to tell all those stories.

Ashley D’Souza is a master’s student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and freelance environmental reporter.