Corruption of history remains as much a weapon in the authoritarian playbook as it was before our current age of information abundance. There are no guarantees that once content is on the internet it ...
Mary Fitzgerald
Mary Fitzgerald is Director of Expression at Open Society Foundations, leading its global work to advance open society values at the intersection of journalism, technology, and culture and art.
Prior to joining the Open Society, Fitzgerald was editor-in-chief and CEO of the global news outlet openDemocracy, where she built an award-winning team of journalists and oversaw major growth in the organization’s global reach and impact. She established an investigative journalism unit and led ground-breaking campaigns to defend journalism and force transparency from governments and big tech. Before openDemocracy, she worked as a senior campaigner with the global organization Avaaz, where she organized campaigns to defend human rights and expose corruption, and as a senior editor of Prospect magazine in London. She has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New York Review of Books, the Boston Globe, Al Jazeera, and others.
She currently sits on the Avaaz board of directors and on the Prospect editorial board. She has also served as a trustee for the human rights charity Reprieve, and on the editorial code committee of Impress, the U.K. press regulator.
For journalism, financial independence is editorial independence. Whether it’s rich proprietors or philanthropists or any special interest group, newsrooms that are overly reliant on one funding sou...
Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have brought increased urgency to discussions on how to protect against the worst outcomes of dis and misinformation. Whether it’s a report on Kremlin-ba...
Funding with purpose: a dialogue with funders on how to provide meaningful support
The Journalism Funders Forum (JFF) is an open community of funders working together to ensure more and more impactful funding of journalism in Europe. We, as funders ourselves, realise funders can hav...
In rich countries, local media is struggling to survive. The people who produce and consume the news are increasingly elites living in big cities. Why is this happening, what does it mean for democrac...
When basic freedoms -- including freedom of expression -- are under attack in democracies around the world, and when climate change is accelerating, staying with traditional newsroom practices isn't j...
Partnership has become the industry buzzword. But when do partnerships work and why do they fail? And how do we make collaboration the real future of journalism? Organised in association with Coda M...
Media capture, the control of journalism outlets by business tycoons and their government cronies, has already existed. In the digital age however it takes new forms. This panel will discuss the role ...
We live in a time when trust is in decline: trust in politicians, trust in institutions, trust in media, even trust in experts. We are drowning in spin and opinions at the same time as many of us are ...
From Brexit to the upcoming European parliament elections, money from unknown sources is increasingly influencing Europe’s politics, boosting the rise of populism across the continent. Over the last...
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