Mijal Iastrebner is co-founder and Executive Director of SembraMedia. She is a journalist, an entrepreneur, a speaker, and teacher of entrepreneurial journalism. She’s a specialist in leadership, team management and international research. She helped hundreds of journalistic startups to pluralize their teams, advising on diversification of sources, the importance of doing journalism as a service to the community, and understanding the digital market, whether in Latin America or in other regions.

In 2015, she co-founded SembraMedia with Janine Warner, a journalist and entrepreneur from the United States. As Executive Director of SembraMedia she built a remote regional team based in Argentina that supports a network of more than 100 consultants in more than 20 countries. SembraMedia is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping digital media entrepreneurs to build more sustainable and independent news organizations. SembraMedia provides business and technical training, market intelligence, marketing, networking opportunities, consulting and financial support to help digital native media become sustainable. As the leader of SembraMedia, she built partnerships and won international funding, connecting the independent digital journalism ecosystem with human rights foundations, technology companies and investors.

Since 2015, she has been sharing lessons learned from her experience in the entrepreneurial world, participating and organizing panels at international conferences such as the International Journalism Festival in Perugia (IJF), Festival Gabo, UNESCO International Freedom of Expression Day, the United Nations Women's Committee, the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) at The University of Texas at Austin, among others.

Her interest in entrepreneurial journalism started at the age of 22, when she founded the cultural magazine Cultra, and since then she stayed in the world of entrepreneurship. She worked as a strategic communication consultant for several regional companies and startups for more than 8 years. In 2013 she created the first course in Entrepreneurial Journalism for the Escuela de Periodismo TEA, where she trained a team of professors and taught courses for three years. She was also a professor in the Master's Degree in Journalism at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) and in the Diplomatura of the Universidad de San Andrés (UdeSA). She was also a co-instructor in a MOOC on Journalism Entrepreneurship of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas, held in 2016 and in which more than 3500 students from 40 different countries participated.

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