#Interconnected22: Day 2 Welcome & Plenary Session

Join the Pulitzer Center as we kick off Day 2 of our 2022 climate conference, Interconnected: Reporting the Climate Crisis. Executive Editor Marina Walker Guevara will share opening remarks, followed by talks from Eliane Brum, David Akana, and Wahyu Dhyatmika. Learn more about these featured speakers below.

This event is part of the Pulitzer Center's two-day climate conference, #Interconnected22, taking place on June 9 & 10, 2022. For more information on the agenda, themes, and speakers, and to register for more sessions, please visit the conference website here. '

Marina Walker Guevara is Executive Editor at the Pulitzer Center. Prior to that, she was ICIJ’s director of strategic initiatives and network.

She managed the two largest collaborations of reporters in journalism history: the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, which involved hundreds of journalists using technology to unravel stories of public interest from terabytes of leaked financial data. Walker Guevara has been instrumental in developing the science behind ICIJ’s model of large-scale media collaboration, persuading reporters who used to compete with one another instead to work together, share resources and amplify their reach and impact.

Her work as a journalist started in her native Argentina, where she received the Perfil Freedom of Expression Prize in 2016. Her stories on topics ranging from environmental degradation by multinational companies to the global offshore economy have appeared in leading international media, including The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, Mother Jones, Le Monde and the BBC.

She has won or shared more than 50 national and international awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and honors from Long Island University’s George Polk Awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Overseas Press Club, Bartlett and Steele Awards, Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Award for distinguished Latin American reporting (special citation) and the inaugural Susan Talalay Award for Outstanding Journalism.

In 2018-2019, Walker Guevara was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University where she studied the use of artificial intelligence in big data investigations. That same year, she received the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service from her alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism.

Walker Guevara sits on the board of directors of the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) and is a co-founder of the Latin American Center for Investigative Reporting (CLIP).

David Akana is a media trainer with over two decades of experience in journalism and international communications and knowledge management. Akana serves in the editorial board of Our Future on Earth, a yearly landmark report providing robust analysis on the state of our planet. Akana is also an occasional contributor to the commentary section of Reuters and Managing Editor of infoCongo, Central Africa's innovative and interactive news platform. In this role, he traveled across Central Africa, strengthening the capacities of journalists and helping cover underreported issues. He is from Cameroon, where he worked for the state broadcaster, Cameroon Radio Television (CRTV), among other news media. 

Akana's full-time job in the past seven years has included supporting the World Bank Group in Washington, D.C. (2013-2015) and the African Development Bank in Abidjan (2015-2017) to advance the communications of development finance. Currently, he is communications director at CORAF, an international nonprofit association working to enhance prosperity, food, and nutrition security in West and Central Africa. 

Eliane Brum is a Brazilian writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. She has received more than 40 awards and honors at home and abroad, published six nonfiction books and one novel, and directed four documentary films. In October 2019, her new book "The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil's Everyday Insurrections" was launched by Graywolf in the U.S., and by Granta, in the UK. She writes regular columns for El País (Spain), and she is also a contributor to The Guardian, Atmos and European newspapers and magazines. She is one of the protagonists of global movements Amazon Center of the World and Free The Future. She lives in Altamira, in the Amazon Rainforest.

Wahyu Dhyatmika has been covering politics, society, the economy, city issues and current affairs in Indonesia since 2000. He is currently CEO of PT IMD/Tempo Digital.

During the 2019 Indonesian general and presidential election, Wahyu Dhyatmika and his colleagues founded CekFakta.com, the first fact-checking collaboration platform in Indonesia. He was also part of the initial team that founded IndonesiaLeaks.id, the only whistle-blower secure platform in Indonesia.

Dhyatmika helped usher Tempo's transformation into a digital newsroom. He was part of Tempo's winning team at the Final Editors Lab hackathon organized by the Global Editors Network in 2016. The same year, Tempo organized the first ever media hackathon in Indonesia.

He also helped start a platform called TempoSMS, which calls for training local and marginalised communities across the country to send text messages about facts they believe are important to their community. Now it has developed into TempoWitness, an interactive citizen journalism platform where the public gets to decide what needs to be reported on.

In addition to the above professional achievements, Dhyatmika is an activist at The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), a journalists association and press union that promotes independent journalism, and freedom of the press. He is also the Secretary General for the Association for Indonesian Media Cyber (AMSI). Dhyatmika was a 2014-2015 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and he currently teaches Data Journalism at Universitas Indonesia and Universitas Multimedia Nusantara (UMN).