Our Team
Wendy Collinson
Administrator
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Wendy assists the Executive Director, Jonathan Heawood, and Deputy Director, Joe Mitchell, and provides operational support to the PINF team in the areas of finance, fundraising and HR.
Wendy has previously worked as Executive Assistant to the Managing Editor, Guardian News & Media, as HR & Administration Manager at Mumsnet, and she continues to act as Company Secretary for the Ethical Journalism Network. She holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature from Monash University in Melbourne, and an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London.
Zoe Greenfield
Business Manager
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Zoe has worked with charities and social enterprises in the UK and internationally for fifteen years. She was previously CEO of the Ethical Journalism Network and prior to this held senior roles at the International Network of Street Papers working at the intersection of social enterprise, journalism and advocacy.
Now, as a freelance consultant she provides strategic and operational guidance as well as hands-on support to a range of third sector organisations with a focus on media development and network organisations.
Jonathan Heawood
Executive Director
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Jonathan began his career as a journalist at the Observer and has also served as Editor of the Fabian Review, Director of English PEN, Director of Programmes at the Sigrid Rausing Trust and CEO of IMPRESS. He has written for newspapers and magazines including the Telegraph, Guardian and New Statesman, and journals including Critical Quarterly, the Journal of Media Law and the British Journalism Review. He has given evidence to several Parliamentary inquiries and is regularly invited to speak at conferences in the UK and internationally.
Jonathan has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has held visiting fellowships at King’s College, London, the University of East Anglia and the University of Stirling. He is a Leadership Fellow at St George’s House, Windsor and Chair of the Stephen Spender Trust. His first book, The Press Freedom Myth, was published in 2019.
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Jaldeep Katwala
Network Manager
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Jaldeep has worked as a journalist for the BBC, Channel 4 News and Radio Netherlands. He has trained journalists at Bournemouth University, worked with UN Peacekeeping Missions in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and led capacity building projects for media in Serbia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Southeast Asia and South Sudan. He is passionate about developing the skills of journalists and their managers and about making journalism more socially representative and diverse.
Joe Mitchell
Deputy Director ​
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Joe Mitchell co-founded and co-directed Democracy Club from 2016-2020. Previously, he gained experience in comms and advocacy with Purpose PBC, the UK Civil Service and Commonwealth Secretariat, and has experience with NGOs such as Transparency International and Global Witness. He has degrees from UWaterloo, SOAS and Oxford.
Beckie Shuker
Campaign and Communications Manager​
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Beckie is a campaigner, previously at Oxfam and Save the Children International, where she has worked on campaigns including ending child marriage, climate and economic justice and most recently on Gaza. She has a particular interest in public interest journalism as a vital component to stop the rollback of democratic rights and shrinking civic space in the UK.​
Simona Bisiani
Data Scientist - Local News Map
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Simona is a computational journalism Doctoral Researcher at the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI. She is the data architect on PINF's Local News Mapping project. Her PhD focuses on measuring spatial variations in news coverage in the UK to understand the robustness of local media coverage across the country, and how ownership consolidation affects media diversity and relevance - and whether media diversity and relevance affect democratic engagement. She has worked as the data journalist responsible for the State of Data Journalism surveys 2021-2023.
Associates
Clare Cook
Dr Cook is a leading expert on independent journalism in the UK, specialising in business and revenue models. She is an experienced Principal Investigator having run mapping projects such as: Hyperlocal Revenues in the UK and Europe (Nesta); Ping! Trends to stimulate new revenues for local publishers (Google DNI and Nesta Future News Fund); and as co-author of Sustainable Business Models on the Net (Comet).
She is currently working as a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, where she is co-founder of the Media Innovation Studio and heading up business viability for International Media Support with missions in Ukraine, Georgia and MENA. See https://clarecookonline.com/
Coral Milburn-Curtis
Dr Milburn-Curtis is an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, where she teaches research methods to graduate students. She is a professor at Pôle Paris Alternance and Director of Studies for the Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) programme. She is also a visiting professor at the GreMOG Laboratory, Paris. Her teaching specialism is quantitative research methods and she provides the statistical analysis for PINF research projects.
Sameer Padania
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Sameer Padania works with diverse stakeholders to defend, support and grow the public interest journalism ecosystem in the UK, Europe and beyond. For PINF, Sameer leads the Local News Plans pilot project. He was Lead Rapporteur on the Forum on Information and Democracy's 2021 global report calling on governments to deliver A New Deal for Journalism.
Over the last decade, he has worked as a grantmaker, strategist and assessor for funders including Open Society, Wellcome, the Nesta Future News Fund, and the Google DNI Fund, and networks like the European Journalism Funders Forum. He has written widely-used practical guides on funding journalism and media, investigative journalism, and the trends in funding journalism across Europe, and is a co-founder of the Charitable Journalism Project.