Our Team
Jonathan Heawood
Executive Director
Jonathan began his career as a journalist at the Observer and went on to spend seven years as Director of English PEN, where he campaigned successfully for free speech and media freedom. He served as Director of Programmes at the Sigrid Rausing Trust, one of Europe’s largest human rights foundations, where he developed a new strategy to support investigative journalism. In 2015, Jonathan founded the independent press regulator IMPRESS (The Independent Monitor for the Press). He led IMPRESS as CEO until March 2020.
Jonathan has written for newspapers and magazines including the Telegraph, Independent, Guardian, London Review of Books, Prospect and New Statesman, and journals including Critical Quarterly, Ethical Space, Journal of Media Law, Communications Law, Information Polity and the British Journalism Review. He has also given evidence to several Parliamentary select committees and is regularly invited to speak at conferences in the UK and internationally.
He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, a Leadership Fellow at St George’s House, Windsor, a Committee Member at the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and Chair of the Stephen Spender Trust. His book, The Press Freedom Myth, was published by Biteback in 2019.
Joe Mitchell
Head of Impact
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.
Hani Barghouthi
Campaigns Manager
Hani has worked as a journalist and in advocacy in Jordan, where he grew up, and in the United States. He was a reporter at 7iber, an online magazine specialising in accountability journalism in Amman, a case and communications manager at Rainbow Street, and a Poynter Institute fellow on the breaking news desk at the Detroit News after graduating from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
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Jaldeep Katwala
Network Manager
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.
Associates
Clare Cook
Dr Clare 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 Coral 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
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.