Technology for Truth: Reframing Stories Young Journalists in Conversation with Nobel Laureate for Peace Maria Ressa

2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and CEO, Rappler, Philippines
Professor, Columbia University’s School of International & Public Affairs

Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler’s CEO, Maria has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, forced to post bail ten times to stay free. Rappler’s battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.

In October 2021, Maria was one of two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

For her courage and work on disinformation and ‘fake news,’ Maria was named one of Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of Time’s Most Influential Women of the Century. She was also part of the BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2019 and Prospect magazine’s world’s top 50 thinkers. In 2020, she received the Journalist of the Year award, the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, the Most Resilient Journalist Award, the Tucholsky Prize, the Truth to Power Award, and the Four Freedoms Award. In 2021, UNESCO awarded her the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.

Among many awards for her principled stance, she received the prestigious Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, the Knight International Journalism Award from the International Center for Journalists, the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University, the Columbia Journalism Award, the Free Media Pioneer Award from the International Press Institute, and the Sergei Magnitsky Award for Investigative Journalism.

Before co-founding Rappler, Maria focused on investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia. She opened and ran CNN’s Manila Bureau for nearly a decade before moving to Indonesia and opening the network’s Jakarta bureau, which she ran from 1995 to 2005. That was when she returned to Manila as the senior vice president in charge of ABS-CBN’s multimedia news operations, managing about a thousand journalists for the largest news organization in the country.

Maria authored Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook. Her most recent book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, was released in November 2022 and has been translated into 20 languages with more to come.

In 2022, she was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General to the Leadership Panel of the Internet Governance Forum and serves as its Vice-Chair.

She is a Professor of Practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she leads projects within the Institute of Global Politics related to artificial intelligence and democracy.

Maria focuses critical attention on the breakdown of our global information ecosystem and how interconnected communities of action can hold the line to protect democratic values.

Aurora Almendral is a Filipina American journalist and writer based in London. She has worked in over 30 countries, from Somalia to Mexico, and has lived in Thailand, Spain, New York and the Philippines, where she maintains a home in Cebu. Her journalism has been published by The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine, and has been recognized with multiple awards, including from the Overseas Press Club of America, and a Hillman Prize for investigative journalism. She is currently working on her first book.

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. Her debut book, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country, an account of the Philippine drug war, was hailed as “a journalistic masterpiece” by the New Yorker.

The book, released October 2023 by Random House, was a New York Times Top 10 Best Books of the Year, A New Yorker and The Economist Best Book of the Year, and was Time Magazine’s #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year. It has since won the NYPL Helen Bernstein Book Award and was longlisted for the Moore Prize for Human Rights and the PEN Galbraith Award. She lives in Manila.