Journalism for the poor: how to tell stories for people without power and privilege and why it matters

Maritza Felix

Maritza L. Félix is an award-winning freelance journalist, producer, and writer in Arizona. She is the founder and director of Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language news service that connects people in Arizona and Sonora primarily through WhatsApp and social media. She is the creator of Cruzando Líneas, a podcast of new border narratives. She is co-producer and co-host of Comadres al Aire. In 2022, Maritza was named Innovator of the Year by the Local Media Association and received the 2022 Cecilia Vaisman Award for Best Hispanic Multimedia Journalist from Northwestern University and NAHJ. She is a senior fellow in the JSK Community Impact Fellowship program at Stanford and a graduate of the Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership in Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She is also a fellow of The Carter Center, the Education Writers Association (EWA), Feet in 2 Worlds (Fi2w), IWMF’s “Adelante” and Listening Post Collective; she is part of Take The Lead’s 50 Women Who Can Change the World of Journalism 2020. Felix has twice been named “Arizona’s Best Spanish Language Journalist” and one of the “40 Hispanic Personalities Under 40 in Arizona.

Shirish Kulkarni

Shirish Kulkarni is an award-winning journalist, researcher and community organiser, with 25 years’ experience working in all the UK’s major broadcast newsrooms. He now works across a range of innovation, inclusion and arts projects, with a focus on new forms of storytelling, community engagement and responsible use of technology - all with the aim of shifting power to build more reflective and inclusive journalism systems.

Mitali Mukherjee

Mitali Mukherjee is Director of the Journalist Programmes at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. She is a political economy journalist with more than two decades of experience in TV, print and digital journalism. She was a Chevening fellow for the South Asia Journalism Fellowship 2020, a Raisina Asian Forum for Global Governance Young Fellow 2019 and a 2017 fellow of the Australia India Youth Dialogue. In 2020, she was nominated for the prestigious Red Ink Awards in India for two of her business stories. Over the course of her journalistic career, Mitali has been Consulting Business Editor at The Wire and Mint. Prior to that she was Markets Editor at CNBC TV 18 and Prime Time Anchor at TV Today and Doordarshan. She has been a Fellow at The Observer Research Foundation (ORF) where she led Gender Initiatives for the organisation. Mitali has also co-founded two start-ups that focused on civil society and financial literacy. She is a gold medallist in Television Journal...

Andreea Vilcu

Andreea Vîlcu is a Romanian freelance journalist covering social inequity. She started working in journalism when she joined DoR (Decât o Revistă) in 2018 – an independent longform media outlet based in Bucharest, Romania. In 2022, she published a personal essay about growing up with debt and how this shaped her relationship with money in her adult life. The topic is still largely taboo in Romania, where talking openly about income, loans and debt goes against a long-standing cultural habit of keeping money-related conversations private. When the magazine closed at the end of 2022, she joined the Romanian national newspaper Libertatea until the autumn of 2024. She has also been part of the organizing team of the international storytelling conference The Power of Storytelling since 2019. But financial vulnerability has always remained in the back of her mind. Against the backdrop of rising inflation — which in 2025 reached the highest level in the EU for a moment — she began researching the podcast Prea Sărac (“Too Poor”) in the summer of 2025, alongside former DoR colleagues. Prea Sărac was launched in October 2025, as a six-episode audio series about the struggles of getting by in Romania today. Especially after a hard 2025 marked by political uncertainty and austerity measures that hit the most vulnerable category of people: students, mothers, minimum-wage workers and the working class at large, most of them living just one emergency away from personal bankruptcy. Through Prea Sărac, Andreea — the reporter and host of the podcast — wanted to start a necessary conversation about the shame and guilt that the daily stress of scarcity creates in people’s lives. And hopefully the conversation will build more solidarity and the feeling that you're not alone.

Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo

Il Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo di Perugia è un evento annuale che riunisce professionisti dei media, esperti di comunicazione e appassionati di informazione da tutto il mondo. Si svolge nel centro storico di Perugia e offre conferenze, dibattiti, workshop e opportunità di networking sui temi più rilevanti del giornalismo contemporaneo.

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