Six Post-Graduate Fellows join Columbia Journalism Investigations for 2024–2025

“This year’s CJI fellows bring a wealth of newsroom experience at digital, print and broadcast outlets,” said Kristen Lombardi, Program Director and Editor. “Their complementary skill sets and diverse backgrounds will enable them to take on critically important and timely investigations.”

CJI launched in 2014 with a dual mission: to provide recent graduates the opportunity to deepen their investigative skills and to help fill talent and resource gaps in today's newsrooms. 

CJI partners with editors and senior reporters at industry-leading news organizations to produce accountability-focused journalism that would not be possible otherwise. Projects have been published in outlets such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, and ProPublica.

The 2024-25 fellows have joined one of three teams at CJI: Global Migration, Cross-Borders Data and Investigative.

The 2024-25 fellows joining the global migration team are Jazzmin Jiwa, '24 M.S., and Carla Mandiola, '24 M.S. Data. The team reports deeply on immigration and migration issues.

Jiwa is an international journalist and documentary maker who has reported on issues at the intersections of migration, conflict and human rights in more than 15 countries. Her long and short-form print, photo, audio and video work has been published by Time, BBC, Reuters, CBC Radio, Al-Jazeera, Slate and others.

Mandiola is a reporter, covering culture, technology, and justice issues for magazines and newspapers in Chile and across South America. Her work has been recognized by such awards as the Cyber Security Journalism Award from ESET in Spain, and the Excellence in Journalism Award in Chile. 

CJI’s cross-borders data team allows recent graduates to use their skills to produce global stories of public interest by collaborating with international reporters and news organizations.

The team welcomes two fellows: Johanna Hansel, '24 M.S.,  and Carla Samon Ros, '24 M.S. 

Hansel is an international investigative and data journalist covering science, the environment, and health. She has worked with GEO, DIE ZEIT, Doclights, and at North German Broadcasting in her native Germany.

Samon Ros is an international reporter covering the environment, labor rights, politics and economics. Before joining CJI, she worked as a foreign correspondent for the world’s largest wire service in Spanish, EFE, in Brazil and Peru.

CJI’s investigative team pairs postgraduate fellows with experienced reporters and editors to produce accountability-focused stories on urgent matters of public interest in the U.S.

They welcome Curtis Brodner, '24 M.S. Stabile, and Oishika Neogi, '24 M.S. Stabile. 

Brodner is an investigative reporter based in New York City. He has reported on labor, housing and policing issues. Before joining CJI, Brodner was a metro news reporter for 1010 WINS. He also ran a volunteer news organization called Protest_NYC that covered the 2020 protests against police violence.

Neogi is an investigative reporter based in NYC, covering criminal justice, healthcare and politics. She has worked at an investigative outlet in New Delhi, and collaborated with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Forbidden Stories, Al Jazeera and various local news outlets in India. Neogi was also a media fellow with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) South Asia, where she reported on children orphaned by the COVID-19 pandemic in India.

The 2024-2025 fellows join Columbia Journalism Investigations following a prodigious year of multi-newsroom reporting collaborations. In June 2024, CJI’s global migration team, in collaboration with Reuters, published an investigation into how migrants are smuggled into the United States through two new intercontinental routes by traffickers charging exorbitant fees. One month later, CJI’s cross border data team, in collaboration with The Examination, The Post and Courier and Belgian public broadcaster RTBF, spotlighted how “forever chemical” polluters get government funding to meet the burgeoning demand for electric-vehicle batteries.

Plus, a December 2023 investigation by another CJI team working with NPR and The Ohio Newsroom revealed that courts in Ohio affirmed improper conduct by more than 100 county prosecutors over four years. More than a dozen of these prosecutors did so at least twice — and none of them faced any documented history of discipline as a result.

Columbia Journalism Investigations Fellowships are among several exclusive paid fellowships available through the Journalism School. For more information, visit Exclusive Fellowships and Internships.