International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

ICIJ Staff

Bill Kovach – Interim Director

Bill Kovach has been a journalist and writer for almost 50 years. In that time he was chief of the New York Times Washington Bureau, and served as executive editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and curator of the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University. He served two years as Ombudsman for Brill’s Content magazine and in 2005 was named a Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Kovach is co-author with Tom Rosenstiel of The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (Crown, 2001), which was awarded Harvard University’s Goldsmith Book Prize (2002), the Sigma Delta Chi award for research in journalism, and the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism. Kovach and Rosenstiel also co-authored Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media (Century Press, 1999), which earned an SDX Award for research in journalism in 2000. Kovach was also a contributing writer for Profiles in Courage for Our Time (Hyperion, 2002), The Prevailing South (Peachtree Press, 1988), The Art of Writing Non Fiction (Syracuse Press, 1986) and Assignment America (Quadrangle Press, 1984).
In 2006 Kovach was appointed to the faculty of the University of Missouri Journalism School. In 2004 he filled the John Seigenthaler Chair in Excellence in First Amendment Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. And from 1994-96 he lectured on Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Over the years, Kovach has received numerous recognitions, including the 2006 Journalism Medal of Honor from the Journalist’s Union of Thessalonika, Greece and the 2003 Richard M. Clurman Award for Mentoring. In 2000, he was recognized with the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award accompanied by an honorary Ph.D. from Colby College; and the same year received the Harvard Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Kovach is the founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and its programs.

Nadi Penjarla – Project Director
Nadi Penjarla is the Project Director of Ujima, a computer assisted reporting (CAR) project to create web portals and data hubs for international journalists especially in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Nadi was the founding editor of Global Tryst, an online magazine focusing on international issues from a grassroots perspective. He also had stints as an investment banker, a strategy and a business analytics consultant. Nadi holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and graduate degrees in computer science & engineering.

Simona Raetz – Membership and Outreach Coordinator
Simona Raetz, a German native, joined ICIJ as membership coordinator in November 2009. Before joining the Center, she worked at Hedrick Smith Productions, a PBS Frontline affiliate, where she worked in production research and as an associate producer. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a degree in political science. Her senior year she wrote a thesis examining how societal rules and traditional practices facilitate the spread of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, for which she received departmental honors. Raetz was a staff writer for her college newspaper, The Corsair, and interned at a local newspaper in Germany.

Ricardo Sandoval Palos – Project Manager
Ricardo Sandoval Palos was named project manager at ICIJ in February, 2010. Previously, he was assistant city editor and weekend city editor at the Sacramento Bee, where his reporters covered health, transportation and environmental issues. Before that he was a Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City, for the Dallas Morning News and Knight Ridder Newspapers. He wrote about drug trafficking, the serial murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, and the fate of money withheld from paychecks of World War II-era Mexican guest workers. He also covered conflicts in Venezuela and Colombia. Sandoval Palos’s career has spanned three decades and includes award-winning coverage of the savings and loan scandal and the deregulation of public utility companies. His list of awards includes the Overseas Press Club and the Inter-American Press Association, for “Lost in Transit,” a probe of profiteering in the international remittance business, and the Gerald Loeb prize for business journalism. Sandoval Palos also co-authored the biography “The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement” published in 1997 by Harcourt. He was born in Mexico and raised in San Diego, California.

Marina Walker Guevara — Deputy Director
Marina Walker Guevara is ICIJ’s deputy director. A native of Argentina, she has reported from a half-dozen countries and her investigations have won and shared more than 12 national and international awards. Over a ten-year career, she has written about environmental degradation in Latin America by multinational corporations; shadowy U.S. government HIV/AIDS prevention programs in Africa, and the cigarette mafia in the Tri-Border Area of South America, among other topics. In March 2006 she was awarded the European Commission Lorenzo Natali Prize (Latin America and the Caribbean region) for her reporting about environmental damage caused in Peru by a U.S.-based mining company; that investigation also won her the 2006 Reuters-IUCN Media Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting. She graduated magna cum laude from Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina, with a bachelor’s degree in communication sciences, and earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

Kate Willson — Reporter
Willson joined the Center for Public Integrity in 2007. She earned her master’s in journalism at American University and her bachelor’s in French at Oregon State University. Focused on enterprise and investigative reporting, she has worked from Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and for community and daily newspapers in Oregon and New Mexico.