A Conversation with Abbas Hussain

09/27/22 • 10 min

How a two-year program helped vulnerable communities in South Asia protect themselves from Covid-19 and the “fake-news pandemic.”

How a two-year program helped vulnerable communities in South Asia protect themselves from Covid-19 and the “fake-news pandemic.”

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LeadNext Fellows: Citizens of the World

Meet twenty young leaders from the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific, the first graduates of The Asia Foundation’s LeadNext Fellowship program. Read the full blog about the LeadNext fellows.

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The Heady Early Days of Rappler

Last week, The Asia Foundation presented our Chang Lin Tien Distinguished Leadership Award to the pioneering Philippine news site Rappler and its founding team, Maria Ressa, Glenda Gloria, Chay Hofileña, and Beth Frondoso, for their courageous online journalism. Once a scrappy startup, Rappler at 10 years old has become a political lightning rod with an average of 40 million page views a month and a history of discomfiting the powerful.
Founded in 2012 by a team of veteran journalists, Rappler’s impact reverberated far beyond the Philippines as it modeled a style of fast-paced, online journalism that upended established newsrooms. It was also a canary in the coalmine of social media, as a tool that once seemed like a new voice for democracy took a darker turn towards online attacks and disinformation.
John and Tracie sat down in San Francisco with two of Rappler’s founders, Executive Editor Glenda Gloria and CEO and President Maria Ressa, to talk about their careers, what it’s like to win a Nobel Peace Prize while threatened with years in prison, and which of the four founders is the mean one.