“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album
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About
Tanya Pampalone has more than 20 years of journalism experience, working in digital and legacy publications in the United States, the Czech Republic and South Africa.
She is currently the managing editor of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit which supports investigative journalists. From her base in Johannesburg, Tanya is responsible for GIJN’s far-flung editorial team, covering sustainability and innovation in journalism, as well as case studies and tools and techniques for investigative journalists, in seven languages and eight regions around the world.
Tanya is co-editor of I Want To Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa’s Great Metropolis (Wits Press, 2018), with international migration expert Loren Landau. She was a contributor to Southern African Muckraking: 150 Years of Investigative Journalism Which Has Shaped the Region (Jacana, 2018) and Unbias the News: Why Diversity Matters for Journalism (Hostwriter, 2019).
Tanya speaks regularly on issues spanning journalism futures, migration, disinformation, longform writing and new storytelling forms. She’ll be chairing two panels — one on storytelling and another on editing the investigative story — at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (Hamburg, 2019), and will be talking journalistic collaborations with academia, civil society and the arts at the African Investigative Journalism Conference (Johannesburg, 2019). Also in 2019, Tanya spoke about migration issues at the Franschhoek Literary Festival, weighed in on the intersection of fact-checking and investigative journalism at GlobalFact6 in Cape Town and chaired a panel on innovation at the World Journalism Education Conference in Paris.
Published Work
In South Africa, Anger in a Hashtag
JOHANNESBURG – Early one morning last year a handful of students gathered to block the main entrance to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to protest the university’s proposed 10 percent tuition fee hike. Their intention: to physically illustrate the economic barriers faced by those attempting to get into the South Africa’s institutions of …
The Funny Thing About Race in South Africa
JOHANNESBURG — It’s 1948 and it’s the first day of apartheid in South Africa. A jazzy tune is playing, the sun is shining and some white people are lying on blankets on a grassy embankment. A familiar sign pops up: “Whites Only.” The camera pans onto a young black man who is taking his place …
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Fear and Loathing at South Africa’s Public Broadcaster
JOHANNESBURG — Sometimes the most acute afflictions present in the simplest forms – like the rusted machine that once spit out parking tickets for visitors to the hulking concrete and steel towers of the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Johannesburg studios, or the escalators meant to glide employees from the ground floor to the lobby. On …
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