Vázquez was born and raised in Cuba, and spent the early part of her journalism career in that country before moving to Spain, where she could report and write with greater freedom. She is going to spend her year at Stanford creating a “cyber-ecosystem” to connect debating forums inside and outside Cuba.

The Yahoo! International Fellowship at Stanford was specifically established for people like Vázquez, journalists from countries where there are strong challenges to a free press. Yahoo! and the Knight Fellowships agreed that supporting journalists who were directly or indirectly under attack should be at the top of the to-do list, and so we created the Yahoo! Fellowship in 2006, with a generous gift from Yahoo!.
Vázquez is the fifth Yahoo! Fellow, following Imtiaz Ali, from Pakistan, Violet Gonda, of Zimbabwe, Abebe Gellaw, from Ethiopia, and Nadia Trinidad, from the Philippines. Like Gellaw and Gonda, Vázquez needed to leave her home country in order to be a more effective journalist. Since 1999 she has been based in Madrid, where she has written for Diario El Pais, Spain’s leading newspaper, Marie Claire Spain, and was a founding member of www.cubaencuentro.com, the digital version of Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana Magazine.

As Vázquez arrives, we bid farewell to Nadia Trinidad, of the Philippines, the 2009-10 Yahoo! Fellow. Nadia is a senior correspondent for ABS-CBN Broadcasting Company in Manila. She studied the psychological and sociological aspects of corruption in the media.

Journalists are under attack around the world, and organizations like the Committee To Protect Journalists make sure that those attacks are brought to light. It makes me feel proud that the Knight Fellowships and Yahoo! have teamed up to provide a fellowship at Stanford every year for someone who is bearing the brunt of those attacks.

Links:

• Stanford University John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists
• Committee to Protect Journalists
• ELPAÍS.com: el periódico global en español
• Marie Clarie
• cubaencuentro.com

We’ll start the day by learning about the important role that governments play in protecting privacy and free expression. Panelists including Sarah Labowitz of the U.S. State Department and Christine Bader, Advisor to the UN Special Representative for Business & Human Rights, and Kum Hong Siew, former member of parliament, Singapore will discuss various government approaches to addressing free expression and privacy rights in the Internet, Technology and Communications (ICT) sector.

Another panel, featuring Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo!’s 2010 Georgetown Fellow and contributing editor to Foreign Policy; Andrew Lewman of the Tor Project; Kathleen Reen of Internews and Alan Huang of UltraReach Internet, will discuss the innovative solutions they have created and discovered, all targeted at evading government restrictions on free expression and privacy.

We will also have a fascinating discussion about unconventional threats to online privacy and free expression, during which we will learn about how issues like account deactivation and terms of service violations can have unintended chilling effects on privacy and free expression. Panelists for that discussion include Dr. Mehdi Yahyanejad, founder and editor of Balatarin.com (a site for news and opinions about Iran), Scott Rubin of Google, Kim Pham of AccessNow (an advocacy group that uses technology to keep activists in press and Internet restrictive countries connected), and Danny O’Brien of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Our final panel will feature journalists, bloggers, social entrepreneurs and film-makers, who will share stories about how they are using the Internet and technology to drive social change.  We’ll hear from Abbas Gassem, the founder and editor of Inside Somalia (an online news and opinion platform focused on Somalian political and social issues;) from Sameer Padania, the former manager of the human rights video sharing platform at Witness.org; from Nadia Trinidad, Yahoo!’s Stanford Fellow and senior correspondent from the ABS-CBN Broadcasting Company in Manila, Philippines; from Elia Serra, the co-founder and director of Maneno (a blogging platform created for and by bloggers and journalists in sub-Saharan Africa) and Omid Memarian, noted UC Berkeley Rotary Peace Fellow and Iranian journalist and blogger.

For more information about the Summit, please see here.

For those of you  who will not be joining us in Sunnyvale, we will be posting video shortly after the event, so please stay tuned!

Ebele Okobi-Harris, Director of Yahoo’s Business & Human Rights Program

The focus of this event is to explore how new technologies and business models can support journalism and participatory democracy through a “concept/design mash-up.” This is a natural fit for us at Yahoo! — providing the platform for others to convene, share ideas and insights, and discover new ways to make a difference. Discussion topics will include how the concept and practice of journalism may adapt to search and social networks, crowdsourcing, diverse, fragmented audiences and digital, participatory politics. It’s all about best practices and new technologies that can facilitate fact/data-rich, citizen-supported, machine-using, inclusive journalism that promotes accountable government and open institutions.

I’ve been at Yahoo! since we were just a handful of people building a searchable directory of websites. From the beginning, we’ve been driven by sheer passion and enthusiasm for the transformative possibilities of the Web — we couldn’t wait to make it accessible to everyone, because we knew amazing things would happen when others applied their creativity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. We’ve never had all the answers — the website directory was just a bunch of links to other people’s stuff — but we brought those links together to invite and inspire others to realize the possibilities of this medium.

Promoting freedom of expression and the open exchange of diverse ideas and information — that’s been at the core of everything we do. We believe information is power, and access to information is a democratizing force. And even though we started out merely linking to “other people’s stuff,” we thought a lot about how the mere act of aggregation is creation, and with that comes great responsibility. These very beliefs are at the heart of “journalism that matters.”

It’s these same beliefs, together with our passion for helping others apply their expertise to unlock the power of the Web, that drives our focus on making Yahoo! more open and social. We are creating flexible tools and platforms for others to build on, and look forward to working with like-minded collaborators in an evolving community.

To that end, several members of our news, front page, and central editorial teams will be in attendance this week. As always, we don’t have all the answers. But we can’t wait to see what emerges when we come together with those who do.

Srinija Srinivasan
VP and Editor-in-Chief
Yahoo! Editorial