Renée Kaplan and Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC join the Reuters Institute as Visiting Fellows from April 2025

Media manager Renée Kaplan and human rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC are joining the Reuters Institute as Visiting Fellows from April to June 2025. During their time in Oxford, they will work on separate projects and will share their experiences and learnings with our Journalist Fellows and with the rest of the Institute's community.

As a Visiting Fellow, Kaplan will explore new approaches to developing and financing independent digital media. During her time with us, Gallagher will focus on the pressing issue of impunity for journalists’ deaths, and on creating systematic changes to secure accountability in these cases. 

Before joining the Institute, Renée Kaplan was the Head of News for ARTE, the European public broadcaster, where she oversaw news, current affairs documentaries and news magazines, and piloted numerous digital transformation initiatives. 

Before taking on that role, she was the Head of digital editorial development at the Financial Times, where she led innovation, new editorial products and digital journalism, including newsletters, podcasts and topic verticals. She worked both on content and strategy and developed new ways to align journalism and business models. She has been a frequent speaker on innovation and the future of journalism at industry events and in journalism schools. 

Before the FT, she was deputy editorial director of the news network France 24, where she was a senior member of the original launch team in 2006. Previously, she was based in New York, where she worked as a producer and editor on staff at numerous US media, including CNN, CBS News and the New York Observer. 

She is a member of the Strategic Advisory Board for the Sciences Po Journalism School, where she taught previously. She has also taught digital journalism at the American University of Paris, and editorial innovation strategy to newsroom leaders in the Craig Newmark School of Journalism Executive Program at CUNY. She was a 2023 Nieman Journalism Foundation Fellow at Harvard.

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is a human rights lawyer, and over the past 25 years she has acted in many leading cases in the UK courts, at the European Court of Human Rights, at the Privy Council and before international bodies. She has particular expertise in State accountability, media freedom, journalists’ safety and arbitrary detention. She has secured the freedom of many wrongly detained journalists, cartoonists, writers and activists worldwide. 

Her caseload includes leading the international legal teams for Maria Ressa (Philippines), Jimmy Lai (Hong Kong), Jose Rubén Zamora (Guatemala), BBC News Persian (Iran) and Daphne Caruana Galizia (Malta). Alongside her practice, she is a Commissioner of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, an Adjunct Professor at University College Dublin, Ireland’s Special Rapporteur on Child Protection and an Associate Tenant at Doughty Street Chambers, London.