Yemile Bucay

Yemile Bucay is an independent journalism risk and security advisor working to promote a culture of safety in the profession in order to have a sustainable, resilient, and free press. Yemile offers holistic safety training to journalists and journalism students and consults with newsrooms and nonprofits to build resilience and well-being. She was BuzzFeed's Risk & Security Manager, where she oversaw the safety of staff and freelance journalists at BuzzFeed News and HuffPost. She has worked with journalists reporting from high-risk environments including Haiti, Afghanistan, wartime Ukraine, Mexico, Nigeria, China, Syria, and beyond. Based in New York City, Yemile has worked within organizations that support media in an ever more complex landscape through positions at PEN America, ElectionSOS, NewsQ, NewsGuard, and FASPE. Yemile is a journalist by education and background. She was a Global Migration Reporting Fellow at Columbia covering the intersection of immigration and gender, and worked as a journalist and documentary producer in Mexico and France. Her work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Broadly, Newsweek, Tablet, and Rest of World. She has also taught as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia. Yemile received a B.A. in Humanities from Yale University, and a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. "I love that this fellowship aims to teach people underrepresented in safety training, as it means that the fellowship will be attuned to the threats that women, non-binary people, and other underrepresented folk face in our work. One of the challenges I found in the approach to safety training in journalism school, was that it at times relied on traditional biases when assessing who is a threat and when advising where to find safety, without recognizing that for some folks, the safest place in a protest may not be with police."

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