Media

Anastasiia Popko is a program assistant with GMF’s Ukraine: Relief, Resilience, Recovery program, based in Berlin. She is responsible for the administrative part of the grantmaking program and for fostering relationships with grantees. Her primary focus is on strengthening the resilience of civil society and local media in Ukraine and the broader region.  

Prior to joining GMF, Anastasia worked as a partnership manager in Ukrainian online media, developing relations between European institutions and Ukrainian journalists. She has also worked on international cultural and art projects, as well as on decolonization, memory, and identity topics. 

Sameer Padania is a nonresident fellow with GMF Cities and runs the independent consultancy Macroscope, which works with diverse stakeholders—including independent media, philanthropy, civil society, businesses, think tanks, and governments—on strategies, policies, and funding mechanisms to defend, support, and grow public interest journalism ecosystems worldwide. He is working with the Public Interest News Foundation in the United Kingdom to help communities develop local news plans and to launch the country's first local news fund. His reports include the Forum on Information and Democracy’s global report, which calls on governments to deliver “A New Deal for Journalism”, and guides grantmaking to journalism, funding investigative journalism, and developing national funds for journalism. 

Padania has written about the funding environment for journalism in Europe for the Journalism Funders Forum and now writes a regular, independent newsletter. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and is a trustee of the Indigo Trust, Doc Society and the Orwell Foundation. 

Philip M. Napoli is is a nonresident fellow with GMF Cities. He is the James R. Shepley professor of public policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, where he is also the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He is a docent at the University of Helsinki and the principal investigator of the News Measures Research Project, an initiative that has focused, since 2014, on conducting actionable research on assessing the health of local news and information ecosystems. 

Napoli has provided research and expert testimony on issues such as local journalism and media ownership to the Federal Communications Commission, the US Senate Commerce Committee, the US Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Research Service. He has also engaged in research collaborations with organizations such as the New America Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.

Napoli is the author/editor of eight books, most recently News Quality in the Digital Age (with Regina Lawrence) and Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age. His earlier books include Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences and Foundations of Communications Policy: Principles and Process in the Regulation of Electronic Media. He has published more than 50 articles in legal, public policy, journalism, and communication journals, and more than 30 invited book chapters in edited collections.

Adam Hsakou is a program coordinator in GMF’s Paris office.

Previously, Hsakou covered Poland as a journalist for Le Figaro and other French-language outlets.  

Prior to that, Hsakou was head of community for Central Europe at the Spanish venture capital firm Demium, where he helped foster the startup ecosystem in the region, and program manager at Polish Tech Day, an initiative that brings together French, British, and Polish entrepreneurs.

In 2019, Hsakou served as a parliamentary attaché in charge of communication for a member of the French parliament. 

Hsakou has interned at the French embassy in Warsaw, the European Commission, and the communications agency Havas Paris.

Hsakou holds a master's degree in economics and management of government and international organizations from Bocconi University and a master’s degree in international public management from Sciences Po Paris. He is fluent in French, Polish, English, Spanish and Italian, and has a basic knowledge of Russian.