2026: Sameer is lead author – with co-authors Hannah Perry and Polly Curtis – on think tank Demos’ report, Our BBC: A Blueprint for a More Independent and Future-Proofed BBC. The report makes recommendations for reforming the constitutional foundations of the BBC, making its governance and funding determinations more independent, and how to integrate citizen involvement and public deliberation into its governance in ways that strengthen the BBC’s vital independence. Sameer also contributed to Your BBC, Demos’ submission to the Government’s consultation, on which Hannah was lead author.
2024: Sameer is working with Prof Phil Napoli and Tarsi Dunlop at the German Marshall Fund of the US on a new seam of work as a Visiting Fellow, on information inequality in cities, how journalism can help counter it, and what cities can do to help support and advance local journalism and media. This was Sameer’s kick-off piece.
2023: Sameer and Francesca have written a global policy paper for GFMD on building National Funds for Journalism, which has been used by teams designing journalism funds in Brazil and other places to help inform and guide their efforts (alongside its counterpart briefing on government-backed funds, by Brigitte Alfter and Anya Schiffrin – at the same link above)
2023: Sameer has written a discussion paper funded by the Ford Foundation and published by IMS about the rise and characteristics of journalism and media festivals in the Global South, three hypotheses about what they’re bringing to the journalism ecosystem (domestically and internationally), and a range of recommendations for those running, participating in, and supporting media festivals.
2023 (Jonathan Heawood of PINF and Sameer co-wrote a report laying out the concept of Media Wealth Building, a novel approach to considering the challenges facing local media in the four nations of the UK, and both building on PINF’s Local News Plans initiative, and towards the launch of the UK’s first Local News Fund in Newry, Northern Ireland.
2021: Sameer was asked by the Forum on Information and Democracy to serve as Lead Rapporteur for their Working Group on the Sustainability of Journalism, and led the final report, which called for A New Deal for Journalism. Sameer also wrote summaries and presentations that distil the main recommendations of the report. Sameer’s co-rapporteurs, Emma Goodman and Louise Anglès-d’Auriac, were key, as was the Chair of the global Steering Committee, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, then head of the Reuters Institute at Oxford.
2019-22: Sameer wrote a regular newsletter for the Journalism Funders Forum (JFF) unpacking different topics and places in the media philanthropy field (also cross-posted at Macroscope).
2019-20: Sameer worked at Nesta on the development, design and delivery of the Future News Pilot Fund, in partnership with Bethnal Green Ventures, which Dame Frances Cairncross had called for as a four-year, £10m a year fund to catalyse innovation in the UK journalism sector. It was the most recent attempt to build a National Fund for Journalism in the UK. At the point of its development that you can see in this video, this vision felt like something the then-government might actually get behind. But six months later, Covid had hit, and, we subsequently found out through a Lords Communication Committee report, other industry players had lobbied against the FNF, so the fund was cut after just one round, and the infrastructure built for the Fund was dismantled. The reports mapping the sector and reporting on the Fund itself by Nesta colleagues were excellent (Anna Hamilos, Isabel Newman, Karmel Edmonds, and Wallis Grant on the end of programme report, and, for the mapping report, Adeola Otubusen, George Richardson, Konstantinos Stathoulopoulos and the inimitable Juan Mateos Garcia – also Chantale Tippett, who doesn’t seem to be listed as an author, but I know was instrumental, as were a number of others, especially Valerie Mocker, and the BGV team.)
2019: Sameer wrote How to fund investigative journalism for and with the team at Deutsche Welle Akademie – thanks to Nadine Jurrat, Petra Aldenrath, Attila Mong who kindly took over the final edits in the home stretch.
2018: Sameer worked with the Ariadne Network of funders, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and the David and Elaine Potter Foundation to prototype a guide for how Ariadne members could think about and engage in funding journalism and media. Ariadne felt that A Guide to Funding Journalism and Media could be of wider value to other funders, advocates and media organisations, so made it open-access. Ariadne’s Julie Broome, TAI’s Michael Jarvis and Potter’s Ben Stewart were all incredibly helpful, as were the funders who bared their souls for the greater good.
2011: Sameer worked with former WITNESS colleagues on a horizon-scanning report looking at the new landscape of visual imagery, social media, technology and human rights. Sameer was Lead Author on the resulting 2011 report, Cameras Everywhere (with co-authors (now Dr.) Sam Gregory, Yvette Alberdingk-Thijm, and Bryan Nuñez).
2007: Sameer researched and wrote Reflecting the Real World 2, a report for the International Broadcasting Trust on the internet’s impact on coverage of the wider world in UK public service broadcasting (with a chapter from Prof Stephen Coleman and Dr Myria Georgiou).
2005: Sameer and Francesca co-wrote a chapter on the internet’s impact on local radio journalism in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia in Local Radio in the Information Society (Panos/SDC)
2002: Francesca wrote a chapter on local radio’s appetite for global stories on local topics: Audio and the internet in Eastern Africa. (Sameer provided additional research.)
Macroscope 