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Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
In a "post-truth" world, websites like Snopes — an online fact-checking site founded more than 20 years ago — are more important than ever. In this Wired longread, reporter Michelle Dean puts the site and its founders, David Mikkelson and his ex-wife, Barbara Hamel, under a microscope. The result is an in-depth profile of the site that has become the gold standard for fact-checking and debunking "fake news".
Ironically, her reportage reveals that Snopes may have its own fake news problem: Since their acrimonious divorce, Mikkelson has been gradually minimizing — even erasing — Hamel's role in the company's success. Their conflict very nearly tanked the site, which was recently rescued by an injection of $690,000 from a Kickstarter crowd-funded campaign.
For now, luckily, Snopes future seems relatively secure. Unfortunately, despite the necessity of fact-checking sites in the era of "fake news", whether it will last in the long-term future remains to be seen.