Jack Brewster
Founder and CEO
Jack Brewster is founder and CEO of Newsreel. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Time Magazine, Vice, and Fortune. In 2024, he broke the story uncovering the source of the viral claim about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. Jack is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and a former Fulbright research fellow.
Brijesh Tiwari
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
Brijesh is the CTO at Newsreel, where he leads engineering across the mobile app, backend, and Newsreel Classroom at scale. He previously founded Dark, a hyperlocal delivery startup that reached the Top 50 on the App Store, outranking brands like McDonald’s, Cava, and Toast Tables. After Dark, he co-founded a meme-coin trading platform recognized by Solana that won at the Colosseum hackathon. He researched keystroke-based emotion recognition during grad school at Syracuse University, publishing work at IJCB.
Katie Toepp
Design Lead
Katie is Design Lead at Newsreel, where she builds the interface and brand identity that helps news-avoidant students actually engage with current events. She developed Newsreel’s “Tactile Digital” aesthetic — a Y2K-inspired design system that makes news feel approachable — and created semantic visualization systems that reveal how events connect rather than dumping articles in a feed.
Jon Ponciano
VP, Business Development
Jon is the VP of Business Development at Newsreel, where he builds partnerships that bring Newsreel into classrooms and libraries across the country. He spent nearly a decade as a financial reporter and editor, including over six years at Forbes covering markets, wealth, and entrepreneurship. He’s also written for the Los Angeles Business Journal, Investopedia, Yahoo! Finance, and The Motley Fool. Jon received his MBA from Columbia Business School and a dual degree in business journalism and economics from UNC Chapel Hill.
Eliza Haverstock
Editor
Eliza is an Editor at Newsreel with nearly a decade of experience in financial journalism. She previously worked at Forbes, NerdWallet, and Bloomberg, and she also works as an English language teacher. She graduated from the University of Virginia with degrees in economics and history.
Nadya Yeh
Editor
Nadya writes and helps lead Newsreel’s editorial team to reimagine journalism for news-weary readers tired of doom-scrolling the internet. She previously served as a senior editor at The China Project and at the China Institute. She holds an MA in Global Thought from Columbia University and a BA in art history from Williams College.
