About:
Jane Lytvynenko is an award-winning freelance reporter specializing in visual and online investigations. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Guardian, MIT Tech Review, and other publications. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Jane now lives in Warsaw, Poland. She’s fluent in Ukrainian, Russian, and English and has basic a knowledge of French and Polish.
At The Wall Street Journal, Jane contributed to the visual investigations team. There, she focused on investigating Russia’s war on Ukraine. One investigation she contributed to, “Russia Is Using a Secret Network to Steal Ukraine Grain,” won the 2023 Gerald Loeb Award in the video category. The investigative documentary, “Shadow Men: Inside Wagner, Russia’s Secret War Company,” for which Jane was one of the producers, is a finalist for the 2024 duPont-Columbia Award.
Previously, Jane was a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Centre. She contributed to the Tech and Social Change project. Her work focused on devising a training curriculum for newsrooms and academics, auditing research, and digging into media manipulation cases globally. She held workshops for a variety of news organization, including the Texas Tribune, ABC News, Axios, the 19th, and others. She also worked with disinformation specialists around the globe on case studies for the Media Misinformation Casebook.
Before joining Harvard, Jane spent five years working as a senior technology reporter at BuzzFeed News. She focused on the disinformation beat. There, she helped pioneer a breaking news approach to debunking false information across platforms. Throughout her tenure, she’s covered elections, attacks, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She also investigated social media manipulation, extremist groups, and networked disinformation campaigns. Her coverage is widely viewed as pioneering in the field and has been cited by lawmakers globally. In addition to producing impactful work at BuzzFeed News, Lytvynenko taught workshops in online investigations to fellow journalists globally.
Prior to working at BuzzFeed News, Jane was a reporter and editor at the media criticism outlet Canadaland. She investigated misconduct within the Canadian media landscape and under her leadership, Canadaland broke a series of stories on employee mistreatment, plagiarism, and lack of diversity in Canadian media. She also contributed as a freelancer to CBC News, Maclean’s, NOW Magazine, and others.