Rana Sabbagh Advisor

A founder of the award-winning ARIJ network, established in 2005, Rana Sabbagh has dedicated the last ‏ ‏35 years of her career as journalist, columnist and media trainer to promote free speech, independent media and human rights in a largely autocratic region.

ARIJ, the region’s leading pioneering network, is spreading the culture of “accountability journalism” in Arab newsrooms, as well as media professors and students across.

As the ‎former chief editor of The Jordan Times, Sabbagh became the first Arab woman ‎in the history of the Levant to run a daily political newspaper. Prior to her work with the newspaper, she was a correspondent for Reuters International News Agency in Jordan and the Gulf for over a decade.

In 2003, she assisted in establishing Jordan’s newest newspaper, Al-Ghad. In addition to her current post at ARIJ, Sabbagh is the representative for the Middle East and North Africa for a second term on the board of directors of the “Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN)”. She has also worked as the Jordan correspondent for, “The Times” of London newspaper, and a media consultant and trainer for the ‘Thomson Reuters Foundation”.

She holds an Executive Master in Positive Leadership and Strategy from the I.E University in Madrid. She is a jury member on several annual regional and global journalism prizes. In 2024, Rana was awarded the ICFJ Knight Trailblazer Award, with judges citing her work, not just as a journalist but as “a teacher and mentor, working with journalists to show them the power of investigations and giving them an outlet for their work beyond the Middle East.”