Alessia Cerantola

Editorial Director, Bassano del Grappa

Alessia’s career has included stints in TV news, producing podcasts, and investigating Big Tobacco. She co-founded the IRPI (Investigative Reporting Project Italy), and worked on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers investigation, which exposed financial crimes worldwide. Alessia was translating manga graphic novels from Japanese into Italian when she got her first journalism gig in 2007. She began working with the magazine Internazionale, bringing Japanese news to an Italian audience. She soon had the opportunity to put her lifelong fascination with Japan into focus, traveling there regularly to report on social and environmental issues. Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK, featured Alessia in a two-part documentary about her reporting on the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Fukushima. She started reporting for the BBC World Service from there, and continued contributing regularly for the next several years. Alessia has reported from Europe and Asia for publications including The Intercept, the Guardian, The Atlantic and The Japan Times. In 2013, she spent three months on a solo road trip around the United States researching Japanese and Korean communities, funded by a fellowship from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Back in Rome, Alessia worked with Report, the flagship investigative program of Italy’s public broadcaster, RAI. One story she worked on –– investigating counterfeit Parma ham –– later caught the attention of actor Stanley Tucci, who featured her in his food show for CNN, Searching for Italy. With her colleagues from IRPI, Alessia investigated the case of a policeman who sexually assaulted several young women in Padua. Citing new evidence in those stories, the prosecutor opened a second trial against the policeman. The investigation was later made into a serialized podcast for Verified, and a documentary series for Sky TV. For IRPI, she also received a fellowship from The GroundTruth Project to report and produce a podcast about the rise of right wing movements in Europe. In 2019, Alessia joined OCCRP (the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) where she reported on the tobacco industry. She coordinated award winning investigations into smokeless tobacco devices, and China Tobacco’s global expansion. Alessia later became OCCRP’s coordinating editor. In 2012, she won the Press Freedom Award, granted by UNESCO and Reporters Without Borders, for a piece she wrote exposing the economic exploitation of Italian freelance journalists. Alessia has Masters level degrees in Oriental Studies, Journalism and Corporate Finance.