Adam Cole and Joss Fong

Adam Cole and Joss Fong are recipients of the 2025 News Creator Award.

Adam Cole and Joss Fong run Howtown, “a YouTube channel dedicated to investigating where facts come from.” Their deeply researched videos help make sense of complex topics such as the spread of misinformation, COVID-19 data and human evolution – in a conversational style that keeps people watching.

Joss Fong is a founding member of Vox’s video team, where she helped build their YouTube channel to 11 million subscribers and 3 billion views, and helped launch Vox series on Netflix and YouTube Originals. She won two AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards for her reporting on gene editing and on Covid-19. She holds a master's degree in science reporting from NYU and lives in New York City. 

Adam Cole was born in Oregon and graduated from Stanford with a B.S. and M.S. in biology. He got started in journalism at a small but mighty newspaper called The Ferndale Enterprise. During eight years at NPR's science desk, he was heard on the radio and podcasts, and created the YouTube channel Skunk Bear. He wrote and directed 10 episodes of the Netflix series "Explained." He lives in Bogotá with his wife and two cats.