I’m an expert on inclusion and have practical experience building diverse teams and giving them the resources they need to thrive, as well as building communities that empower organizations.I can help you identify and articulate your mission and then create workflows, budgets and systems that help you invest in your goals and resource your teams to meet them. I’m great with spreadsheets and finding the right apps and tools to help you serve your communities with efficiency and purpose. I have almost two decades of experience running projects, teams and organizations, mostly in the nonprofit sector.I’m happy to have a free, quick call if you have questions.

Not a LION member? Here’s more about how to hire me.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on how to make newsrooms sustainable from a revenue perspective, but it’s so important to think about what sustainability looks like for a community, and for news workers themselves. jmr has great wisdom and practical ideas here. News colleagues, I hope you spend some time with this guide, published by the Center for Cooperative Media.

Get a copy here.

I can’t say enough about my predecessor, Giles Morris, who has created an organization with heart and soul and a mission of equity in local news at its core. We have an amazing team and an amazing board — it’s a dream job to work with and for my neighbors who care for how we tell our stories. I hope I can help this organization grow to meet the needs of our communities here in central Virginia.

As I do this work, I’m drawing on the invaluable connections I’ve made with other local news organizations, journalists and those looking to create more equity and justice in our industry. And I look forward to building our organizations, projects and dreams together!

Our managing editor, Jessie Higgins, explained our editorial choices very well in a spot for our local community radio station, WTJU.

I know almost everyone remembers what happened here. The images of Klan-like torch marchers surrounding activists and students, the brazen violence and intimidation are seared into my mind. I was working in national news at the time, far away in Minneapolis, and still it feels like a turning point in my journey.

But coming here and getting to know so many people in Charlottesville, I’m also very moved by how thoughtful and brave people here have been to not just condemn white supremacists, white nationalism, racist and anti-Semitic violence, but to look deeper at ourselves too. It’s not an easy path, and there is plenty to argue and debate. Still, we press on.

There is a lot of national conversation because the rally and violence here in 2017 was indeed a national event. I hope you can, with intention, look at what our local press is reporting too. This is a great day to check out Charlottesville Tomorrow no matter where you live.

Here’s a great place to start: Jessie’s introduction of our coverage with a full list of our stories this week.

Many of my neighbors in Charlottesville, Virginia, might not know that not too far away, immigrants from around the state (and who are detained at the southern border and elsewhere) are held in a huge, jail-like facility while their immigration cases make their way through our often slow-moving system. The story of ICA Farmville runs along the arc of the story of the rise of immigration detention in the U.S.

Last year, I won a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation just as I began my position as editor-in-chief of Charlottesville Tomorrow. The fellowship is supporting my continued reporting on the immigrant experience in central Virginia. My first story is about ICA Farmville, the people who run it, and the people who want to see it shut down. It’s a place that once had upwards of 800 detainees. A large COVID-19 outbreak and a judge’s order have forced it to stop taking in new ICE detainees and now they have in their custody just 11 people.

The story was produced with palabra, an amazing national media organization that has features fresh reporting and voices. We’re also running it locally today in Charlottesville Tomorrow.

I could have written 3,000 more words — and I actually did (thank you to my editor Monica Campbell) — but I hope this piece helps more people understand what our immigration system does, and how it requires the participation of many people to do it. Whatever you think of our immigration system, I think it’s important to know what it actually does.

Read the story in palabra >>

Or read it in Charlottesville Tomorrow >>

(Wherever you read, be sure to subscribe for free and support media that you value.)

On Dec. 1, I started a new role as editor-in-chief of Charlottesville Tomorrow. It’s a really amazing local news organization that is set up well to challenge what news can do for a community — and who can own it. And wow, is this team ever mission-driven!

Since my first day, I’ve been taking meetings with people who live and work in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia. I’ve lived here over two years and it’s been really amazing to get to know the neighborhood anew through the eyes of so many different kinds of people. My listening tour is now over 50 meetings strong and I’m so glad to constantly fill my head with what people need from news. I also fulfilled a lifelong dream to be on a hip hop radio station — we’ve got a great one that’s nonprofit here in Charlottesville in 101.3 Jamz — to talk about the importance of local news and who makes it.

I’m also thrilled that the nonprofit organization I helped found, Women Do News, is growing! We work to get women and nonbinary journalists recorded in the shared history that is Wikipedia. We’re now a nonprofit, in partnership with the Bay City News Foundation, and have a great lineup of events and edit-a-thons brewing for 2022.

Last but not least, I’m thrilled to join a new initiative to support independent journalists! The game is too often stacked against creators and reporters who work for themselves. But we can advocate for our work and help news organizations create better, more equitable practices. Let’s talk about how! I’ll be on a panel (virtually) at the inaugural Center for Independent Journalists conference on March 12 about pay and negotiations.

By my best count, I’ve gotten about 20 requests for ideas for job candidates this year alone. And I love to get these kinds of requests! (I’ve learned to manage all this by watching my mentors, like Doug Mitchell.) It’s flattering that people appreciate my network and judgment. My career as an editor and founder has been all about getting people into positions where they can do great work, so I see helping talented colleagues get good career opportunities as part of that mission!

But — and you knew there would be a but — most of the time, I wish those asking me for help had called a few months earlier.

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Read on at Source, one of my favorite resources for people who want to make (or remake) news media.

Thanks to Emma Carew Grovum and P. Kim Bui who opened their column space to me and encouraged me to be candid about experiences I’ve had as a newsroom leader of color.

My hope is that this column also resonates with people in other industries who get requests to help recruit candidates. How do you handle people coming to you for “more diverse applicants”?

But now, there was no reason that the touch points of popular culture couldn’t look like me and my friends. There was no way anyone could say that the market doesn’t want narratives that express our diversity, or that the majority of audiences (read: white audiences) would not relate to these stories. Crazy Rich Asians of course, is not a perfect representation of Asian Americans or Singapore — indeed, there is no such thing — but it was irrefutable in its appeal. Like Black Panther that same year, it was proof that we, people of color, are blockbuster caliber. We are, in fact, mainstream.

This kind of breakthrough has not happened in the news media. In our industry, we are still battling the idea that new news organizations that focus on communities of color, immigrant communities, or particular geographies, are niche or small or charity-cases or worse, they are seen as risky investments and don’t get the upfront capital they need to become the mainstream news sources they could be.

So it was a real honor to help elevate these vital news organizations that I think should enter our information and news culture as often as CNN or NPR or the Washington Post. I moderated a panel called “Turning the Tables” to close out this year’s Institute for Nonprofit News annual meeting. It featured organizations that I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know well through my work as a coach with the Listening Post Collective. And because it was online this year, I can share it with you.

Mukhtar Ibrahim, founder of Sahan Journal, described the vital role his organization plays in how we understand Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The Twin Cities have been in the national news often in the last decade for police shootings, immigration and national security events and it is home to a rich network of local news organizations. And still, the representation wasn’t there.

“We have two daily newspapers, the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press. We have Minnesota Public Radio, a couple of TV stations, so there is no ‘news desert’,” Ibrahim said. “But when you go to these websites, the issues they cover are almost the same. Immigrant and refugee communities, some people of color, are almost absent from the media that you tend to see. We were trying to really change that.”

Sahan Journal is now well known among many because of its crucial coverage of the murder of George Floyd, the ensuing trial, and the ongoing story of police violence in Minnesota. But its coverage has been high quality for a long time. And I often wonder what might have happened had they gotten the kind of investment they are seeing now when they launched in 2019.

“One of the biggest differences between news outlets serving communities of color and news outlets serving whiter communities is simply their sustainability. New outlets serving communities of color don’t have the same access to capital that newsrooms serving whiter communities have,” said Madeleine Bair of El Tímpano in Oakland.

Carla Murphy articulated the idea of what “mainstream” can and should mean in this summer’s Dissent: “I don’t view the progressive or liberal journalist’s pursuit of news about marginalized people as progress. From my view in the borderlands, the progressive mission should be to expand the production of news (about race, class, and gender) for these audiences. It should be to create multiple mainstreams strong enough to compete with the mainstream.”

She’s talking about redefining the word, and challenging who can be dominant in news. Mazin Sidahmed talked about his organization, Documented, which is often cast as niche but actually aims to serves a majority of New York City. The immigrant-focused news they provide is relevant to at least 60 percent of households who have at least one non-US citizen among them. (See the data from the New York City mayor’s office.)

“Maybe as an underground hip hop head, the word ‘mainstream’ makes me uncomfortable sometimes. I kind of like the fact that we are putting our thumb in the eye of the larger news organizations,” he said. “But maybe [mainstream] is something that we need to own… If we embrace the fact that we’re the alternative, that we’re off to the side, we’ll always only have access to the off-to-the-side money.”

Ibrahim dropped wisdom on how we might re-imagine “mainstream.”

“A lot of people, when they hear ‘mainstream,’ they think about whiteness. But imagine Sahan Journal as the metro section of the Star Tribune. Opening up that newspaper every morning and seeing the diversity of lives and communities that live in St. Paul/Minneapolis.”

As news consumers, maybe it’s time to expand our definition of mainstream news, too. It’s time to change how we get information about our own lives and communities. Here are some news organizations you might start with. Who else should be on this list? Who gives you news that is about you and your community?

Sometimes, though, the more important something is, the more difficult it is to commit what you want to say to words. This year, I’ve worked with people who were writing proposals for crucial services, connecting with communities that have been hardest hit by the pandemic, and people who helped us better understand racial justice, power and trauma.

When it’s time to tell your most important story — something you feel deeply or have poured your time into researching or reporting — what do you do? How do you start? How do you revise? How do you release it into the world?

To celebrate our courage in 2020, I’m hosting a virtual conversation about how to tell the most important story. This is an hour to talk about how we write the things that matter, the things that are often the most difficult to say. Bring a story, essay or writing project that mattered to you this year, and join us!

Register: Writing when it counts
Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2020
1pm ET

Cost: Pay what you can as a donation to Women Do News.

Here is one example: We recently saw the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorder come and go. The 1968 report found the news media shockingly negligent in its inclusion of African Americans, and a major factor in why society was increasingly divided. It concluded, “The painful process of readjustment that is required of the American news media must begin now.”

Fast-forward 50 years and diversity among news media staff and leadership is still inadequate. And news media leaders’ commitment to “readjustment” is questionable: The American Society of News Editors survey of diversity in newsrooms had a historically low rate of participation in its data collection, despite an elegant and impassioned call by lead researcher Meredith D. Clark, University of Virginia assistant professor, for leaders to “hold themselves to the same accountability standards we expect from other influential sectors.”

And yet, through these decades, marginalized people and communities have continued to build incredible organizations of immense value to the U.S. media landscape. Scholars and historians recall that history to remind us that, yes, we have been here all along. (See Joshunda Sanders’ “How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media” and Lewis Raven Wallace’s “The View from Somewhere” for just two of many examples.)

…

This is a portion of a new guide I wrote for the Center for Cooperative Media. I wrote this guide before the pandemic, before I could even dream of the pandemic taking on a global scale.

And now, as it becomes imperative for news organizations to provide critical information, the burden placed on journalists and organizations that are trusted by the most affected people — in the US, too often those who are marginalized in the news media industry — is huge. These underrepresented journalists will be called upon to collaborate, to participate and to help beyond their compensation and capital investments. And, if history tells us anything, they are also likely to be disproportionately affected by furloughs, layoffs and pay cuts.

Though this guide was written before the pandemic, my hope is that it is helpful to keep us grounded, to keep us powerful while we are in crisis. It draws upon the brilliance and deep experiences of those who agreed to speak with me — often with candor and trust — as well as colleagues along the way, too many to name. You might agree with what I’ve written, or disagree. It is not an argument or a prescription.

But if this guide helps you to step up and continue to prioritize equity, in whatever way you think is best, then it will have succeeded.

See the guide as a PDF here, and see two other guides, written by the inestimable Heather Bryant, here.