Michele McLellan

Michele McLellan

2009-2010

  • Reynolds Fellow
    Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute
  • Michele McLellan is a journalist and consultant who works on projects that help foster a healthy local news ecosystem. Her principal clients are the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California.
  • Building on her fellowship at RJI, McLellan continues her independent research into the emerging community news landscape with support from The Patterson Foundation.
  • From 2003-2007, McLellan was director of Tomorrow’s Workforce, a Knight Foundation project that developed tools and training to make newsrooms more adaptive. Based on that work, she was co-author of the book News, Improved: How America’s Newsrooms Are Learning to Change.
  • McLellan held a variety of posts as an editor at The Oregonian newspaper, including politics editor, special projects editor and public editor (ombudsman).
  • As a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2001-02, McLellan focused on interdisciplinary ethics. She was principal author of The Newspaper Credibility Handbook for the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 2001.
Project: Community News Sites

As a Reynolds Fellow, McLellan developed Michele’s List of promising local news sites and organized Block by Block: Community News Summit 2010, a gathering of more than 100 local news entrepreneurs. A second annual summit will be held in Fall 2011.