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.