The 2022 WIJ Workshop group! Join us in 2023!

The Women in Journalism Workshop is an annual workshop that focuses on challenges, accomplishments and issues specific to women in the journalism industry today. We want to help build safer, more diverse and innovative newsrooms to serve our communities worldwide. You will learn how to innovate the way you cover stories, the management of newsrooms and teams and be trained in emerging skills and tools from global leaders in the journalism industry. All session leaders are chosen for their cutting edge knowledge in the topic of the session they are leading.

The 2023 WIJ Workshop will be April 7-9, 2023 at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Students $50 (or free if you volunteer!), Professionals $75.

The 2023 WIJ Workshop is now FULL! Please email duncank@rjionline.org to be added to the waitlist.

Questions

Contact Director of Innovation & Founder of WIJ Workshop Kat Duncan at duncank@rjionline.org.

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Session Leader Bios

Session leaders will be added here as they confirm.

P. Kim Bui, Arizona Republic

Twitter: @kimbui

P. Kim Bui is the director of product and audience innovation at the Arizona Republic. A native Iowan, she’s focused her career on leading real-time news initiatives and creating new storytelling forms for digital, print and broadcast companies catering to local, national and global audiences. Prior, she was editor-at-large for NowThis News and deputy managing editor for reported.ly, a distributed social journalism startup. She was in the inaugural class of the Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership from City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She’s spoken on journalism and leadership worldwide and written about empathy in journalism for a number of research outlets. She writes a newsletter for emerging leaders and managers, The Middles and collaborates on a column about creating a better workplace for journalists of color, “Sincerely, Leaders of Color.“

Tara Francis Chan, The Appeal

Twitter: @taramfrancis

Tara is Managing Editor & Operations Director at The Appeal, where she has led its relaunch as a worker-led nonprofit newsroom.

Tara was previously a senior editor at Newsweek and was the launch editor of Business Insider’s Asia desk, helping establish the editorial scope and operations of a news team across three continents. Prior to this, she was the editor of a leading Australian magazine published in 37 countries and managed special projects including a bestselling book and a national conference series. She was previously a finalist for Young Australian Journalist of the Year and was a cohort member of Poynter’s Leadership Academy for Women in Media in 2022.

Tara has a bachelor in communications and biochemistry, as well as a diploma in innovation management, from the University of New South Wales where she was a William McIlrath Rural Scholar. With a background in science communication, she has worked on projects in New York, London, Moscow, Sydney, Edinburgh, and Abu Dhabi.

Vanessa Charlot

Twitter: @vanessacharlot_

Vanessa Charlot is an award-winning photographer, filmmaker, lecturer, curator and media safety trainer. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Multimedia at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media. Her work focuses on the intersectionality of race, politics, culture and sexual/gender expression to explore the collective human experience. The purpose of her work is to produce visual representations free of an oppressive gaze. Vanessa seeks to humanize Black bodies through her photography, restoring the dignity and vitality of those often shot as subjects divorced from context, motives, and histories. Her work invites us all to question our relationship to what we think about when we see Black bodies as static images and in motion.

She has worked throughout the U.S., Caribbean and Southeast Asia.  Her photographs have been commissioned by the New York Times, Gucci, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Apple, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, Artnet News, The Washington Post and other national and international publications. Vanessa lectures at the International Center of Photography and is the recipient of the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award for 2021. She is currently an Emerson Collective Fellow.

Stefanie Friedhoff, Brown University School of Public Health.

Friedhoff is a professor of the practice and content director at the Brown University School of Public Health, and a veteran journalist. Her work investigates intersecting issues of science, technology, migration, education, culture and trauma. She engages diverse communities on these subjects through research, writing, talks, events, consulting and leadership. At Brown, she leads the School of Public Health’s crisis communication and pandemic policy response team, and researches the relationship between the information needs of marginalized communities, misinformation, and health. Other projects include trauma workshops for journalists, journalism startup support, and journalism conferences. Her work has appeared in Time magazine; The Boston Globe; Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper; and other publications. Friedhoff, who was a 2001 Nieman Fellow, created and led Nieman’s Trauma Journalism Program from 2006 to 2012.

Laura Garcia, BBC Mundo

Twitter: @lauragrb 

Laura Garcia’s work as a multimedia journalist started in her hometown of Mexico as a newspaper photographer covering the “lucha libre.” She’s an incurable nerd and has always been fascinated with new ways of telling stories, new tech, coding, apps, and even VR/AR. Laura worked for newspapers and film production companies in the U.S. before moving to the UK in September 2011. She has worked in different national newsrooms across the UK as a TV and radio producer. She taught multimedia journalism and TV production at the University of Kent for five years until December 2019. Currently, Laura’s main job with First Draft is teaching journos to spot and verify disinformation. She is passionate about getting new diverse voices into the industry and is the co-founder of PressPad, a social enterprise dedicated to helping young people become journalists.

Emma Carew Grovum, Kimbap Media

Twitter: @emmacarew

Emma Carew Grovum is the founder of Kimbap Media, a Brooklyn-based consultancy solving problems at the intersection of journalism, technology, and audience. Emma coaches journalists on leadership, product thinking, and digital transformation.

Beyond running Kimbap Media, Emma holds several additional external roles, including programming director for the News Product Alliance and lead partner at Media Bridge Partners, a collective of like-minded journalists working to bring newsrooms into an anti-racist future. She is a proud and active alumnus of the Chips Quinn Scholars and NextGenRadio programs.

Emma is a former Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow who studied best practices for developing and retaining leadership candidates of color for local newsrooms. She has previously held editorial, leadership, and product roles at The Daily Beast, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and The Star Tribune.

Marissa J. Lang, Washington Post

Twitter: @Marissa_Jae

Marissa J. Lang writes about gentrification, housing and the changing face of American cities as part of The Washington Post’s social issues team. She previously covered protests, social unrest, activist movements and the rise of domestic extremism, culminating in her coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and its aftermath. Lang came to The Post in 2018 from the San Francisco Chronicle, where she explored the inner workings of tech companies and the disparities they fueled. She won several awards for her coverage of the 2016 Wine Country wildfires and the plight of farmworkers amid the state’s worst-ever drought. Previously, Lang covered City Hall for the Sacramento Bee, criminal justice and courts for the Salt Lake Tribune and breaking news for the Tampa Bay Times. Lang has reported internationally, filing dispatches from Mexico and Rwanda. She is HEAT-certified, an active member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), adjunct professor at the University of Maryland and a dedicated mentor to student journalists to color. A native of New York City, Lang is an unapologetic pizza snob who now lives in Washington, DC.  

Leah Millis, Reuters

Twitter: @LeahMillis

Leah Millis is a staff photographer at Thomson Reuters, where she has covered a wide range of issues, including politics, international protest movements, immigration, climate change, mass shootings and the rise of domestic extremism in the United States. 

A journalist for more than a dozen years, Millis has worked for local newspapers in nearly every region of the United States, produced several short documentary films and written the accompanying articles for several projects. In 2020 Millis was one of the 11 staff members of the Reuters team awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for their coverage of the Hong Kong protests for democracy in 2019.

Tara Pixley, Independent

Twitter: @tlpix

Tara Pixley, Ph.D., is a Jamaican-American photographer and professor with a 20-year career in visual journalism. Dr. Pixley is based in Los Angeles, where she teaches journalism at Loyola Marymount University. She is a 2022 Reynolds Journalism Fellow and Pulitzer Center Grantee, a 2021 IWMF NextGen Fellow, a 2020 recipient of the World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative and was a 2016 Visiting Knight Fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her writing and photography have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, ProPublica, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, ESPN Magazine, and the Black Scholar, among many other publications. As a strategic storytelling and social impact consultant, Dr. Pixley combines her expertise in visual storytelling, critical cultural studies, and equity practices to work with media organizations, brands, production companies, film sets, and nonprofits. She has led 35+ workshops, panels, and guest lectures on visual ethics, journalist safety, the social impact of visual storytelling, inclusive pedagogy, and decolonizing journalism for dozens of newsrooms, museums, colleges, and organizations. Currently, Dr. Pixley is producing the Source of Safety project and documenting the environmental justice issues of Southern California oil production. Most recently, she oversaw the research and writing of the 2022 State of Photography Report and edited the Guide to Inclusive Photography. She is also a co-Founder and current Director of Authority Collective — an organization dedicated to diversifying perspectives in visual media — and a co-Author of the Photo Bill of Rights.

Mago Torres

Twitter: @magiccia

Mago Torres is an investigative journalist who specializes in research, data and project leadership. She is the Research Project Director at Open News and data editor with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP). She worked for ICIJ on the investigations Pandora Papers, FinCEN Files, Luanda Leaks and Pulitzer prize-winning Panama Papers. She was a JSK Fellow at Stanford University and holds a Ph.D. in Humanistic Studies.

Elite Truong, American Press Institute

Twitter: @elitetruong

Elite (e-light) Truong is the Vice President of Product Strategy at American Press Institute, where she manages data products that help local newsrooms make strategic decisions, including Metrics for News and Source Matters. Formerly, she was the Director of Strategic Initiatives at The Washington Post, where she led the newsroom R&D team to create projects and products driven by emerging technologies, including machine learning, artificial intelligence and 3-D and augmented reality. Before joining The Post, Truong spent four years at Vox Media, three as the product manager for off-platform storytelling.

Truong has also been an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, where she created and taught an entrepreneurship class for journalism students, which covered product development and project management basics for enterprise media projects, negotiation, pitching and public speaking skills.

Hannah Wise, McClatchy

Twitter: @hwise29

Hannah Wise is the Central Audience Growth Editor at McClatchy. She is an award-winning digital journalist with experience as a social media and engagement editor, breaking news and political reporter and user interface designer. Her professional work and academic research are focused on how journalists can better serve their audiences through engaging in meaningful conversations with the community.

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Schedule

Friday, April 7, 2023

10:00 am

Check in and grab your swag!

10:15am

Welcome and icebreakers

Kat Duncan, RJI Director of Innovation

Welcome to the WIJ Workshop! We will spend our first session together getting to know each other a bit before diving into our weekend together.

11:00 am

Innovate and Advocate

Marissa Lang, Washington Post

An inspiring discussion of how to stand up for yourself and push for what you want in a variety of circumstances — to your editor, to your sources, to your company. Discussion topics will include building sources in a male-dominated field, engaging communities of which you are not a part, managing up, negotiating pay and benefits, knowing the rules — and when to break them, finding mentors and more.

12:00pm

How to do new things in the newsroom

Elite Truong, American Press Institute

How can we experiment in our newsrooms in a structured and supported way? In this interactive workshop, Elite will teach product thinking frameworks to come up with new ideas, get buy in from the right people, and run experimental new projects.

1:00 pm

Lunch

2:00 pm

Centering consensus and care in the newsroom

Tara Francis Chan, The Appeal

As the journalism industry remains as unstable as ever, worker-led efforts are showing what it takes to rethink newsrooms, and the health of the journalists within them, from the ground up. This session will highlight what it takes to build a worker-led newsroom and flip outdated norms, adapting democratic and consensus decision-making models for any newsroom. It will also spotlight broad policies through to small actions that journalists can use to prevent burnout and support better boundaries for those around them.

3:30 pm

Collective intentionality: lessons from international collaborations to build inclusive teams

Mago Torres, Open News

 Understanding our differences, for work environments, media ownership, journalistic practices and access to resources, is key to building cross-border collaborations. In this session we will share some of the main lessons learned in these long-form projects and discuss how they can be translated to build more inclusive and equitable teams within our own organizations. 

5:00 pm

WIJ Welcome Reception

Join us for our welcome event! Appetizers, drinks and special guests at a private venue nearby.

Saturday April 8, 2023

9:00 am

Self-care for the resilient journalist

Stefanie Friedhoff

Trauma is an occupational hazard for journalists. One doesn’t need to be on the frontlines of war or national tragedies to encounter stories of destruction, suffering and despair. Add the stressors of fast-paced news environments, and you’re no longer wondering why you are so exhausted at the end of the day. Let’s explore some essentials about trauma and resilience that help us prepare for difficult assignments and taxing experiences — and discover self-care habits that help keep us sane in the long run.

11:00 am

HEFAT training

Vanessa Charlot

Journalists working in the field and/or hostile environments have to be aware of various aspects of safety to keep themselves resilient. This session will cover situational awareness, risk assessments, de-escalation, protests/riots, protective gear and simple tactical movements based on identity and gender safety awareness.

1:00 pm

Lunch w/ puppies

The adoptable pups from Unchained Melodies Dog Rescue join us during our lunch break for puppy cuddles!

2:00 pm

Group photo out on the grass!

2:15 pm

It ain’t all cat videos and dance challenges

Laura Garcia, BBC Mundo

This hands on session will help you get over your fear/hatred/reluctance of TikTok and other vertical & AR augmented storytelling spaces. We will delve deep into why these spaces matter for journalists, how to analyze them critically and enjoy learning new ways of telling stories. 

3:30 pm

Mass shooting coverage: let’s talk about it.

Leah Millis and Heather Martin

Work in journalism long enough and you may start to feel like you’re trapped in a horrible version of Groundhog Day when it comes to covering mass shootings. They have become so frequent that as a journalist it is likely you will cover more than one during your career. Some journalists have to cover numerous mass shootings in a single year. How do we talk about this issue in a new way? Can we break the Groundhog Day coverage formula? Is there a way to minimize trauma to the survivors and the journalists? For this talk we bring in Heather Martin, a survivor of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, to have a discussion with Leah Millis, a photojournalist, about each of their experiences as they relate to mass shooting coverage. We will also discuss trauma, secondary trauma, PTSD and moral injury.

4:30 pm

Choose your own adventure: Resume reviews & Hula Hooping

WIJ session leaders & Laura Garcia

Hooping in Palmer, Resume reviews in lobby…

• Get resume or portfolio feedback from the session leaders at WIJ! Talk to them about applying for jobs, formatting, and what journalism leaders look for when they hire.

• Pick up a hoop and get ready to hoop to music with Laura Garcia! (hoops provided)

5:30 pm

Done for the day! Head to dinner or fun time with fellow attendees!

Sunday, April 9, 2023

10:00 am

Identity-Aware Reporting Practices 

Tara Pixley

This session discusses how our own backgrounds, identities and lived experiences affect the ways we show up to do the work of journalism and considers what our social impact might be for the communities on which we report. How can we avoid implicit biases as reporters? What practices of interviewing and engaging sources minimizes potential harm to them and their communities? We will unpack what we mean when we say “trauma-informed” and how to integrate that approach across all of our journalistic work.

11:00 am

Digital Security in Hostile Urban Environments

Olivia Martin, Free of the Press Foundation

While this is not a uniquely American phenomenon, journalists covering protests, rallies, and demonstrations face increasing challenges reporting, investigating, and filing their stories. Learn some strategies for keeping phones, laptops, other gear, and data safe; and hear more about your right to report in the field.

12:00 pm

Lunch

1:00 pm

Time to Wooble

Hannah Wise, McClatchy

In this fun hands on craft session

we will learn to start to crochet a Mizzou tiger! M-I-Z

3:00 pm

Let’s make a plan

Kim Bui & Emma Carew Grovum

WIJ is wrapping up and now you have new ideas! You learned new skills and tools! Getting these ideas and skills into actual practice can be harder than it needs to be. We’ll work through different planning techniques, questions to ask yourself and methods for how you can retain and use everything you’ve learned at WIJ when you get home.

4:30 pm

Goodbyes!