A family that works together, stays together. Right?

Facilitated by Brittany Mayes & Brian Boyer

In this session, I’d like to explore the idea of “family” within the workplace. In some ways, having a close personal working relationship with your colleagues builds trust, fosters greater collaboration and, in times of adversity, trauma or distress, allows for a level of comfort. In others, considering your co-workers as family can be detrimental. It opens doors for manipulation, open secrets and requires a level of vulnerability, which can be used against one another. At what level does a family-like environment help versus when does it start to hurt? What can we do to build these relationships in a productive manner while respecting workplace boundaries like separation of work and personal life? Finally, how can we prevent these boundaries from being crossed and the closeness from being manipulative?

Becoming a more ethical manager

Facilitated by Sasha Koren & Andrew Losowsky

We’ve all had problems with a boss. And then some of us became bosses, and found that managing people is hard. How might we work within the inherent power dynamics of boss/employee (or team leader/team member) to create better, more inclusive, more humane work environments? If you’re a manager, what are you most afraid of? What are the best and worst lessons you’ve learned about how to work with people of different ages and experiences, and empower everyone to be their best selves at work? Let’s have an open discussion on how to use hierarchies to support everyone. Examples from personal experiences are very welcome!

Bootstrap Bias

Facilitated by Heather Bryant & Jean Friedman-Rudovsky

Let’s talk about how societal notions of meritocracy, hard work equals success and pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality have contributed to inherent biases against people experiencing economic hardship, shaped our coverage of these issues and what we can do moving forward to better address this growing problem.

Forget toolkits—let’s talk about tools. What is the relationship between the tools we’re given and the power we have in newsrooms?

Facilitated by Sarah Schmalbach

Power in the workplace is often dictated by the tools we’re given to complete our work–and those tools can take many forms and be of varying levels of quality. Let’s consider how power flows through the newsroom based on the tools we’re given, or not given access to. A tool could be the equipment or software we use, but a tool could also be data or physical space, or even access to people or places. How do each of us direct the flow of power in our newsrooms based on the tools we give each other access to? Whose power is at stake when we build our own tools? Further, what tools do we give our audience and what work are we trying to help them do?

Funders: Can’t live with ’em. Can’t live without ’em!

Facilitated by Molly de Aguiar & Jessica Clark

Funders wield immense power over the field of nonprofit journalism, from what they choose to value and support, to how they design their systems and processes. If you have ever tried to figure out how to get your foot in the door with a funder, or spent countless hours on their application and months waiting for a decision, you already know it can be relentlessly discouraging to try to get your project or organization funded. And once you get funding, hanging onto it for more than a year or two seems like a never-ending battle.

What should the ideal relationship look like between funders and organizations? Where do you have opportunities to shift the balance of power?

In this off-the-record session, we want to:

• Offer a snapshot of how foundations are thinking and talking about supporting journalism today
• Share Dos and Don’ts for building relationships with funders
• Help you understand what program directors and officers at foundations do and do not have control over
• Brainstorm ways that funders could share more power with grantees and applicants, and how we might put some of those ideas into practice

We also want to:

• Give you a chance to discuss sticky situations with funders and workshop ways to fix them
• Offer a safe space to ask questions you’ve been afraid to ask, or share funding-related frustrations you want to talk through

We are two people who are very familiar with being both the funder and the grantee, seeking to build bridges between the two and reduce the power imbalance. We hope to share general takeaways from this session with the philanthropic field.

Historical legacies of resistance in journalism

Facilitated by Lewis Wallace

Discussions of race, gender and power in journalism aren’t new. In fact, some of the country’s most dynamic journalists throughout history were resisters and activists, working outside of dominant power systems. This session is a dive into historical legacies of resistance in journalism, from known names like Ida B. Wells to lesser-known leaders like Marvel Cooke and Ruben Salazar. We’ll look at strategies for building power from starting independent and community-based projects to union organizing, legal action, boycotts and protests. We’ll connect these stories from the past to current-day strategies for transforming journalism and building the news we need today. Facilitator Lewis Wallace is currently writing a book about the history of “objectivity” in journalism, through the stories of marginalized journalists who have pushed back, challenged, and changed journalism in the U.S.

Influence versus authority: wielding power at all levels of an organization

Facilitated by Nozlee Samadzadeh

Many of us work to effect change in our organizations, even without having formal titles or positions of power, by wielding influence. This may come in the form of asking tough questions of leaders in public or private spaces, empowering people around us to speak up, or speaking directly on a more junior coworker’s behalf. The transition to wielding authority as part of management changes that power dynamic from implicit to explicit. The same strategies may no longer apply: progress may be slow, public communication may be less splashy, action may be hampered by defined processes, and responsibility may shift from asking tough questions to delivering hard truths. Let’s talk about how influence and authority are wielded differently across the newsroom, share advice on how to mature as an authority, and develop strategies around using individual leverage to empower ourselves and the people around us at all levels.

Is this what democracy looks like? Meeting democratic challenges with collective solutions

Facilitated by Simon Galperin & Joe Amditis

Democracy is a word that gets thrown around a lot as a by-product of journalism. But when was the last time you took a moment to really interrogate what democracy is, how it functions, and your relationship with it? What role should democracy play in the workplace, in the home, and in our every day lives?

In this session, we’ll begin to address these questions. We’ll collectively define what we mean by “democracy” and examine some of the roles journalism plays in cultivating it and not. We’ll try to grapple with the some of the challenges democracy poses and explore potential solutions rooted in democratic values. This will be a highly participatory session. Participants will leave the session with a handful of useful tools, tactics, and ideas for cultivating more democracy in their lives.

Minding the (Accessibility) Gap

Facilitated by Kevin Huber

Accessibility is frequently seen as a zero-sum feature that is excluded from initial planning and frequently left out altogether. At this session, we’ll be exploring the Curb Cut Effect— that is, instances when designing for the inclusion of a minority group benefit all. Join us in reframing the conversation on accessibility.

Much more than eyeballs: Exploring & empowering community members’ power

Facilitated by Emily Goligoski & Ashley Alvarado

Many news sites have mission, vision, and values statements. But what about people who contribute to journalism with their time, energy, money, and ideas?

Engagement journalism, solutions journalism, member-driven reporting, and movement journalism all have a common heart: their practitioners put community members and their needs at the center of the work—not driving clicks or piling onto the news of the day. Let’s talk about the people behind these approaches and what we expect of leaders in this space (including you). Together we’ll share ways to better tell the stories of how we work and how people in our communities can be involved in it. Let’s start ensuring that community members’ voices are more fully considered in station and news site decision-making.

Overview of Pre-trial Risk Assessment Tools: A Social Justice Perspective

Facilitated by Di Luong & Hannah Sassaman & Jenessa Irvine & Rowan Cota

Courtrooms around the United States are using predictive algorithms to guide judicial decisions on who to be released pretrial into the community. The Media Mobilizing Project will present our national study on the community impact of predictive algorithms. Workshop objectives: 1) overview of tools’ design and implementation, 2) enhance understanding of how deeply-flawed data could reinforce preexisting structural inequalities. Facilitators will share how grassroots organizations could use data as a storytelling tool and present their narrative to journalists.

Phenomena and phenomenon: everyday personal institutional responsibility

Facilitated by Stacy-Marie Ishmael & Kaeti Hinck

The entrenched position of media may feel precarious at best when news organisations and individual journalists are actively under threat around the world. Between the daily fatigue of seemingly never-ending layoffs and the tragedy of journalists being killed by hostile regimes, it is tempting to believe we have no power left. That temptation has started to lead us down a path of failing to take responsibility for the power we continue to wield.

Power to the People—of Color

Facilitated by Emmanuel Martinez & Julia B. Chan

Issues affecting women, people of color, and individuals who identify as LGBTQ, among other marginalized communities, have all been under fire since November 2016. And it’s more important now than ever before that investigative journalists cover these issues and does so in a manner that does those communities justice.

So how do you cover these communities that you’re not a part of in an effective way? In this panel, we will talk about how journalists should be thinking about the communities they cover, their characters and their stories in ways that don’t further perpetuate injustices. We will talk about how not being aware of our own blind spots can reduce characters and communities to stereotypes.

Run for the board

Facilitated by Steven Rich

Most professional development and connections in journalism revolve around journalism organizations and the conferences they throw. Your experience with those organizations is largely determined by the board of directors of those organizations, which, for the most part, tend to be homogeneous groups. I want to convince you why joining the boards of these organizations is a great idea and give you the inside details of what to expect and how to shape your organizations from the inside. The time is now to run and change these organizations for the better.

Shedding the Pink Collar: Gender and power in the workplace

Facilitated by Kristin Oakley & Kat Bouza

There are certain parts of every newsroom and every workplace that are dominated by women. Historically, these “gendered” roles were secretaries, nurses, or teachers. But, there’s a new subset of jobs emerging in newsrooms and across media corporations that are dominated by women, too — and not just on the social media team. We’ll lead a conversation about the ways in which areas dominated by women are often underestimated and undervalued, and how women in these spaces can learn to take hold of their own power.

Strategies for equitable pay in journalism organizations

Facilitated by Harry Backlund

Who gets paid how much in our organizations? Are we able to explain why?

This session is designed to generate actionable steps newsrooms and journalists can take to establish more equitable pay policies within their organizations.

While questions of compensation are universal to all workplaces, there are some unique aspects to newsrooms—especially the blurry line between the valuable labor of information gathering and analysis, and volunteerism in the name of citizenship, self-expression, and community representation.

How can journalism organizations translate the value they produce in the world to their compensation structure in ways that fair and equitable? When, how, and on what grounds can journalists challenge established pay practices?

To ground us, we’ll briefly review, with examples, how journalism organizations have historically paid for labor, how journalists and their constituents have responded, and how the economy has changed over time. City Bureau will also share the universal (no negotiation) pay policy we created and the lessons we learned along the way.

Survival Kit for Journalists of Color

Facilitated by Jennifer Dargan & Michael Grant & Seema Yasmin

Journalists of color deal with micro and macroaggressions in the newsroom and in the field on a daily basis. It gets in the way of our work, affects output, creativity, mental health and physical wellbeing. Seema Yasmin, a reporter, and Michael Grant, a designer, have created the Toolkit for Journalists of Color, an innovative card deck to help journaists of color.

From quickfire, in-the-moment responses to everyday racism, to deliberative exercises that help you build community and recruit allies in the newsroom, the Toolkit for Journalists of Color is part of a Survival Kit which includes a second card deck, designed by Jennifer Dargan, to help white journalists be actively anti-racist.

The card decks have been created with the help of journalists throughout the US who have contributed their experiences of working in predominantly white newsrooms. Thank you for trusting us with your stories. Now come explore the Kit with us, engage in conversation, share solutions, and build community.

That's not my job ... yet

Facilitated by Julia Wolfe

Even if you keep the same job title, that role is going to change over time. Ever-evolving newsrooms present opportunities. You might jump at a chance for a promotion or just end up taking on different responsibilities as needed. Let’s discuss what work we should take on enthusiastically, what work we should be wary of and how to negotiate the terms of a changing job.

We’ll focus on the practical. In this session, we’ll co-write guides to help work through these questions. Managers and non-managers alike: let’s talk about how to have productive conversations that ensure the newsroom is supported and the employees thrive.

The (Career) Matrix

Facilitated by Soo Oh & Kavya Sukumar

Journalists whose main end product isn’t a written story often find their various core tasks bundled under a monolithic umbrella title. Without established guidelines, it’s difficult to measure what levels we are in our careers and how we’re progressing (and even more difficult to convince management when we should get a raise or promotion). Contrast that with newsroom engineering teams, which establish career ladders to identify competencies on their teams and provide a framework for individual career advancement.

Can we define skill levels for data analysis, programming, designing, and other non-text journalistic work? Should we?

Turning news consumers into constituents for journalism

Facilitated by Mike Rispoli & Andrea Wenzel

The idea of “news consumers” is outdated – it frames people as having value only if they generate revenue, and creates power imbalances where the public are passive recipients of the news. When we reframe communities as being constituents for journalism, however, it holds up journalism as a public service, one that is accountable to the public, prioritizes transformational relationships over transactional interactions, and gives communities agency to shape local news.

Whether it’s during the news gathering process or when designing an engagement or collaborative project, sharing power with the community is key. Participants at this session will learn how to build accountable and trustworthy relationships that are mutually beneficial to both the public and local media. We’ll share examples and strategies on how projects in North Carolina, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and rural Kentucky put community, not the newsroom, at the center of the work. Participants will walk away with an action plan on how to implement several strategies on how to pair trustworthy reporting with trust-building practices, including outreach and organizing, community-engaged research processes, and how to design inclusive, people-led projects.

What to do when you lose (energy)

Facilitated by Geoff Hing

Many who have worked in newsrooms have been involved in conflicts. Often the interests of reporters can get overruled by people with more power in the organization. Or, fearing repercussions, or just running out of energy, one might back away from a fight. Still, the conversations that are part of building power to raise concerns, or the relationships and trust built as part of that, can be valuable, regardless of the outcome of the conflict. This session would use small groups with art-making supplies to make pages in a zine describing strategies for building power out of losing battles, or to be better able to recognize things that have been built when it feels like everything is falling apart.

Why not add Puerto Rico to the standard U.S. map? Rethinking the messages in our templates and defaults

Facilitated by Lisa Waananen Jones

After several weeks of Hurricane Maria news coverage last year, a poll found that only about half of Americans knew that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. Would that be different if news maps of the U.S. routinely showed Puerto Rico? What if election maps showed not just votes, but where people aren’t eligible to vote? We’ll take a look at examples of projects and redesigns that confront what we take for granted, and go through a few thought experiments to consider how small changes to templates, design defaults and data structures could improve newsrooms or better serve the public.

Why visual representation in journalism matters

Facilitated by Kainaz Amaria

85-90% of news imagery is made by men. This single data point has tremendous implications with how we have been trained as an audience to see ‘the other’ or those that don’t identify in the same ways we do. This session will walk you through the origins the visual language, show examples of how we’ve been primed to devalue the lives of brown and black people and how by simply being aware of this dynamic, you can help correct the imbalance.