Login

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.  Luckily, this is not difficult.

—Charlotte Whitton

J-Lab Staff

“Can you create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of traditional news organizations? Can you seed participation in community issues? Can you create a sense of news entrepreneurship? Can you train a new, more diverse generation of journalists in new ways of doing news?”—Jan Schaffer

Photo of Jan SchafferJan Schaffer is the Executive Director for J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, a center at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism that helps newsrooms, educators and communities use innovative information technologies to develop new ways for people to learn about important public issues. More...
E-mail:

Photo of Julie DrizinJulie Drizin has been a news and talk producer in public radio since 1984, when she began hosting interview programs at WXPN-FM in Philadelphia. After a six-year, award-winning stint as the station’s News and Public Affairs Director, she moved to Washington, D.C., to lead Pacifica Radio‘s Washington Bureau. There, she produced a nightly newscast, reported from the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, anchored national programs and launched Democracy Now!, a ground-breaking daily program of citizen activist news. The Institute for Alternative Journalism named her a “Media Hero” of 1996 at its historic Media and Democracy Congress. In 1999, she helped create and went on to produce Justice Talking, an NPR program of live debates on constitutional issues, sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.  She was Managing Producer of The Intersection, a daily interactive regional news-talk program on WETA-FM. Most recently, she was a judge in the Public Radio Talent Quest, an online participatory contest to find a new generation of hosts for public radio. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
E-mail:

Kira Wisniewski joined J-Lab as the Project Coordinator in September 2007. She completed her undergraduate work in 2006 at the University of Miami double majoring in print journalism and political science.
E-mail:

Craig Stone has been the Web Editor at J-Lab since June 2005. He is a native of Laurel, Maryland, and earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2005.
E-mail:

Award

NMWE will honor one new media woman entrepreneur with a $2,000 award in 2009.
Nominate a woman whose creative contribution to news inspires you.

Our Focus

NMWE is a unique initiative addressing opportunity and innovation, recruitment and retention for women in journalism by spotlighting their ingenuity and entrepreneurial abilities. Pilot projects will show what can be done. Research will tell us what more to do. And an awards program and summit will showcase women’s creative ideas. NMWE is supported by the McCormick Foundation.

Check It Out

MediaShift talks to Echo team

MediaShift’s Mark Glaser recently interviewed Echo project leaders Karyn Lu and Lila King about their plans and motivations. Read the full blog post, “Digging Deeper: Locative Media Project Aims to Collect Stories of Atlanta,” at PBS.org.

Retention of Women Journalists

Women Journalists and Retention of Women Journalists graphs