Moderator:
Vanessa Maria Graber, News Voices Director of Free Press/Free Press Action Fund
Panelists:
Penda Howell, CEO/Publisher of New Jersey Urban News
Frank Santos, Revenue Strategy & Design, Black in Jersey
Dr. Kaia Shivers, Founder of Ark Republic
Mark Tyler, Founder/Publisher of Atlantic City Focus
In this session, discover innovative strategies and success stories for sustaining local journalism featuring insights from Hopeloft’s groundbreaking work in community-driven reporting. Through real-world examples from partnerships with private, federal, and state funding opportunities, participants will explore how fostering local voices and grassroots collaboration can strengthen journalism’s impact and financial sustainability.
Melissa Helmbrecht is the President and Executive Director of Give Something Back, a national organization that provides scholarships and mentoring to more than 2,000 students who have experienced homelessness, foster care, the incarceration of a parent and other significant childhood adversities. She also serves as the founder of Hopeloft, an incubator based in Bridgeton, NJ that focuses on community journalism and violence intervention strategies for youth.
In this session join staff and Documenters from Newark and New Brunswick to learn about how residents are being trained and paid to monitor and report on local public meetings. We’ll discuss successes and challenges and leave you with a set of steps to map out public meeting schedules in your community.
Max Resnik is City Bureau’s Director of Network Services for the Documenters Network. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Max works with civic and media organizations across the country to equip community members to document and amplify important local information from public meetings.
The 21 teams in the 2024 New Jersey Technology and Sustainability Accelerator made real progress toward financial sustainability by bringing a disciplined approach to each organization’s unique mix of people, financial position, products, audience and process. We’ll share practical insights from participants and coaches in the program and answer your questions about how to grow faster and smarter in 2025.
This session will feature David Grant and Cierra Hinton from Blue Engine Collaborative, Liz George of Montclair Local and Mary Galioto of MercerMe.
The Maynard Institute’s Fault Lines® framework reveals how we see the world through the prism of class, gender, generation, geography, race and sexual orientation and areas of self-categorization, such as politics, religion and ability. Learn how these factors as well as biases – unconscious and conscious – influence news coverage, organizational culture and working relationships.
Felecia Henderson is the Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
Speakers:
Linda Czipo, President & CEO of New Jersey Center for Nonprofits
Erik Estrada, Community Manager of Community Foundation of South Jersey
We’ll discuss how news ventures that have been around for a few years can push past the initial build phase and grow to the next level. The goal is to share best practices and discuss the challenges of growth so we can brainstorm ways to overcome them.
Ambreen Ali is a longtime journalist and the founding editor of Central Desi, a news outlet covering New Jersey’s fast-growing South Asian community.
In this session we’ll discuss the past, present and future of the Consortium—what New Jersey and other states can learn from NJCIC and how it might be able to expand its funding base beyond state appropriations.
Dickson Louie is a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Davis and Treasurer and Board Member of the Robert C. Maynard Institute of Journalism Education.
Join frontline workers–librarians and journalism professors–to explore the current state of information, news and digital media literacy among K-12 students, and downstream effects on New Jersey’s future labor force, media workers and civic leaders.
It’s a pivotal moment. In 2023, NJ became the first state in the country to require public schools to teach media literacy. We invite stakeholders invested in informed civic participation in a range of community issues, to help support the successful implementation of the new, New Jersey Student Learning Standards on Information Literacy.
Media Studies educator Tom Piotrowski and TCNJ Education Librarian Ewa Dziedzic-Elliott will explain what implementation of new Standards means in K-12 education, and what stakeholders can do. To share the downstream effects of literacy on journalism education and training the next generation of journalists, media workers and civic leaders, they’ll be joined by Rutgers-Newark journalism professor, Carla Murphy. Murphy, who is also a media organizer, spent the last year co-writing education policy for the Media Policy Collaborative and is a member of News Futures, a national coalition with a mission to create more responsive and participatory local news ecosystems.
As local news dwindles across the U.S., universities are partnering with local news outlets to fill gaps with student-produced community news. Students get real reporting experience, newspapers get fresh and often more affordable content, and readers get news they otherwise wouldn’t get. In this panel, we’ll discuss how New Jersey schools are opting into this model and what it means for the future of news in the state.
Sarah Gamard is a program manager for the Center for Community News, specializing in strengthening local news across the U.S. via university-led news partnerships. She has covered government and politics for several news outlets in Louisiana, Maryland, Delaware and D.C. She lives in Philadelphia.
Mark Berkey-Gerard is an associate professor of journalism at Rowan University, where he teaches news media literacy, digital reporting and data journalism courses. He is a co-founder of the student-run South Jersey Climate News project, which covers local environmental issues.
Christian Oberly serves as Follow South Jersey’s Program Director: managing the site, overseeing development, forming partnerships, and recruiting community journalism interns.
Community colleges can play a catalyzing role in strengthening local news ecosystems. By equipping more people to produce, share and discuss reliable, relevant and fact-based information, community colleges across New Jersey are building pathways that enable more people to help keep their communities informed. In this session, we’ll spotlight the creative programs and partnerships that NJ community colleges are growing to nurture deeper engagement with local news. We’ll hear firsthand from faculty and staff about the opportunities and challenges they’re facing, and invite discussion on how other media and community organizations can connect with colleges to build more resilient and responsive networks that power community-centered news.
Speakers:
Carin Berkowitz, New Jersey Council for the Humanities
Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, Journalism + Design at The New School
Holly Johnson, Mercer County Community College
Nancy Gallo, Sussex County Community College
The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that funds initiatives to benefit the State’s civic life and meet the evolving information needs of New Jersey’s communities. Questions? Contact the Consortium via email at [email protected].