ONA Weekly #384: Apply For The Women’s Leadership Accelerator Program

Apply for the 2022 Women’s Leadership Accelerator

Exciting update: Applications are now open for the 2022 cohort of the Women’s Leadership Accelerator. The tuition-free, year-long program supercharges the leadership and management skills of women pushing digital innovation. Throughout the program, participants enjoy many opportunities to build a support system alongside their peers. Together, the cohort engages in honest dialogue about leadership, work-life balance and thinking critically through common and unique challenges. They also receive one-on-one mentoring from industry leaders, coaching on individual challenges and additional sessions targeting group needs. The accelerator culminates with a half-day workshop in September 2022, during ONA’s annual conference in Los Angeles. Learn more about the program’s requirements and get started on your application or forward this opportunity to a colleague who’d be a great fit. Applications are due Nov. 30.

Are you looking to expose injustice?

The O’Brien Fellowship gives reporters nine months, $70,000, funding for travel and research and a team of student journalists to do just that. Applications open in less than a month on December 1, 2021. Learn more.

Get buy-in for your ideas

Join us online Nov. 4, 12 p.m. EDT (16:00 UTC), for Making the Case for your Ideas and Team, the first of a three-part conversation series from the Women’s Leadership Accelerator focused on advocating for yourself and your team’s vision. Guests will hear from Irene McKisson, Co-Founder of AZ Luminaria, a new nonprofit news organization in Arizona; Amy King, Deputy Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Times and moderator Nadine Ajaka, Senior Producer of Visual Forensics at the Washington Post. They will discuss their shared experience creating local and national nonprofit newsrooms and redefining workflows within their organizations. Name your own price to register now.

More resources to demonstrate your impact

Following up on last week’s newsletter, we are happy to share more resources on tracking and communicating the impact of your journalism. ONA community member Anjanette Delgado, a journalist who began tracking the impact of local journalism in 2015, wrote in to share how she led the Detroit Free Press to document their first community report in 2019 and seven things to keep in mind during the process. Anjanette also recommends zooming out to consider a systems approach, digging into how individual events you’re reporting on relate to larger patterns and impact. Check out this toolkit on systems thinking with journalists.

Exposing the secret world of police dogs

A yearlong investigation into violence involving police dogs across U.S. cities won Excellence in Collaboration and Partnerships at the 2021 Online Journalism Awards. The project Mauled: When Police Dogs Are Weapons started out as a local reporting endeavor by AL.com and soon expanded into a joint effort after they reached out to The Marshall Project for national research and reporting on this issue. Partnerships were also forming in other parts of the country. The IndyStar and Invisible Institute were focusing their efforts on dog violence in Indianapolis and The Advocate was examining the use of dogs on teenagers in Baton Rouge, La. Together, the newsrooms uncovered individual cases of police dog violence — many that were life-altering, even deadly — from court documentation and built a nationwide database of more than 150 severe incidents. Their investigation also brought to light a higher incidence among men, particularly Black men.

Explore more inspiring finalists in the collaboration category, including projects from Al Jazeera English, Mongabay, The Gecko Project, Chicago Tribune, Better Government Association, BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Important dates

Nov. 4: WLA Series: Making the Case for your Ideas and Team
Nov. 11: WLA Series: Challenging the System on Imposter Syndrome
Nov. 18: WLA Series: Building the Career you Want
Nov. 19: Women in Leadership Community Meetup
Nov. 30: Deadline: Apply for the 2022 Women’s Leadership Accelerator New!

Career opportunities

ONA’s Career Center is an excellent resource for jobs, fellowships and internships in digital journalism. Recent postings include:

Director of Audience Strategy and Engagement and Crowdsourcing Reporter, ProPublica
Marketing Associate Fellowship, Kaiser Family Foundation
Contributing Writers, The Juggernaut
Managing Editor for Audience, WAMU 88.5
Managing Producer, Digital Supervisor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Product Director of NABUR, Wick Communications
Digital Director, The Detroit News
Editorial Assistant, Opinion Editor (Politics and Culture), Climate Editor (Opinion), The New York Times
Learning Director, Online News Association

On our radar

Question/Answer with Stephanie Kuo, Janelle Salanga for The Objective
Interviewing for a job is the best time to suss out whether a place is right for you, Marquita Brown for The Poynter’s Collective
How folklore helped me reclaim Halloween: An Afro-Caribbean tale, Tiffanie Drayton for The Root
The return to the workplace means new rules for office dressing, S. Mitra Kalita for Charter
Lauren Sandler on the ethics of human-interest reporting, Aiden Stein for Storybench

The radar is now open for suggestions. Have you written or read a piece lately that would benefit others in journalism? We’re interested in sharing insights on trends, how-to guides, lessons from a project and other inspiration for innovation in digital journalism.

Join as an ONA member or make a donation to help sustain ONA’s mission to inspire and support innovation in digital journalism. If you’re looking to promote an event, product, job opening or other opportunity, explore options to reach the ONA community.

We also rely on philanthropic and corporate support. Contact Chief Strategic Partnerships Officer Jessica Strelitz at jessica@journalists.org to learn about the many ways to invest in our mission.