This is a candidate for the 2025-26 ONA Board of Directors election.
Ashley Alvarado (she/her) is vice president of community engagement and strategic initiatives at LAist (Southern California Public Radio), where she’s spent more than a decade working to engage new and existing audiences across platforms: on air, online, and in person. What started as a team of one is now a department focused on community engagement, newsletters, social media, and partnerships.
In 2019, LAist won the inaugural Gather Award for engaged journalism portfolio at the Online Journalism Awards. LAist won the award again in 2020 and 2022.
Ashley serves on the board of the Online News Association, on the board of Greater Public, on the national advisory board of Poynter, and as a digital transformation coach.
Ashley’s vision for the future of digital journalism
The future of journalism is one that centers the information needs and habits of the community members it strives to serve. That requires going from hoping for relevance to instead designing for it: practicing deep listening, adopting human-centered design, demonstrating a willingness and ability to pivot and to acknowledge wrongdoing, and a commitment to supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and a culture of belonging across organizations and with communities. The future of journalism is participatory and not limited to a single platform or distribution model.