OpenNews Advisory Council from top left: Emma Carew Grovum, Tiff Fehr, Candice Fortman, Andrew Losowsky, Luisa Ortiz Pérez, Dan Sinker, Cordelia Yu

Last month, we shared our thinking behind the next phase of community-driven leadership for OpenNews. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce our new Advisory Council.

This move comes as OpenNews enters its fifteenth year of building and holding a supportive space for journalists to learn and grow together. We see our incoming Council as an extension of our team that matches our vision for shared and democratic movement building in journalism. They each bring a passion for developing community, uplifting others, and asking difficult questions of journalism and its potential. While their roles and experiences are diverse, their values and resilience exemplify what will keep this community going as we face uncharted territory.

We are grateful for the support of our departing advisors who have seen OpenNews through leadership changes and will continue as community members and friends of OpenNews. Thank you to Trei Brundrett, Dawn Garcia, Aron Pilhofer, and Aaron Williams.

Incoming Council members will serve two-year terms, except for where a term is transitional and intentionally shortened, and will contribute to OpenNews consulting work, SRCCON and other events, community engagement, and fundraising. We are excited about this behind-the-scenes evolution and even more delighted for the support and enthusiasm our advisors are bringing to OpenNews at a time when we need each other more than ever.

As part of our introduction, we asked each of our advisors to share a brief reflection or an earliest memory of OpenNews. Like many in our community, our annual conference SRCCON became a place for them to make connections, form bonds, and expand possibilities. Please extend a warm hello to our Council when you see them at NICAR, ONA, SRCCON, and elsewhere this year.

New to our Advisory Council

Emma Carew Grovum, Founder at Kimbap Media

• “It’s Summer 2014, and I’m in Philadelphia for the first ever SRCCON conference, a fearful anxious wreck filled with imposter syndrome. I’m worried I won’t know a soul other than Erika, who earlier that spring convinced me I had plenty to be worthy of entering the OpenNews space more deeply. The first SRCCON is so small, yet so large all at once. We chuckle when we learn that a third of the crowd came from New York -- specifically Brooklyn. But what stood out to me was how immediately I found and sat with two other journalists of color whom I already knew. Slowly, our table filled with more faces that looked like ours, not only in color but with the same cautious curiosity. We all secretly wondered the same thing: Was this going to be an awesome or awful experience for people like us? What we didn’t know then was this would be a completely unparalleled experience as a journalism convening, one that would evolve and begin to shape other events, making them more accessible and inclusive.”

Andrew Losowsky, Director of Product / Product Editor at CalMatters and The Markup; Co-organizer, Perspectives

• “SRCCON is my happy place, where we can be vulnerable and ourselves, as we laugh and cry and scheme together. I have especially fond memories of every SRCCON game night, ending as they often do with the incredible noise of Pig Destroyer.”

Luisa Ortiz Pérez, Executive Director at Vita-Activa.Org and Lead at MDRNet.org

• “I feel so much gratitude for all the care and support OpenNews has given me over the years, be it as a small grant to attend ONA, a webinar or Slack conversation, or in the kindness of Ryan, Erika, John, Jessica or the community members. Thank you!”

Cordelia Yu also joins our Advisory Council.

Continuing to our Advisory Council from our advisory board

Tiff Fehr, Principal at Gasworks Data, ex-NYT

• “OpenNews staff showed up on the nerd-filled floor of The NYT one day to film news nerd interviews and a teammate’s absence moved me — a relatively new hire — into the list. So my introduction to OpenNews was caught on film. Long hours on the London 2012 Olympics newsapp had me in glasses and full-on project myopia, but it was a joy to share that work and hear real engagement and encouragement from OpenNews staff. That carried over into the first SRCCON and beyond.”

Candice Fortman

• “The first time I attended SRCCON was also the first time I attended a conference that asked for pronouns. This was not a common practice at the time, but I thought it was a degree of thoughtfulness and inclusion that could remind us all to go a step further in our professional care.”

Dan Sinker

• “When I joined what would eventually be known as OpenNews, it was called the Knight Mozilla News Technology Partnership and its logo, believe it or not, was a dinosaur wearing an old-timey press hat. More than that, it felt weirdly irrelevant to journalism and, after dropping the dinosaur, fixing that was job one.”