JAWS CAMP 2025: Breakfast with Washington Press Club Foundation President Deborah Berry
(WASHINGTON, DC) - Join us this year for JAWS CAMP 2025! JAWS’ 40th Anniversary Conference and Mentoring Program (CAMP) will be held September 5-7, 2025 at The Royal Sonesta Hotel in Washington, DC’s Dupont Circle neighborhood.
The Washington Press Club Foundation (WPCF) will host a breakfast at the conference on Saturday, Sept. 6 at 8 a.m. featuring remarks from WPCF President Deborah Barfield Berry, who currently works as a national correspondent for USA TODAY where she focuses on voting rights, civil rights and politics.
Berry, an award-winning journalist, has spent most of her journalism career in Washington, DC, where she has covered Congress and national politics. She serves as president of the board for the Washington Press Club Foundation. Her journalism career includes reporting for Gannett News Service, Newsday, Knight Ridder News Service, the Providence Journal, the Times Herald Record and the Star Democrat.
What happens at CAMP? This will be JAWS’ 40th CAMP. While the format and size have varied over the years, the goal has not: to bring women journalists together from different specialties, beats, demographics and geographies to share with, learn from and empower each other. There will be structured presentations and workshops, planned social events and free time for unstructured relationship-building and city exploration. The CAMP Site Selection Committee chose Washington, D.C. based on feedback from members urging a balance between an urban setting allowing easier travel with access to a get-away-from-it-all vibe. The committee also took into account the venue’s capacity, support for conferences, cost and central location.
Stay tuned for more programming announcements and updated information on the CAMP page.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Deborah Barfield Berry, a 2023 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, is a national correspondent for USA TODAY where she focuses on voting rights, civil rights and politics.
Berry, an award-winning journalist, has spent most of her journalism career in Washington, D.C., where she has covered Congress and national politics. She serves as president of the board for the Washington Press Club Foundation.
Her journalism career includes reporting for Gannett News Service, Newsday, Knight Ridder News Service, the Providence Journal, the Times Herald Record and the Star Democrat.
Berry was part of a Newsday team that won a 1997 Pulitzer for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800. She recently won three 2024 National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Awards and other NABJ awards over the years. She was also part of a team that won several awards for USA TODAY’s project 1619: Searching for Answers and was the lead reporter and creator of Seven Days of 1961, a multimedia civil rights project published in 2021. The civil rights project won several awards, including a 2022 NABJ award.
She is a lecturer at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs where she teaches a news writing and reporting course, a reporting coach at the University of Maryland and a volunteer with the Washington Association of Black Journalists urban high school journalism workshop.
The native of Brooklyn, New York, is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism where in 2023 she was inducted into the Merrill College Hall of Fame.