Dear JAWS community, I want to share an important message from Eloiza Altoro, who has decided to step down from JAWS in March for personal reasons. We all owe her an enormous debt of gratitude for her leadership and hard work of more than three years. Eloiza arrived at a time when JAWS needed her most, as we navigated a leadership and organizational transition, our own racial reckoning, lagging financial reporting and then the pandemic.

JAWS is pleased to announce the inaugural group of reporters selected to participate in its new Health Journalism Fellowship. These emerging journalists bring diverse professional and personal experiences to the beat that will inform the untold stories about health care that they want to tell, in particular those about people who are marginalized as a result of discriminatory practices rooted in race, class, and disability. They will also focus on potential solutions to these challenges. The health journalism fellowship program was created through the generous support of The Commonwealth Fund.

Learn about Google's newest tool, Pinpoint, explicitly built with journalists in mind. We'll explore public collections, as well as learn how to upload document sets to examine through powerful search functionality, including searching handwriting and text within images. And we'll show you how to use Pinpoint to transcribe audio and video files, such as interviews and meetings. We'll also review some case studies and see how U.S. newsrooms have used Pinpoint in their work.

JAWS Health Journalism Fellowship in partnership with The Commonwealth Fund is a unique opportunity for emerging and early career journalists who have an interest in and passion for upping their health care reporting skills. To improve access, quality and efficiency in our health care system, patients and communities need far more accurate, accessible and useful information devoid of misinformation or jargon. A rigorous, science-based but far more inclusive, empathetic and compelling approach to health care reporting is needed.

JAWS is excited to announce the newly elected members to the 2022-2023 Board of Directors: President-Elect Jhmira Alexander, returning Treasurer Joanna Hernandez, returning general board members Linda Jue and Suzanne Cosgrove, and new board members Jill Cornfield and Cirien Saadeh. They join President Jennifer Kho, Secretary Tanya Gazdik and general Board members Amanda Crawford, Gwyneth Doland, Barbara Selvin and Nadine Arroyo Rodriguez.

JAWS is excited to announce two of our keynote speakers for JAWS CAMP 2022 Sept. 9-11 in Austin, Texas! Register here for the 2022 Conference And Mentoring Program where we will focus on Truth. Justice. Community. Lulu Garcia-Navarro – a two-time Peabody Award-winning journalist – is our Saturday evening keynote speaker. Sunday afternoon, Karen Attiah will close the conference. She is an Opinions columnist for the Washington Post where her writing focuses on race, gender, culture, human rights and international affairs.

On June 2, JAWS President Jenn Kho was named executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, the first woman and person of color to hold the position in the newspaper’s 178-year history. Jenn is the former managing editor of HuffPost and Guardian US, and a digital media consultant. She’ll be leading the Sun-Times at a pivotal moment for the daily newspaper, which recently transitioned to nonprofit ownership.

The wait is over! You can register now for the first JAWS CAMP (Conference And Mentoring Program) in person since 2019. The theme this year is JAWS Reunited. Truth. Justice. Community. JAWS CAMP 2022 is Sept. 9-11 in Austin, Texas. You can register, book your hotel room and keep up with all things CAMP. Early-bird pricing ends July 31. We'll be staying at the beautiful Lakeway Resort and Spa with special rates for CAMP attendees.

Join JAWS' and Los Angeles Times Houston Bureau Chief Molly Hennessy-Fiske as she talks with Melissa del Bosque, Emmy and National Magazine Award-winning journalist and author of Bloodlines – The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty, in which she follows a harrowing attempt to dismantle a cartel leader’s American racing dynasty built on extortion and blood money. 

Got an idea for the next great media outlet? Not sure how to develop it in the ever-changing journalism landscape? Join JAWS and NLGJA: the Association of LGBTQ Journalists on May 4 from 7 to 8 p.m. ET. During this webinar, you’ll hear from Karen Hawkins, co-publisher and co-editor-in-chief of the Chicago Reader, and Tammye Nash, managing editor of the Dallas Voice.

Meet four women who are organizing newsrooms and freelancers. Why? What are the outcomes, the stakes, the implications, not only for our industry but the communities we serve? How can you get involved?

Join this week’s JAWS webinar – 7 p.m. ET, Thursday, March 24 – as we talk to Molly O’Toole, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter based in Washington, D.C., currently working on her book, “The Route,” a narrative of the new migrant underground, a deadly gauntlet for refugees from around the world that stretches from Brazil to the U.S.-Mexico border. The book is to be published by Crown, a division of Random House.

I’m honored and excited to take on the permanent role of the Journalism & Women Symposium’s executive director. This incredible opportunity marks the beginning of a new chapter for the organization, whose mission is to advance women in journalism and advocate for more inclusive coverage of the diverse experiences and cultures that comprise our society.

Join us TOMORROW, Feb. 23 at 7 p.m. ET. as we talk with Jhmira Alexander, president and exec director of Public Narrative and incoming vice president of JAWS. Driven by a mission to "shore up our country’s democratic underpinnings," Public Narrative has for 25 years worked with journalists to tell more inclusive stories that reflect diverse human experiences. Join us to discuss how Public Narrative has evolved to serve multi platform media and how news organizations can be more responsive to and more engaged with audiences.

JAWS is, and always has been, member-driven. That means our ambitious plans can’t happen without your unique skills, talents and perspectives. Please consider joining a committee or task force this year to advance the professional empowerment and personal growth of women in journalism and advocate for more inclusive coverage of the diverse experiences and cultures that comprise our society.

“Happy New Year, JAWdesses! I’m so excited to kick of 2022 at JAWS. Over the holidays, as I reflected on what I’m grateful for, and read the love letters to JAWS from Dawn Garcia and Georgia Dawkins, I was overwhelmed with gratitude that I get to be in community with so many amazing people at JAWS who are working to bring meaningful …”

JAWS helped me tell the truth — and changed my life. In 2014, as a JAWS fellow, I fell in love with CAMP — and with the validation, compassion, and acceptance that I felt all around me. This incredibly diverse group of women in different career phases and stages of life made me feel more like myself. I’d found a home, a place to grow with grace. That intensified at CAMP in 2015, when in Jill Geisler’s diversity breakout sessions, my table talked about feeling ‘other’ in our newsrooms. It can feel so lonely in your newsroom – until you can share and hear others’ struggles too. I felt like, WHOA, I’m not crazy? How sad that we all feel othered, separately!

I first learned about JAWS as I was joining a newsroom that did not welcome the new Latina editor – me – hired instead of the guys they knew. It was my first official leadership role in a newsroom, and it was lonely. At my first JAWS CAMP, I learned from wise and witty women who had been newsroom leaders before me. They gave me strategies, suggestions – and raucous laughter, when that’s what I needed. I felt like I was home.

Despite all that we faced, we loved this organization enough to fight with and for each other, to cry together, and to hold ourselves accountable for JAWS’ survival. Even in our moment of distress, we tested whether we could become the ambitious, tolerant and inclusive organization we sought to be. To do that, we did what so many women in history fighting for a cause have always done: we trusted the brilliance and ingenuity of women.

Alessandra Galloni, appointed in April 2021 as Reuters’ first female editor-in-chief in the news agency’s 170-year history, said she got some great workplace advice years ago when she had her first child: Return to a bigger job. She took that advice, and it paid off with a progression of increasingly important roles at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters over the past two decades.