I’m the Editor-in-Chief of The Oaklandside, a local newsroom serving Oakland, California. We’re a small but mighty team that amplifies community voices, shares information resources, and investigates systems, not just symptoms. Read more about our mission and vision over at the Columbia Journalism Review.
I’m also a co-founder of the Cityside Journalism Initiative, the nonprofit parent organization powering both The Oaklandside and Berkeleyside. I believe deeply in the power of community-supported, community-centered journalism.
Before returning to Oakland, I was the Executive Editor and co-founder of The Tyler Loop, a nationally recognized nonprofit local news startup in East Texas, and a former senior editor at NPR and Mother Jones. I’ve written and reported for national outlets including The New Yorker online, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and NPR on an eclectic range of subjects.
The Tyler Loop is a nonprofit news platform for the beautiful, complicated, deeply diverse, deeply segregated city of Tyler, Texas, that produces deeply reported features on history, demographics, and change in a stretch of Texas where fascinating, important stories too often go untold and where dusty old stereotypes hang on for too long. The Loop also experiments with new ways to collaborate with the people and communities we aim to serve, from its storytelling training program to audience-driven reporting to a wildly popular taco tour. Here's a nice write-up of the site from Harvard's Nieman Lab.
At NPR, I reported and edited stories about race, identity, and culture as a senior editor of the Code Switch team. I also led the development and launch of the popular Code Switch podcast. On one of my favorite episodes, I talked about a funny pet peeve — people mispronouncing my name — with a couple of my favorite comics. In another episode, I dissect the enduring American fascination with the Indian accent with two great Mumbai comics. You can read a bit more about my work at NPR over at Poynter.
Earlier in my journalism career, I specialized in data-driven and interactive journalism, leading a scrappy team of designers, coders, and reporters at Mother Jones. We built the first-ever database of mass shootings in America and a suite of open-source storytelling tools for newsrooms everywhere, among many other things.
As a national magazine writer, I'm interested in everything. I've gone deep on a fight over Confederate names, how employers can stop gendered interruptions, how remote work can save the world, how computers think, Starbucks names, the Craigslist for guns, Silicon Valley's brogrammers, Indian accents, fringe religions, 9,000-year-old bones, how not to train your dog, and lots more. I've talked about my reporting on national and local radio programs, including NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, and on panels at SXSW, Google, and more.
Called "one of the smartest people on Twitter" by Fast Company, I've spoken at leading web and media conferences (Newsfoo, Online News Association, National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting, Spark Camp, MediaRise) on diversity and inclusion, journalism in the digital age, gender in the workplace, and other issues I care about deeply.
I live in Oakland, Ca. with my husband, daughter, and two imperious terriers.
