Meet the Solutions Journalism Advisory Council
The 11-member advisory council will create a solutions journalism awards program with broad access to participation
by Holly Wise, SJN network strategy manager
Sometimes there’s only good news to share.
(And that’s happening right now!)
The Solutions Journalism Network has brought together an advisory council with expertise spanning journalism, education, equity and inclusion, systems change and community-building.
Over the next six months, the council is charged with designing an awards program that will celebrate the best of solutions journalism — rigorous reporting on effective responses to society’s most vexing challenges.
The advisory council is committed to creating a program with broad access to participation across equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging.
We are thrilled to work with the council to develop this awards program, forging deeper connections with and paths to the communities we seek to serve, and ensuring that all people have access to solutions journalism no matter where or how they get their news.
Here are the members of our new Advisory Council (see bios below this list):
Amy L. Kovac-Ashley, head of national programs, Lenfest Institute
André Natta, collaborations editor, Muckrock
Aparna Muhkerjee, leading the Catalyst media program, Asian American Journalists Association
Blake Stoner, founder and chief reporter, Vngle
Chris Rudisill, digital & audience engagement editor, Qnotes in Charlotte
Diana López, coordinator of programs, Online News Association
Letrell Crittenden, director of inclusion and audience growth, American Press Institute
Rashad Mahmood, executive director, New Mexico Local News Fund
Sara Lomax, co-founder, URL Media
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, professor, Columbia College Chicago
Josh Hinkle, director of investigations and innovation, KXAN
Bios
Amy Kovac-Ashley
Amy L. Kovac-Ashley is the head of national programs at Lenfest Institute, where her portfolio includes nurturing communities of practice such as the Statewide News Collective and advising news leaders on organizational and cultural change. She is a 2022–23 RJI fellow, where she is creating a succession planning guide for digital news operations, and she currently serves on the Board of Directors of the nonprofit news organization Open Campus Media. Previously, she was executive vice president and chief of news transformation at the American Press Institute, where her portfolio encompassed all of API’s Journalism programs. Those included accountability journalism; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; and organizational transformation and culture change, a major piece of which is the Table Stakes program. She also designed and led API’s adviser and community listening programs and was a principal architect of API’s Listening and Sustainability Lab. Amy has been a journalism educator at the undergraduate and graduate level at West Virginia University and Georgetown University and spent a dozen years as a professional journalist, with most of her time working in print or digital news at outlets such as Foreign Policy magazine, Patch and The Washington Post.
André Natta
Muckrock’s collaborations editor André Natta has worked in both hospitality and economic development in addition to journalism. He previously served as Resolve Philly’s project editor for Broke in Philly and as editorial director of the Lenfest Local Lab, a news product & UX team focused on innovation and housed within The Philadelphia Inquirer. André started and maintained the local independent news site, The Terminal, in Birmingham, Alabama for more than 10 years. A 2018 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow, he’s served as a columnist for the Poynter Institute and as a digital news producer for both the Southern Education Desk, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded regional journalism collaborative, and NPR member station WBHM. He’s board chair for the Tiny News Collective, an organization helping bring equity into the news and information ecosystem.
Aparna Muhkerjee
Aparna is a consultant, serving as the Asian American Journalists Association lead for the Catalyst media entrepreneurship program for founders of color; and as a Digimentor, working to empower nonprofits, startups, and media organizations to better discover and share their communities’ stories with a clear equity lens. As a 2021 John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford University, she focused on boosting democratic voice in public meetings through AI, sentiment analysis, and deliberative democracy methodologies. Through Sense LA, a systems thinking creative assembly series she co-created and launched out of LA’s City Hall, where she served as an Executive Adviser, she also emphasizes the role of emotion and lived experience in shaping public opinion and policy. A former journalist, Aparna has worked in newsrooms at the AP, Bloomberg News, CNBC, and written for WSJ and The New Yorker. At The New York Times, she ran the paper’s online education ventures group and civic engagement initiatives. Her other innovation-focused roles include serving as McKinsey’s first social media editor and running industry programs for the Paley Center for Media. An alumna of Bryn Mawr College, she holds a joint Master’s in Journalism/MBA from Columbia, where she was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow and taught digital strategy master classes for EMBAs.
Blake Stoner
Blake Stoner is the Founder and Chief Reporter of the web3 grassroots news agency Vngle. Vngle stands for “various angles” and serves as a nonpartisan newswire that trains diverse constituencies on how to capture verified hyper-local insights to aid newsrooms in combating news deserts and traces of misinformation. Blake serves as a Knight Foundation fellow for the CUNY Craig Newmark Journalism School’s Executive Program for News Innovation & Leadership. Blake holds an MS in Strategic Communication from Columbia University and a BA in Economics from Morehouse College. His leadership has earned the MIT Solve Global Community Award for creating Antiracist Technology and a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from the late Congressman John Lewis. Previously, Blake has served as a Harvard Franklin Fellow for Social Impact x Tech, a Human-Centered Design Leader at the Columbia Design Studio, an Oprah Winfrey International Leadership Fellow, and a Goldin Institute Global Fellow for international grassroots leadership.
Chris Rudisill
Chris Rudisill, the Digital & Audience Engagement Editor at Qnotes in Charlotte, N.C., is focused on increasing opportunities for community involvement and sustainability in local LGBTQ journalism. He joined Qnotes in 2019 and led the publication through the Google GNI North American Innovation Challenge project to launch the new QnotesCarolinas.com. Chris is also the Director of the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative, a partnership of seven media companies and other local institutions focusing on issues of major importance to the Charlotte region, and the interim Project Manager for the Delaware Journalism Collaborative, launched earlier this year. As a writer, he specializes in long-form narratives, solutions journalism, arts journalism and community journalism. In 2020, he was selected into the Solutions Journalism Network Mentorship program and has participated in numerous trainings and conferences on collaborative journalism. Chris consults with journalists, cultural organizations and LGBTQ advocacy groups across the country, has been a guest speaker at a variety of national events, was featured in 2017 on NBCComcast Newsmakers and has written for Huffington Post and The Sun News. In 2019, he founded artstreet where he uses his combined background in nonprofit leadership and journalism to empower organizations to excel in achieving mission-based initiatives, building sustainability, and increasing the impact of projects on the communities they serve.
Diana López
For over 4 years, Diana López has been coordinating programs, resources, volunteers and community initiatives at the Online News Association. She also facilitates ONA’s governance matters and is an active participant in the Vision25 collaboration between ONA, the Maynard Institute and OpenNews to advance racial equity in newsrooms. Previously, Diana worked as a broadcast researcher for the nationally syndicated newsmagazine show Inside Edition. She graduated from Stony Brook University with a B.A. in Journalism and also holds an A.A. in Media and Communications from Nassau Community College. Diana believes storytelling is a superpower and enjoys encouraging journalists to use it responsibly.
Dr. Letrell Crittenden
Letrell Crittenden, the first director of inclusion and audience growth at the American Press Institute, specializes in issues related to diversity and inclusion in news and community-engaged journalism. Prior to joining API in September, he was the program director and assistant professor of communication at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, where he helped revamp the program’s curriculum and served as the inaugural Diversity Advocate for the College of Humanities and Sciences. For his efforts inside and outside the classroom, he received the university’s 2021 Provost’s Award for Service to the Profession. He has also been a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and the Media and Inequality Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His doctoral dissertation focused on the history of the National Association of Black Journalists, of which he is a member. Prior to his academic career, Crittenden was a police and government reporter and is a veteran practitioner of community journalism. He is co-founder and former editor and co-researcher for the Germantown Info Hub, a project of Resolve Philly designed to provide better news coverage of the city’s Germantown neighborhood.
Rashad Mahmood
Rashad Mahmood is the executive director of the New Mexico Local News Fund. He is an expert storyteller with experience in journalism, grant writing, public relations, mediation and program management. Rashad has a B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from UC Berkeley and an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Before coming to New Mexico he worked in international development in Washington DC, Egypt and Iraq. He also worked for two years as a business journalist in Egypt. After moving to Albuquerque, he worked as the Program Outreach Coordinator for Generation Justice, and in December 2014 joined KUNM 89.9 FM as the Program Coordinator for the Public Health New Mexico project.
Sara Lomax
Sara Lomax is a co-founder of URL Media and believes deeply in the power and importance of media ownership, especially for Black and Brown people. She has been a media entrepreneur for almost 30 years, building, shaping and growing organizations created by, for and about Black people. She is the CEO of WURD Radio, one of the few remaining Black-owned talk radio stations in the nation. She is the Program Lead for the Facebook BIPOC Sustainability Accelerator and a coach in the Major Metro Table Stakes program. She believes now is the time to radically reinvent the media industry by supporting Black and Brown owned/led organizations that serve communities that have been overlooked and undervalued for far too long.
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, a Professor in the Communication Department at Columbia College Chicago, teaches a wide range of journalism courses but has a special interest in magazine writing and editing as well as solutions journalism. She is also the creator of Columbia Votes, the college’s nationally recognized voter education, motivation and registration initiative. A dedicated teacher, she was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2013 and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Teaching Activism Award in 2022. Her scholarly interests include magazine media and solutions journalism. Her research has been published in Journalism Practice, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Handbook of Magazine Media and the Journal of Magazine Media and she is co-editor of Curating Culture: How 20th Century Magazines Influenced America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
Josh Hinkle
Josh Hinkle is KXAN’s director of investigations and innovation, leading the station’s duPont and IRE Award-winning investigative team. He also leads the Texas-based television outlet’s political coverage as executive producer and host of “State of Texas,” a weekly statewide program focused on the Texas Legislature and elections. Josh teaches broadcast journalism at St. Edward’s University in Austin. He also serves on the board of directors for both Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
Want to learn more about solutions journalism? Discover what it is (and isn’t) in five minutes here, or you can dig into thousands of solutions stories with the Solutions Story Tracker.
