I’m president of the Solutions Journalism Network, where we equip journalists to push beyond the usual problem-focused approach, digging into meaty, meaningful responses to society’s most difficult problems.

Before SJN I was a reporter, editor and newsroom manager, with stints as a freelancer and newsletter founder. I am pretty much terrrible at all sports but I once ran the LA Marathon and lived to blog about it. Career highlights include working as a staff writer at the LA Weekly in the golden era of alt weeklies and heading the nascent digital news operation at NBC4 Southern California, where my team won the station its first national Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

I got my start as an intern at the Sonora Union Democrat, an afternoon daily in the foothills of the Sierra Madres. I’d come back from my lunch break to community members lined up outside the building, patiently waiting to buy a newspaper “hot off the presses.” After that I went on to the Los Angeles Times, where I contributed to the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Northridge Earthquake.

Before NBC I was a regional editor at AOL's hyperlocal Patch.com, which was all digital and all remote before either of those were a thing, and where I spearheaded the Southern California operation, supporting the launch of the first sites in California. I’ve worked as a Mother Jones contributor, editorial director at Zócalo Public Square, West Coast Editor in Charge for Reuters, and as an editor at Global Press Journal. In the 20-teens I founded JTrust, a pop-up newsletter and Twitter feed on flailing trust in journalism that was featured by the Local News Lab. Over the years I also taught reporting and writing to undergraduate and graduate students as an adjunct at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

I earned my master's degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley, where I recently returned for a chat with the dean on the future of journalism, and my bachelor's degree in philosophy from St. John's College. I serve on the selection committee for the JSK Fellowship at Stanford, where I was a fellow, on the national and LA boards of the Society of Professional Journalists, and on the board of Ascencia, a non-profit that provides permanent supportive housing and comprehensive services for unhoused people.