The Jackson State University Department of Mass Communications will host Connecting with Diverse Communities, a Maynard Institute for Journalism Education workshop featuring Martin G. Reynolds.
The event will be held in the Convention Hall at the Mississippi e-Center @JSU, Thursday, Sept. 26, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. The campus and the public are invited.
Reynolds, senior editor of community engagement for the Bay Area News Group, will lead the program and present ideas to:
• Use the institute’s Fault Lines diversity framework to build a process of conceiving stories and business practices that include views across race, gender, generation, geography and class
• Leverage diversity to increase the bottom line
• Use new tools to strengthen ties to previously underserved communities
• Avoid technological/community mismatch
• Create technology strategies to ensure that newsrooms are not leaving potential audience members behind
Reynolds was named in December 2011 as senior editor for community engagement for MediaNews Group’s Bay Area News Group and Digital First Media’s Western Region. He began his career at The Oakland Tribune as a Chips Quinn Scholar intern in 1995 and worked his way through the ranks, serving as editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2011.
He was one of the lead editors on the award-winning Chauncey Bailey Project investigating the assassination of the former Oakland Post editor and Tribune reporter. Mr. Reynolds was among the lead editors for the “Not Just a Number” project examining youth violence in Oakland, which won the Knight Award for Public Service from the Online News Association in 2006. He is co-founder of the Tribune’s Oakland Voices project, a community journalism program run in partnership with the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
Reynolds was named 2013 Innovator of the Year by his parent company, Digital First Media, largely for his work developing Oakland Voices.
Reynolds has served as the National Coordinator on two Voices expansions, one in partnership with MIJE and The Clarion-Ledger, along with a series of Voices forums in Philadelphia in 2012 that brought together media professionals to talk about ways to reframe the narrative around black men and boys. Reynolds is an at-large board member of the Associated Press Media Editors and lives in Oakland, Calif., with his wife and their two children. He is an avid boxing and San Francisco 49ers fan.
The workshop is funded by the Gannett Foundation.