Join ONA Triangle for our October meetup — “What I learned after leaving legacy news to start a modern local media company” on 10/19.
Hear from Sarah Day Owen Wiskirchen, founder of Minerva Media Co. and editor of Raleigh Convergence.
She will share:
+ Why journalism is a discipline and a tool, not a platform (so stop calling yourself a “print” anything)
+ Looking beyond the institutions (why you might be missing some of the best stories)
+ Your analytics aren’t the problem, your storytelling is
+ Why starting a brand from scratch sometimes isn’t as hard as facing what an audience already thinks of you
+ Why we should be owning a role as a facilitator, not a “publisher” for the future of local news
ABOUT THE SPEAKER – SARAH DAY OWEN WISKIRCHEN
Sarah Day Owen Wiskirchen is the founder of Minerva Media Co., a modern local media company, and editor of Raleigh Convergence, a newsletter-first journalism project. Before starting her company in April 2019, she was an editor for more than a decade at organizations including USA Today, the (Palm Springs, Calif.) Desert Sun, and the Des Moines Register.
During her time as the no. 2 editor at the Desert Sun, she led an Online Journalism Award-winning partnership with the University of Southern California’s JOVRNALISM program, which produced a series of immersive stories around the environmental crisis of the Salton Sea. She also launched innovative projects including AI chatbots, a live storytelling series, a membership program, two podcasts and a climate change/environmental newsletter that was picked up by USA Today. She also was the USA Today Network West group social media leader and interim executive editor for four months.
While at the Des Moines Register, career highlights included working on the caucuses as a digital editor and as the social media editor, transforming a weekly print publication to a data-driven, multiplatform young professionals and creative vertical and working with newsrooms around the country as part of a national training team teaching community engagement & events, marketing skills for journalism and analytics.
She started her career as a reporter at the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, covering features and reporting project work on issues such as poverty and teen pregnancy. She oversaw the high school “teen board” and was the news organization’s first social media editor, in 2010.