Journos in the SF Bay Area — or anywhere — please join ONA SF for a stimulating two-part virtual event to close out 2021!
The first part will feature a conversation about race and equity coverage in our newsrooms and covering our Bay Area community by two local news leaders, Michael Bolden (Director of Culture and Operations at the San Francisco Chronicle) and Otis R. Taylor, Jr. (Supervising Senior Editor of Race and Equity at KQED). After they share their remarks on the topic, there will be time for a brief Q+A.
The second part of our evening will be an informal and fun mixer for everyone to celebrate the holidays and the end of the year, and share their hopes and plans for 2022 in many small group conversations. It will be a great opportunity to mingle, meet new people or hang out with friends that you haven’t seen in a while.
We’ll be using a new social video platform to replicate the kind of easy and spontaneous socializing you would normally have at our in-person events. You will have the opportunity to roam different conversations in our virtual event space at your own pace. In each conversation you’ll be able to see a few other attendees, say hi and chat, and move on to meet another group of friends whenever you’re ready. In addition to fun virtual hangouts, we will have spaces devoted to specific conversation topics so you can more easily find colleagues with similar interests.
To join in, please RSVP here and save the date on your calendar! That way you will receive Meetup emails with event updates and the direct EVENT URL when we make it available, and be reminded again on the day of the event. To ensure that you receive those updates, make sure that you have checked the box to receive “event updates from organizers” at https://www.meetup.com/account/comm/ONA-SF
Tentative Agenda:
6:00pm Welcome
6:10pm Conversation on Race and Equity Coverage in the Bay Area featuring Michael Bolden and Otis R. Taylor, Jr.
6:50pm Q+A
7:15 pm Social Mixer with lots of different conversation spaces to join
8:45pm Social Mixer wraps up
Speakers:
Michael Bolden is Director of Culture and Operations at The San Francisco Chronicle and a member of the newsroom’s senior leadership team. Previously, he was managing director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University. Earlier, Bolden served as the first editorial director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and worked at The Washington Post, where he led the award-winning transportation and development reporting team and worked as an editor for The Washington Post Magazine and the Style and Sunday Arts sections. He’s also been a reporter and editor in Miami and Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is a graduate of the University of Alabama.
Otis R. Taylor Jr. is Supervising Senior Editor of Race and Equity at KQED. His focus is on the role of systemic inequity in journalism, working with reporters and senior editors to bring a cultural competency to story production and editing as they reframe the station’s coverage of diverse communities. Previously, he was an East Bay Columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and an investigative reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While at the Chronicle, Taylor extensively covered housing, policing, race, and inequality. For that work, he received the 2020 Journalist of the Year award from the NorCal chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Taylor is from South Carolina, and spent more than a decade at The State newspaper as a reporter.