Ashley Alvarado is vice president of community engagement and strategic initiatives at Southern California Public Radio (KPCC + LAist). Ashley is currently leading a yearlong program with the American Press Institute that aims to support public media organizations as they operationalize engaged journalism in their newsrooms and connect the dots to revenue and membership. After chairing the Southern California Public Radio’s diversity, equity, and inclusion task force from 2020-2021, she now oversees much of the implementation plan. She also serves as board president of Journalism That Matters, on the advisory committee of Gather, on the national advisory board of Poynter, and as a Table Stakes coach. In 2019, SCPR won the inaugural Gather Award for engaged journalism portfolio at the Online Journalism Awards. SCPR won the award again in 2020.
Ashley’s vision for the future of digital journalism
The future of journalism is one that centers the information needs and habits of the community members it strives to serve. That requires going from hoping to relevance for designing for it: practicing deep listening, adopting human-centered design, demonstrating a willingness and ability to pivot and to acknowledge wrongdoing, and a commitment to supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and a culture of belonging across organizations and with communities. The future of journalism is participatory and not limited to a single platform or distribution model.