My platform
I’m running to be your next NAHJ president to take our organization into the next era. Serving as your vice president for the last six years has allowed me to see our strengths and where we can improve. This experience will allow me to take on the challenges facing NAHJ of both today and tomorrow.
We need to bolster our advocacy efforts and fight for our members and a free press. That means focusing on member and leadership engagement, revenue diversification, and organizational infrastructure as the foundations that will make us stronger.
This is what I will do to ensure our current and future NAHJ leaders take our organization to places we have never reached before.
Grow our organization via member and leadership engagement
NAHJ needs a strong membership to function, and my goal is to grow from our current 3,780 members to 4,500 members by our 45th anniversary.
We can reach those new 800 members if we treat membership growth as an active responsibility rather than a passive dream, engaging the members we have, empowering our leaders and systematically reaching the constituencies we are meant to represent.
Task the board members, all 18 of us, with recruiting a set number of new members from each of our constituencies. To reach 4,500 by 45, that would mean 15 new members per board member over three periods in addition to staff and organization-wide efforts, encouraging board members to connect with constituents beyond our personal networks.
An example of this could be: the Spanish At Large representative reaching out and building relationships with Spanish-language newsrooms across the country, many of which have employees who are not members while still being our constituents. Each board member would do the same with their constituents according to geography or discipline
Provide our chapter and task force leaders the resources and training they need to build programming that serves their communities. Recruitment should not happen in a vacuum. If the Vice President of Print is reaching out to photographers or investigative journalists, for example, the Visual Task Force and the Investigative & Data Task Force should be working alongside them to offer events, trainings and opportunities that provide those journalists a reason not only to join NAHJ, but to get involved.
Encourage engagement via transparency. People will be more invested in the organization if they know what we are doing. We should prioritize publishing our board meeting agendas ahead of time and invite members to observe and share their input during public comment sections at our board meetings. Since not everyone will be able to make it to board meetings live, we should record the meetings and upload to YouTube for members to reference, along with meeting minutes on the NAHJ website.
Build engagement across the organization from the top down and the bottom up by ensuring chapters, national, and task force leaders are accessible to each other and participate in collective group discussions as part of the day-to-day operations via the NAHJ Leadership Slack, which I built at the request of chapter leaders. If the chapter leaders are working not only directly with their national representatives, but with their peers, that encourages them to grow engagement with their constituents
Capitalize on the Announcements and Promotion channel in the Leadership Slack to encourage chapters, task forces, and national to support each other and cross-promote the work being done by members across the country
Diversify revenue and finances
My goal is to grow our budget from $2.4 million to $2.75 million for 2028 and $3 million for 2029 by cultivating new revenue that is not traditional to NAHJ.
Our annual conference raises 80 percent of our general operating funds, and while this event is valuable to members and sponsors, I believe greater growth is found by expanding beyond this model as the news industry evolves.
We need to explore and create an NAHJ Board of Advisors, comprised of executives and well connected professionals , including those from outside the news industry, who can help NAHJ explore new fundraising avenues and provide perspectives beyond the expertise of our Board of Directors.
We should prioritize moving Palabra to a publishing or distribution platform like Substack as a way to reduce current hosting costs and monetize the articles we publish.
We should examine events as a sponsorship and revenue source, the way many news companies have built events divisions to improve their finances. Holding the Mic was a great platform for our members to be heard as the experts as they are. We should examine what a recurring, planned annual events series could look like that would elevate our members while building consistent revenue.
Build organizational infrastructure
I plan to build the tools needed to unlock the potential of our current leaders, establish a strong launchpad for those who will come after us, and nurture the type of skills in our leaders that will allow them to become the type of leader that can run everything from a chapter meeting to a newsroom meeting.
We need the good work we have done to continue, building upon the foundation that previous boards have established and relying on our strategic plan to guide our next steps.
Develop resources for chapter and task force leaders. We need to have clear responsibilities and expectations when it comes to NAHJ leadership, but that requires that we give people the resources and support needed to fulfill those responsibilities. Think of the corporate onboarding and human resources trainings many of us do. If we give the chapter and task force leaders unified onboarding, job descriptions, and advice from their peers and predecessors, we are setting them up for success as they then better serve our members.
Fully implement the NAHJ Leadership Slack to give our chapter leaders the direct access to their national representatives they have asked for. The Leadership Slack gives our chapter, taskforce, and national leaders the chance to connect with each other and learn from their peers via dedicated channels. This allows people to connect with their fellow presidents, vice presidents, secretaries and treasurers, while the regional channels allow chapters to work with each other. Nurturing this culture of organizational cooperation, access, and accountability also gives us a place where new leaders can tap into shared knowledge, and learn from experienced leaders as they step into a new position.
We must begin work on the 2027 strategic plan before our current plan expires next year. As the media landscape continues to drastically change, we need clarity about the ways in which the needs of our organization and members have grown or changed over the past 5 years, and take that into account when working with leadership and membership on our new plan.
Build a strong recruiting system within NAHJ that explains the work it takes to run the organization and primes members to step into leadership positions. These recruitment efforts are important at the conference, but we must make them available to members outside as well to ensure people from all parts of NAHJ are involved in moving our organization forward.
These are the policies I would like to pursue as President of NAHJ. If they sound good you should vote for me in the November election.
If you have any feedback please let me know.