DOWNLOAD PUBLISHABLE STORY Katina Arnold, the vice-president of corporate communications at ESPN, is puzzled by an oddly lingering perception: That women aren't into sports.   "You know, we're some of its biggest fans," she says.  View MMCA 2024 Sheroes in Media Awards Acceptance Speech (Photo credit MMCA) She herself always loved sports, which not only brought her to her dream job today, but also has made her a noted advocate for women in athletics and women overall. That includes chairing the Alliance for Women in Media, an influential organization whose mission is ...Read More

DOWNLOAD STORY Founded more than 100 years ago, the National Press Club has been an enduring D.C institution ---and watering hole -- for reporters looking to entertain themselves and their sources and hear from leaders worldwide, And for many years the historic club was famous for being as non-diverse as they come – open only to white men, for example, until that barrier fell in 1955. For even longer women were excluded -- barred until 1971, when the press club members finally voted to end the sexist policy, The club has since elected several women presidents, including, recently, fou...Read More

DOWNLOAD PUBLISHABLE STORY Alicia Bell has long been in the vanguard of the drive to diversify newsrooms and also to right the wrongs that media organizations have inflicted upon Black people. Her most recent position is as director of the influential Racial Equity in Journalism Fund housed at the Borealis Philanthropy, but her work goes back further.  She was founding director of the Media 2070 group at Free Press, which called in 2020 for media reparations and "a national reckoning on the history of systemic racism in U.S. media." It also noted that ”Consolidated media power has...Read More

DOWNLOAD PUBLISHABLE STORY Her mother was a motel maid. Her father could neither read nor write. But their daughter flourished with their unyielding support. “Education was a prime importance, even though they themselves were denied education,” says Janet Dewart Bell of her parents, who grew up in the rural South. Born in 1946, decades before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Dr. Bell came up in both a casually and deliberately racist America. She became an award-winning broadcast journalist, a social activist, a labor official, a doctorate-holding book author, a women's ...Read More

DOWNLOAD PUBLISHABLE STORY Though the Institute for Independent Journalists is oriented toward persons of color, its founder and president, Katherine Reynolds Lewis, no doubt speaks for freelancers everywhere when she makes this modest proposal: “Can I say the pay scale should be flipped between CEO and intern?”  “Because one of my biggest frustrations,” she continues, “is that there are so many people at the top who are just failing up – they launch a news organization, hire a ton of journalists, make a big splash, get covered in the New York Times; ...Read More

DOWNLOAD STORY Tracie Powell has spent years as a prominent activist creating access to media for people of color -- while creating a compelling story of her own. She is a longtime journalist battling racism in the profession she has loved since her childhood in Atlanta.  "I learned how to read by sitting on my father's and grandmother's laps as they read the newspaper," she says. "So I knew early on that I had ink in the blood, as they say, and I knew I wanted to be a journalist." As she grew older in school, she penned news reports and “couldn't wait for my dad to get home from...Read More