Hi. I'm Heather.
I’m fascinated by the intersection of journalism, collaboration, class, art and technology
This site is my gathering space of my professional work, projects and writing.
I've worked on a weird and wildly varied portfolio of projects considering journalism, technology, class, caregiving and creativity.
This site is a catch place and a repository of the things I've worked on, am working, and hope to work on soon.
What does it mean to subscribe to this site?
I'm not setting out to do a regular newsletter or anything like that. It's more that it's getting hard to count on different platforms to share my work and my thinking so I'm going to primarily focus on putting them here before I chase after whatever other platform is on-trend. If you'd like to see those things—which I imagine will be a mix of posts on issues, topics and efforts I'm thinking about, book mentions or highlighting interesting stories, feel free to subscribe. I'm not on a planned publishing schedule for these things so I don't anticipate showing up in your inbox too much if you do subscribe.
My background
I started in journalism in Alaska first at the student weekly at UAF and then at KTOO Public Media where I served as the digital editor, guiding the design and implementation of digital strategy as the organization began to offer digital news products. In 2015, I received a grant from the Knight Prototype Fund to build Facet, an open source infrastructure project that supports journalism collaboration with tools and frameworks to manage the logistics of creating, editing and distributing collaborative content, managing projects, facilitating collaborative relationships and sharing the best practices of collaborative journalism. As a 2016-2017 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, I researched how to make collaboration more effective, equitable and inclusive. Facet was a finalist in the 2018 Startups for News global competition managed by the Global Editors Network.
In 2018, I worked on the Stanford Journalism and Democracy Initiative where I participated in the early research and scaffolding of the digital project examining the impact of journalism on democratic institutions before moving on to work with the Membership Puzzle Project at CUNY studying how newsrooms can create responsive and inclusive relationships with low and no income audiences.
Following that I joined the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University where I helped document and create resources for collaborative journalism projects including publishing two editions of the collaborative journalism workbook.
I was the Deputy Director of Product for News Catalyst based out of Temple University. News Catalyst works with news organizations around the country to implement product-driven newsroom practices to drive innovation, responsive news coverage and sustainable business practices. As part of that work, I helped organize the Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms in partnership with J+ at CUNY and the Google News Initiative. The program is a remote training program that’s been offered around the world to participants from small newsrooms.
Most recently, I co-founded and launched the Tiny News Collective and served as the interim executive director of the organization. The Tiny News Collective helps local news founders launch and develop local news organizations in the United States in areas unserved or underserved by existing news organizations.
Heather Bryant