Jan Schaffer

Executive Director
J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism

Jan Schaffer, former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (www.J-Lab.org) and one of the nation’s leading thinkers in the journalism reform movement.

She left daily journalism in 1994 to lead pioneering journalism initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive and participatory journalism and citizen media ventures.

J-Lab is a center of American University’s School of Communication. She launched J-Lab in 2002 to help newsrooms use innovative computer technologies to engage people in important public issues. The center now spotlights new forms of digital storytelling on (www.J-Lab.org). It rewards innovative practices through the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. It funds cutting-edge citizen media start-ups through its New Voices project (www.J-NewVoices.org). It built web tutorials on how to launch and manage community news sites (www.J-Learning.org). It collects information on community, citizen and original journalism projects with the Knight Citizen News Network (www.kcnn.org) and it raises awareness of women in media in a partnership with McCormick Foundation through the New Media Women Entrepreneurs project (www.newmediawomen.org).

J-Lab is the successor to the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million project which Schaffer previously led. The center (www.pewcenter.org) helped to fund more than 120 pilot projects that developed new reporting techniques to engage people better in public life.

She brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to her work. Schaffer joined The Inquirer in 1972 after earning a masters degree from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. She held range of reporting and editing positions on the city desk, the national desk and the business news department.

As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of six Philadelphia homicide detectives and won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service.

Also while covering federal courts, she broke the Philadelphia Abscam story about the FBI sting operation that used agents posing as Arab sheiks. She was sentenced to jail for six months for refusing to reveal her sources; the sentence was stayed on appeal.

As Business Editor, she directed the reporting and editing of two investigative series that were named Pulitzer finalists, one on pharmaceutical pricing and one on abuses in the nation’s non-profit sector.

Currently, she serves as a speaker, trainer, author, consultant and Web publisher on the future of journalism and is a regular discussion leader for the American Press Institute and other industry organizations. She is married to a Smithsonian Magazine editor and has two children.

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J-Lab helps journalists and citizens use digital technologies to develop new ways for people to participate in public life with projects on innovations in journalism, citizen media, news games, interactive stories, entrepreneurship, research, training, and publications

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J-Lab is a center of American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C.

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