J-Lab Staff

Jan Schaffer

Executive Director, jans@j-lab.org
Twitter: @janjlab

Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, runs one of the nation's most successful incubators for news entrepreneurs and innovators and is a leading thinker on the emerging new media landscape.

A former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, she left daily journalism in 1994 to lead pioneering journalism initiatives in 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 has a history of rewarding new ideas and practices through the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.  It has helped launch 58 news start-ups through its New Voices and New Media Women Entrepreneurs projects. It is pioneering innovative collaborative journalism partnerships through its Networked Journalism project and its Enterprise Reporting Awards. The center publishes web tutorials on how to launch and manage startup news sites, and it develops information and resources for online community news sites at the Knight Citizen News Network.

J-Lab, formerly the Institute for Interactive Journalism, is the successor to the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million project that Schaffer previously led. The center 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 a 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.

Schaffer serves on the Journalism Advisory Committee of the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.  She was a member of the 2011 SXSW Accelerator Advisory Board. She is a winner of the awarded by Louisiana State University's Manship School of Mass Communication for innovative media work that has advanced citizens' understanding of challenges in the public arena.

Currently, Schaffer serves as a speaker, researcher, trainer, author, consultant and Web publisher on the future of journalism.  She is married to a Smithsonian Magazine editor and has two children.


Ari Pinkus

Project Manager, ari@j-lab.org

Ari is J-Lab's Project Manager. Previously, Ari served as a national news editor for The Christian Science Monitor in Boston for three years. She has also been managing editor for the US Congress Handbook and a staff writer for Campaigns & Elections magazine in Washington, D.C.  Ari earned a Master of Public Administration from New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. She has a BA in media studies and political science from Penn State University. Outside of work, she enjoys writing and is working on a novel.