What does it mean to report on gender-related topics with an awareness of race, class, and other intersections? How can people of all genders and backgrounds investigate matters that pertain to both their identities as well as identities other than their own? Where would you find ideas for focusing on gender-related topics, and how can you pitch those stories to a range of media outlets?

Tasneem Raja, an alumna of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, will moderate a virtual conversation on Friday, March 4, with journalists Natalie Alcoba, Lawrence Andrea, Ashley Okwuosa, and Kate Sosin to dig into these issues.

The conversation is co-organized by the Pulitzer Center and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, along with NLGJA and Women in Media. UC Berkeley is a Campus Consortium partner.

Speaker bios:

Raja is the editor-in-chief of The Oaklandside, a nonprofit news site with a community-centered approach and a commitment to reporting for underserved local communities. Raja is a pioneer in data journalism and local nonprofit news startups, having co-founded The Tyler Loop, a nationally recognized community news platform in East Texas. She was a senior editor at NPR’s Code Switch and at Mother Jones, where the team she led helped build the first-ever database of mass shootings in America.

Alcoba, a Pulitzer Center grantee, is a Argentine-Canadian journalist based in Buenos Aires. She writes extensively about the feminist movement in Argentina, and is interested more broadly in collective organization in Latin America. Alcoba has co-produced short documentaries on the impact of the pandemic on female workers, land occupations, and the legalization of abortion.

Andrea is a public safety and breaking news reporter for The Indianapolis Star. Before joining The Star, he covered politics and breaking news for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and PolitiFact Wisconsin. Andrea was a 2020 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow who focused on the migrant crisis in Greece, including efforts by women to tell their stories and the stories of other refugees through their own photography and filmmaking.

Okwuosa is a Nigerian journalist whose stories on immigration, education, and gender have been published in The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, WNYC, Quartz, and others. She currently works as a reporter and researcher for Maternal Figures, an exploratory project documenting maternal health innovations in Nigeria. She also is a Pulitzer Center grantee.

Sosin is the LGBTQ+ reporter for The 19th, focusing on transgender rights, incarceration, politics, and public policy. The 19th is an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy. Previously, Sosin worked at Logo TV, INTO, Windy City Times, and NBC News, at the latter conducting deep-dive investigations into transgender prison abuse and homicides.