Jaya Padmanabhan is an Emmy-award winning editor, veteran journalist, essayist, columnist, and author of a short story collection.
She is executive director of
American Community Media, a network of community news outlets, founded
by the legendary journalist Sandy Close. American Community Media
conducts weekly briefings with experts speaking on issues of the day,
produces original stories, syndicates content and partners on
initiatives to financially sustain the community media sector.
Jaya was most recently at USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism,
where she served as the editor of a collaborative framework of ethnic
media in California that reported on health and health equity topics
essential to their communities. The stories from the Collaborative have
influenced legislation and received numerous prestigious awards - 18
awards, including 6 Emmys - and continues to receive accolades. Jaya
counts the importance of listening, building trust, tailored mentoring
and mutual respect for the reporters in the program as essential parts
of her toolkit for success.
As one reporter put it, beyond the edits and insights that Jaya offered
throughout the year, it was the "mentorship, kindness and patience" that
mattered most and an LA Times editor thanked Jaya "for going beyond to
be attentive to all the elements that make up a multicultural
fellowship."
As an editor and project manager, she has immersed herself in
fact-based, research driven journalism. She has spent time contouring
stories within the equity framework, writing headlines, editing pitches
and stories, sourcing distribution channels, and refining copy for
diverse platforms.
Jaya applies her background in computer science to newsroom digital
strategy. To bolster newsroom capacity and capability, she draws insight
from story metrics, guarding against the reductive tyranny of
quantification, and not losing sight of the dignity and complexity of
the reporter's craft and audience need.
Her journalism career spanned a six-year stint at the San Francisco
Examiner where she wrote a bi-weekly column called "In Brown Type." She
was also a consulting editor at Ethnic Media Services during that
period. Prior to that she was an editor of the print publication India
Currents, where she steered the magazine to digital-readiness.
As a freelance journalist, her bylines have appeared in numerous
publications, including the New York Times, PBS Next Avenue and Forbes.
In
2015, she was the convocation speaker addressing the graduating class of
computer science graduates at San Jose State University. Her speech was
titled "Why a Software Engineer became a Writer."
She served on San Francisco's Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, advocating
for transparency and accountability in all the city's dealings and
departments.
Jaya sits on the boards of the San Francisco Public Press and India
Currents and consults and speaks on the power of community and
collaborative journalism.
She is the author of "Transactions of Belonging," a collection of short stories published in 2014. |
 Jaya Padmanabhan 2015 Convocation Speech to the SJSU CS Dept
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