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.

She launched J-Lab in 2002 at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism 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 $16,000 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 has also built a web tutorial on how to launch community news sites (www.J-Learning.org).

J-Lab is the successor to the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million project Schaffer led for 10 years. 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. Both centers work with print and electronic journalists.

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 young children.