Jan Schaffer
Executive Director,
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 Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, she left daily journalism to lead pioneering journalism initiatives in civic journalism, interactive and participatory journalism and citizen media ventures.
She launched J-Lab in 2002 to help newsrooms use digital 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 77 news start-ups through its New Voices and New Media Women Entrepreneurs projects. It pioneered 23 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 is the successor to the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million project Schaffer previously led. From 1993 to 2002, 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 after earning a masters degree from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. For more than 20 years, she held a range of reporting and editing positions on the city desk, the national desk, in the business news department and was Business Editor when she left.
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.
Schaffer serves on the Journalism Advisory Committee of the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. She was a member of the 2011, 2012 and 2013 SXSW Accelerator Advisory Boards. She is a winner of the Manship Prize, 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, civic engagement and education. She is married to a Smithsonian Magazine editor and has two children.
