Jan Schaffer

Ms. 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 launched J-Lab in 2002 at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism to help newsrooms use innovative computer technologies to inform people about important public issues. The center spotlights new forms of digital storytelling. It rewards innovative practices through the $10,000 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. It funds cutting-edge citizens media ventures through its New Voices project (www.J-NewVoices.org)  and offers a companion how-to site for community publishing (www.j-learning.org). J-Lab is the successor to the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million project Ms. Schaffer led for 10 years. The center 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.

Ms. 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 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. 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. Currently, she serves as a speaker, trainer, author, consultant and Web publisher on the future of journalism.  Ms. Schaeffer has attended five API seminars: Business and Economic Coverage (1990), Journalism Educators (1990), News Credibility in the Information Age (2001), Women in Newsroom Leadership (2002) and Newspaper Next Symposium II: Blueprint for Transformation (2006).