• ANCIENT PROFILE •
Ana Graciela Mendez ’07 Reinventing local news
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Miss Porter’s School
n the years since Ana “Annie” Graciela Mendez graduated from Miss Porter’s School in 2007, she has co-founded a data journalism company and worked as a journalist in her native Panama, earned two master’s degrees, done freelance investigative reporting for The New York Times, and held a fellowship at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
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Now she is the special projects editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Lenfest Local Lab, where she leads strategy for a team tasked with finding new ways of doing local journalism. “New and better ways, and ways that better serve residents,” said Ms. Mendez, who also oversees the lab’s Spanish translations. “Not everyone will sit for an hour reading a newspaper from front to back. Not everyone has the technology to scroll through a front page on a website.” With financing from the Inquirer’s nonprofit owner, the Lenfest Institute, the Local Lab team is an incubator of sorts, experimenting with technology and product design
to connect with readers and communities that have traditionally been under- or ill-served by Philadelphia’s paper of record in the past. “In a city like Philadelphia, the news has played a role, unfortunately, in causing harm in different communities— systematically excluding them from coverage or covering them in one specific way,” said Ms. Mendez. “Reversing that, and taking a hard look at what we can do better to cultivate trust, looks a lot different from day-to-day reporting.” Her work wins high praise from Michael Krisch, deputy director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University. The institute collaborated with the Local Lab to develop an automated tool that identified and mapped locations in the Inquirer’s news stories for a diversity and inclusion audit. “Bringing trusted journalism to communities that have long been ignored or misrepresented is just the first step to a more equitable journalism, and I cannot imagine a better person than Annie for the job,” said Mr. Krisch.
