CHAPTER MEMBERS: Mark Your Calendar for an in-person gathering for the holiday season.
Join your SPJ DC Pro colleagues Tuesday, Dec. 5, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., at the National Press Club.
We’ll have a private meeting room, free snacks, cash bar. 🍷🍺
More info coming later.
NATIONAL HUG A NEWSPERSON DAY
National Hug a Newsperson Day (formerly National Hug a Newsman Day) on April 4th encourages appreciation for the people reporting the news.
#HugANewspersonDay
Read more HERE.
And for a bit of music to celebrate, have a listen to The Morning Papers by Johann Strauss II.
Join the chapter and other journalists Friday, Oct. 4, at 5 p.m. to meet with 10 foreign journalists visiting the United States under the auspices of the World Press Institute. The gathering will be in the Cosgrove Lounge on the 14th floor of the National Press Club in downtown Washington (529 14th Street NW, 20045 near Metro Center station).
The DC chapter will provide some light snacks. Beverages will be available from a server, but you’ll pay for your own order.
The visiting journalists are coming from Brazil, Bulgaria, Finland, India, Italy, Kosovo, Nigeria, Peru, South Africa and Ukraine.
The World Press Institute, founded in 1961, has provided regular opportunities for journalists from around the world to visit the U.S. and compare notes with their American counterparts.
Please sign up for the event here.
Offered by New England First Amendment Coalition
The NEFC provides reporters, watchdogs and other curious community members the knowledge they can use immediately in news gathering, data collection, storytelling and other areas of journalism and First Amendment law.
The lessons are provided in a 30-minute format to accommodate the demanding schedules faced by many working in New England newsrooms. The program is free and open to the public.
Registration for each lesson is required.
Immigration Reporting 101 session led by Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio
The Boston Globe
Come celebrate the holiday season with your fellow members of the Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. We’ll also toast the near-arrival of the 234th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, our First Amendment birthdate.
We will provide the great New Orleans-style food — you just need to pay for anything you want to drink from the cash bar.
The Ragtime Restaurant is a 2–4-minute walk from the Court House Orange Line Metro station. You can’t get much more convenient than that.
We are aiming to grow our membership in these days when a strong, united voice from journalists committed to seeking truth and reporting it to the public is more important than ever. Bring a colleague who you think would be interested in joining.
This will be a great opportunity for chapter members to connect/re-connect, and for you to meet prospective members who may be our guests and tell them what membership means to you and why they should be part of our chapter and our mission. Spread the cheer, but also spread your enthusiasm for SPJ.
Sign up HERE to let us know you are coming.
Please note that you should respond using the form on the link above so we have your name and email address for any updates.
Current times mean many of our sources may fear repercussions ranging from deportation to court action to violence. How can journalists protect sensitive sources? Erica Hellerstein developed a policy to protect immigrant sources for El Timpano in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kae Petrin co-founded the Trans Journalists Association and is board president for the organization. Margaux Ewen is director of whistleblower protection at The Signals Network, which works with journalists and sources. They’ll share examples and suggest ways to work with sources while minimizing harm.
Registration is required to attend the free Zoom webinar on Wednesday, January 14 at 12 p.m. ET.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS:
- Margaux Ewen is the director of The Signals Network’s Whistleblower Protection Program. Margaux was most recently the director of Freedom House’s Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners, a major project to support journalists, human rights defenders and pro-democracy activists who are detained in retaliation for their heroic work.
- Erica Hellerstein is senior immigration, labor and economics reporter for El Tímpano in the San Francisco Bay area. She is an award-winning journalist with more than a decade of experience reporting on global human rights issues. She’s reported from Africa, Latin America, Europe and across the United States while writing about politics, gender, labor, historical memory and the ways geographies real and constructed shape popular opinion and culture.
- Kae Petrin is president of the Trans Journalists Association board, after co-founding the organization in 2020. They are on leave from their full-time job as a data and graphics reporter at Civic News Company for a 2025-26 John S. Knight fellowship at Stanford, exploring ways to improve coverage of trans communities and retention of trans journalists.
The most consequential midterm election stories — who is organizing, how money and messaging are taking shape, and which issues are reshaping voter priorities — are already unfolding, long before the first votes are cast.
Join the National Press Club Journalism Institute and OpenSecrets for a free webinar that will prepare journalists to cover the midterms with financial data top of mind. This interactive session will focus on OpenSecrets’ campaign finance tools that can support your local and regional political reporting in 2026 and beyond.
OpenSecrets launched in 2021 following a merger between the National Institute on Money in Politics and the Center for Responsive Politics, which expanded users’ access to a vast collection of campaign finance data on state and local races, as well as lobbying data.
During this one-hour, virtual session, participants will learn:
– How to find, download, and incorporate public data into their elections-focused storytelling on deadline;
– How to explore Open Secrets’ “Get Local!” donations tracker and other reliable tools; and
– Strategies to strengthen their midterms coverage in 2026 through accountability journalism.
In the spirit of transparency, this session is also open to interested members of the public.
Journalists today aren’t just reporting the news — they’re becoming their own social media managers. As more people turn to social platforms as their primary news source, knowing how to promote your work strategically and thoughtfully has become a core journalism skill. Not a bonus one.
Kassy Cho, editor-in-chief of Almost, will lead this virtual workshop and share best practices for sharing your reporting on different platforms like Instagram and TikTok. That’ll include how to draw people in, visuals 101 and tips for defining goals.
This SPJ DC–requested workshop is designed to help reporters meet audiences where they already are. Bring your breakfast and questions for this early-morning session!
Register for the Zoom session here.
Editor-in-Chief of Almost, Kassy leads an independent media platform delivering social-first news for young people, helping them make sense of global events with truth, clarity and heart. Kassy’s work has reached hundreds of millions worldwide, sparking new conversations and shifting how news is understood across platforms. She is also a passionate advocate for social change through digital storytelling and education, empowering young people to understand, participate in and reshape the world around them.
In this webinar, hosted by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), we’ll examine how government officials are increasingly labeling routine accountability reporting as “doxxing.” That term originally meant exposing personal information about private people to harass them. But now, government officials are extending it to publication of newsworthy information about public officials. They are intentionally confusing the American public about the role of journalism and even threatening legal action against journalists, newsrooms, and ordinary people for publishing information the public has a right to know.
Register HERE
We’ll hear from journalists who have faced these “doxxing” accusations firsthand:
– Vittoria Elliott, reporter at Wired covering platforms and power
– Gregory Royal Pratt, investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune
– Doug Sovern, award-winning political reporter, formerly of KCBS Radio
– Charlie Kratovil, founder and editor of New Brunswick Today
– Moderated by Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser, FPF
From federal threats against reporters covering Immigration and Customs Enforcement to state laws restricting what journalists can publish about police, government officials are citing “doxxing” to threaten press freedom. When accountability is reframed as harassment, it chills reporting and limits the public’s access to information about how power is exercised.
I hope you’ll join us for this important discussion and support our work defending the First Amendment by donating at freedom.press/donate.
McDonnell Nieto del Rio joined The Boston Globe in July 2024 as an immigration reporter. At the Globe, she has reported on migrants struggling to find shelter in Massachusetts amidst the state’s housing crisis, how federal immigration policies have affected local residents, and on the impact of immigration enforcement changes on Massachusetts communities, among other issues. Previously, she worked as an immigration reporter at Documented, a nonprofit news site that covers New York City’s immigrant communities and policies that affect them. At Documented, she covered the migrant crisis in New York extensively, and published stories about the conditions in city-run shelters, the exploitation of newly-arrived migrant workers, and the effects of housing instability on migrant families. She also covered immigration detention and immigration courts. Before that, she was a national reporting fellow for the New York Times, writing about any and all national news — including COVID-19, the 2020 election, mass shootings and extreme weather events. McDonnell Nieto del Rio is a native Spanish speaker and has reported on breaking news as an intern for her hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times. She has also worked for CNN in New York and Washington D.C. She holds a bachelor’s degree in History from Williams College, and earned her master’s from Columbia Journalism School.