Industry conferences can be awesome. You get to learn new things and catch up with colleagues and friends.

But they also can be incredibly insular. Same people, same conversations. What if we were find others who face similar challenges in totally different contexts? What could we learn, and what might emerge from creating these unexpected connections?

That's why I co-founded Perspectives, a way to bring people together who have overlapping systems and methods for different ends.

We prototyped this as a "parasite event" alongside the Online Journalists Association Conference in Los Angeles. We brought journalists and technologists together with an artist/activist, a community COVID hotline organizer, and a museum curator to discuss knowledge, misinformation, and trust. We hosted it at East/West Players, an Asian American theatre founded in 1965.

Our second event was a keynote at the invitation of the News Product Alliance Summit. We invited two generations of Latin American reproductive rights activists to discuss creating and sustaining a movement for long-term change.

We've since held events in Chicago and Minneapolis (featuring the Executive Director of the George Floyd Global Memorial.)

If journalism is going to remain relevant, accessible, and connected to our communities, we need to invite more perspectives into our spaces, not only around who we quote in a story, but in how we do everything. More events are planned.

Created with Ariel Zirulnick. Photo of Ariel and me by Emma Carew Grovum; photograph of three speakers in Minneapolis by Erik Westra.

Read more about Perspectives
Read an interview with us on our core principles.