As president for the non-profit Solutions Journalism Network, Sara leads the strategy to accelerate rigorous reporting on evidence-based responses to society’s most difficult problems and expand access to those stories, wherever people get their news. This approach is grounded in the fundamental belief that all people deserve journalism that is committed to their wellbeing. To that end, solutions reporting does not end with exposing and recounting what is wrong. It takes the additional step to report with the same attention to rigor and accountability on what is being done in response to problems to make the lives of people in communities materially better.
Sara's leadership experience is grounded in years of reporting, writing, editing and newsroom management. She's chased breaking news at the Los Angeles Times and Reuters, crafted long-form investigative features at Mother Jones and the LA Weekly and led news teams at AOL/Patch and NBC.
Past roles include editorial director at Zócalo Public Square, West Coast Editor in Charge for Reuters, editor at Global Press Journal and head of digital news at NBC4 Southern California, where her team won the station its first national Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She also taught reporting and writing to undergraduate and graduate students for nearly a decade as an adjunct at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Before NBC Sara was a regional editor at AOL's hyperlocal Patch.com, where she spearheaded the Southern California operation, supporting the launch of the first sites in California. Sara has worked as a Mother Jones contributor, as a staff writer specializing in long-form storytelling for the LA Weekly and as a cub reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she contributed to the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Northridge Earthquake.
Sara holds a master's degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley, a bachelor's degree in philosophy from St. John's College, and is the author of a forthcoming memoir about growing up in Bronzeville on Chicago's South Side. She serves on the program committee for the JSK Fellowship at Stanford and on several boards, including in an elected officer role with the Society of Professional Journalists national board as secretary/treasurer as well as on the SPJ local board in Los Angeles. An avowed non-athlete, she once ran the LA Marathon and lived to blog about it. She is certified in MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction).