Press Forward Chicago: Strengthening Local News

Sarah Conway

Jacqueline Serrato

Jacqueline Serrato has been the editor-in-chief of South Side Weekly since 2020. Previously, she worked as a contributor to The Chicago Reporter in 2019 and Multimedia Producer at Hoy Media from 2017 to 2019. She has also worked as a Production Assistant at WTTW/Chicago PBS from 2016 to 2017 and an editor at Pilsen Portal (Chicago Voz) from 2015 to 2016. In 2015 she was a WBEZ Community Reporting Fellow at Chicago Public Media. She has received multiple awards, including the 2022 Studs Terkel Award, Public Narrative’s 2022 Community Media Award, and the 2022 Peter Lisagor Award.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler

Trina Reynolds-Tyler is the Data Director at the Invisible Institute, a journalist, and a native of the South Side Chicago. She leads Beneath the Surface, a project employing machine learning to identify gender based violence at the hands of Chicago police. trina works to document how communities unable to depend on the police are forced to create safety and accountability outside of the carceral state. As a data scientist, she centers the practice of narrative justice in her inquiries.

Trina won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for the investigative series Missing in Chicago.  

Trina is an abolitionist and trained restorative justice practitioner, an organizer with Not Me We, and is serving on a University of Chicago council attempting to measure the institution’s impact on local residents of the South Side. She developed the skills to use data science for real world problems as a Pozen Center for Human Rights intern with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), and was a Pearson Institute Fellow. Trina holds a masters degree in public policy from the University of Chicago.

She has spoken at the Yale Access and Accountability Conference (2022), Stanford Women in Data Science (2023), and gave the Community Keynote at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) (2023)

Mackenzie Warren

Mackenzie Warren directs Northwestern Medill’s Local News Accelerator. He specializes in transforming organizations through research and insights, content strategy, business strategy, new product development and executive leadership development. Before coming to Northwestern, he held a number of executive roles at the USA TODAY Network/Gannett, the largest publisher in the United States. As senior director of news strategy, he guided large Pulitzer Prize-winning titles like USA TODAY, the Detroit Free Press, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Arizona Republic, Cincinnati Enquirer, The Courier Journal in Louisville, The Tennessean in Nashville and others through their transition to consumer-supported businesses.

Olivia Obineme

Olivia Obineme is a content and people strategist and visual journalist based in Chicago, Illinois. She is currently the director of journalism and media engagement at Public Narrative, a nonprofit organization in Chicago that focuses on narrative change through community bridge-building, workshops, and programming. She is also a coach for the 2024 Local News Accelerator program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, leveraging her expertise to foster growth and innovation in journalism among various communities.

A proud first-generation Nigerian-American and Baltimore native, Obineme holds a master’s degree in media innovation and entrepreneurship (now known as media innovation and content strategy) from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her work has been featured in various publications, and she has received recognition for her contributions to journalism projects, including the Peter Lisagor Award and the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Editorial Award. Additionally, she has been involved in various journalism programs and organizations, including the Chicago Headline Club, where she served as the 2023 VP of FOIA Fest, leading its fully hybrid version and bringing it back to in-person engagement since the height of the pandemic.