Greetings from NLA President, Manny Garcia

Dear NLA family,

We are well into 2022 and I could not be prouder to see the positive direction of the News Leaders Association (NLA). Our board, director, staff, and 400-plus members are committed to help each other and strengthen our communities.

It is an honor to serve as NLA President this year. I stand in the long line of leaders who represent the best of journalism and defend the First Amendment.

For me, the presidency is very personal.

My family is an example of when tyranny destroys the freedoms that we so cherish. My grandparents and parents lost their freedom and livelihoods when a communist dictatorship took over Cuba.

Press freedoms disappeared. Demagoguery, censorship and repudiation became – and remain – the tools of the bully.

We increasingly, and alarmingly, are witnessing similar tactics from too many of our elected leaders and public officials in our beloved communities and country. Our role as editors requires us to speak out against the growing attacks on transparency and press freedoms. We also cannot truly celebrate Black History Month without first learning and continuing to document the unvarnished reality of American history; only then, can we speak truth to power.

We at NLA are best positioned to leverage our collective voices. We represent every platform, newspapers, digital newsrooms, television, non-profits, and public radio from coast to coast.

We are best positioned to help equip and empower the next generation of newsroom leaders, a commitment to succession leadership that is core to the NLA mission.

Our growing staff is primed to serve our members’ needs to ensure that NLA’s three pillars – Leadership, Diversity and Protecting the First Amendment – guide our mission. I want to thank our executive director and expert staff for all they are doing. We are hiring key positions this year to expand on our strategic initiatives: development, partnerships, and continuing to grow our membership with key training programs.

Our latest Emerging Leaders Institute (ELI) fellows are set to graduate in March, and each attendee will be paired for a year with a partner-coach, a first for our organization. We are requiring supervisors to provide a plan of action so that ELI graduates can use their new skills and exceptional leadership talents to improve their newsrooms and help their communities. ELI has gained its well-deserved national reputation thanks to the dedication of its talented creators – and mentors to so many in our industry – Jill Geisler and Alfredo Carbajal.

As someone who has taught at ELI, it is one of the great success stories in our industry, a program that has been emulated by others. ELI graduates are leading news teams across the land.

NLA lives its values: leadership, training, networking, coaching.

We strive to be the front-line resource for rising diverse journalists who seek a leadership role. We know that networking is crucial on this front. Two years into the coronavirus pandemic and with the omicron virus present, we remain vigilant to put the safety of our members and their families first. We plan to host on May 18-20 an in-person and virtual conference in Nashville. Mark your calendars, please. We hope to see you.

NewsTrain continues to be a point of pride under Director Linda Austin, even if omicron caused us to reschedule one session in California, we are continuing to push forward with this valuable program and build staff.

Diversity continues to be a guiding principle for NLA. We have reopened the NLA diversity survey to give digital and print newsrooms more time to participate, and we expect to roll out the results of our 2021 diversity survey in a few weeks. It’s taken a tad longer to collect and tabulate. In our efforts to work with newsrooms to participate last fall, we found the need to show grace and patience: We have all been through a lot the past two years.

The results will show more newsrooms participated for the first time, though the overall number of newsrooms continues to lag. We want to thank everyone who took the time to fill out the survey and encourage those that weren’t able to complete the survey to participate now. You can request a survey here. 

A major win coming from our diversity discussion is that we tied entering three of our contests this year to participation in the 2021 survey. Next year, all contest entries will require newsrooms to have participated in this second round of diversity collection data for 2022 now underway.

We just closed our NLA contest window with 386 submissions. That topped last year by nearly 30 entries. Another win-win.

Dear colleagues, thank you for your heart, service and dedication to protect our freedoms, ones that my family saw as the only way out for them, an escape that allowed their infant son to grow up to lead a newsroom and be president of the News Leaders Association.

In service,

Manny García
NLA President
Editor
Austin American-Statesman