Sara Hebel, Open Campus co-founder and editor-in-chief, and Charlotte West, Open Campus’s reporter covering education in prisons, will be speaking in March at SXSW EDU — an annual gathering in Austin of educators, policymakers, industry leaders, and others to discuss the future of education.
Hebel will be on a panel, “The Higher Ed Headlines that More Americans Need to Read,” at 10 a.m. Central time on Thursday, March 6. Other participants in the panel include Christina Shih of Press Forward and Stephanie Wang of the Lumina Foundation.
The session will explore how local news can help rebuild trust in higher education and strengthen higher ed for all and how colleges and universities can play a role in improving local news deserts. The panel will also address how education stakeholders can engage with local news outlets to tell stories that better reflect today’s students.
West will moderate a panel, “Journalism Training in Prison Teaches More Than Headlines,” at 2:30 p.m. Central time on Monday, March 3. She will be joined by Yukari Kane, founder and CEO of Prison Journalism Project, and Lawrence Bartley, the publisher of The Marshall Project Inside.
The panelists will discuss how journalism can be a way to teach literacy and workforce readiness skills in prisons and share their own experiences working with incarcerated writers.
These are two of 187 sessions chosen out of more than 1,400 session proposals. Read more about SXSW.
About Open Campus
Open Campus is a nonprofit news organization that ensures communities have the independent information they need about higher ed. By placing expert reporters in local newsrooms across the country, we help people understand and influence the institutions that shape their future opportunities.