The SRCCON:LEAD program

At SRCCON:LEAD, we’ll come together as a community to figure out how we can reshape the ways journalism leadership operates. This is a brand-new event where we’ll:

• inspire each other to transform our own organizations, regardless of title or job description
• teach each other the practical skills—from handling money and hiring to effective communication—we can use to be part of that change

Schedule overview

SRCCON:LEAD takes place November 19 & 20 in Philadelphia, at the Fleisher Art Memorial. Our conference schedule is organized around shared experiences: meals, talks that orient us as a community and participatory sessions where small groups share ideas.

Generous breaks mean you never have to rush off to the next thing. Lunch provides a space to rest, spend time with friends, or talk about what you’re learning. Dinner on Tuesday evening gives you a chance to connect with people over informal conversation. We want SRCCON:LEAD to feel less like a small conference and more like a big cohort.

Talks at SRCCON:LEAD

Talks will open both our days at SRCCON:LEAD and send us off to dinner Tuesday evening. We’ve asked speakers to challenge the ways journalism traditionally thinks about leadership, and we’ll open up space for Q&A to explore these themes together.

Our speakers at SRCCON:LEAD include:

• Stacy Marie-Ishmael (@s_m_i), asking what it really means to be a leader in journalism, and what it means to be that leader in a time of upheaval and unease.
• André Natta (@acnatta), on finding your networks—including the ones you don’t even know you have—and discovering that vulnerability is a strength.
• Bryan Mercer (@bscottmercer), on collective action and current movements for change in Philadelphia, and something journalism can take away: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

We’ll share live transcripts of each talk as it takes place.

Sessions at SRCCON:LEAD

This event is built around two days of peer-led conversations and hands-on workshops. The sessions on our schedule are proposed and led by community members who want to help people learn new skills, explore tough questions, or develop new resources to share.

Sessions at SRCCON:LEAD will discuss ways journalism leadership needs to change so we can build more representative, equitable newsrooms. Many come from a single question or problem that people want to take on together—if you’ve been struggling with just about any aspect of your work, you can bet others have dealt with it, too. Session facilitators represent backgrounds and organizations from across the community, and they draw on the experience of participants in the room to guide conversations and collaborative work.

We’ll also make space at SRCCON:LEAD for emergent conversations and small-group gatherings. If a great idea occurs to you on the way to Philly (or even in the middle of a session there!), we’ll have room for it.

How do collaborative sessions work?

Sessions at SRCCON events work because they’re participatory—we really do learn best when we learn from each other. We want to make this a genuinely hands-on, inclusive event, and it’s hard to be part of a conversation or work together in a session that’s mostly lecture. So we look for sessions that include real interactivity, and we love creative thinking that supports learning. You might take part in design exercises, games, art projects, small-group work, role-playing, even field trips—and we’re always interested in new formats.

SRCCON:LEAD sessions last about 60-75 minutes, and we work with facilitators to think about outlines and information density. Overprogramming a session can make it hard to reach a satisfying goal—but a session that’s underdesigned can easily turn into a conversation that loses focus. We’re happy to help facilitators figure out the right balance, and they partner with session participants to help everyone take away new ideas from their time together.

For more about what to expect during SRCCON:LEAD, check out our attendee info page.