Cecilia D. Email & Phone Number

Like many modern professionals, my career path is not linear but does have a common thread. I'm interested in the complex problems that arise from rapidly changing conditions, and I love thinking about them, talking about them, and working collaboratively to understand and address them. The first 10 years of my career were spent focused on how digital distribution was changing our relationship to news and challenging traditional journalism practice. As a product manager in the early years of the internet, I worked on some of the first versions of breaking news alerts, email newsletters, streaming video, and live election data maps and widgets. Later, I held multiple senior leadership roles, where I helped facilitate radically different ways of working, with journalists, product managers, and user researchers all working alongside each other to explore problems and test solutions. The latter 8 years of my career were spent outside of journalism and outside of the US. First, I led product and UX strategy in other contexts, and then, for both professional and personal reasons, I became interested in a very different set of problems: how interpersonal violence is connected to structural inequalities. After volunteering with a domestic abuse support service, I decided to get an MA in Social Work. During my studies, I worked for several small nonprofits, providing both practical and therapeutic support to children, adults, and families. I developed a deep understanding of asylum systems, child protection frameworks, and domestic abuse interventions programs. After my degree, I became a researcher, writer and editor for a national anti-violence advocacy organization in Wales. Interestingly, these experiences brought me full circle, back to a focus on journalism and how it needs to change in order to support an equitable society. Since early 2023, I have been working on those ideas independently while preparing to move back to the US, where the news landscape is more diverse and includes more nontraditional news organizations. In August of this year, my British partner and I relocated to my home state of Pennsylvania. *** I would love to connect with anyone who shares a similar view of what journalism can and should do, whether they are currently working in news or media, or are trying to shape public narratives about societal problems through other types of work. ***

Listed skills include Military, Physical Security, Military Training, Military Operations, and 36 others.