February 2017: Charting the future of JAWS

Where should JAWS go in the next five years?

How can our organization better serve our members?

That’s the question your board of directors will be mulling as we meet in Denver next month for our spring board meeting.

It’s time to update our strategic plan, created in 2012 to last through this year. You may read a summary here.

We’ve achieved some of our goals. We have a strong membership base, and our annual Conference and Mentoring Program remains an inspiring and intimate event even as it grows a bit each year.

We’re taking an active role joining other news organizations in speaking out about our profession.

We’re on relatively stable financial footing, but we don’t have the stability we need to achieve all of our goals – returning to having a full-time executive director and providing a robust year-round series of webinars and regional training days.

The journalism business is changing at a rapid pace – it’s far different for many of us than it was five years ago, as the digital space becomes ever more important, freelancing is more often a career option and traditional media shrinks.

Such rapid change is sure to continue.

We’d like to know what you, our members, want from Journalism and Women Symposium.

So let us know where you’d like to see JAWS go through 2022.

Send us your wildest dreams, your well-reasoned critiques, your logical charts for our next course. Email them to me at , and include Planning JAWS in the subject line.

And we’ll let you know what we come up with!

– Sandra Fish