Executive Editorial Integrity and Leadership Initiative (2025-26)

Poynter, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is offering the Editorial Integrity and Leadership Initiative.

This six-month fellowship for executive managers of public media stations will strengthen editorial leadership and provide custom instruction on how to build capacity within public media. It will equip station managers with powerful support tools and provide cohort-based as well as individualised training to help them uphold public media journalism’s highest editorial standards and successfully lead every part of their station.

Learning Outcomes

In this Fellowship, public media executives will:

• Create an executive leadership action plan drawn from the strategy and vision for their newsroom.
• Sharpen the skills they use in making editorial and ethical decisions.
• Use custom tools and assessments to gain awareness of their personal leadership style.
• Tap into the mission of public media and apply those values to their leadership and work in the newsroom.
• Deepen an audience- and data-informed approach to meeting the information needs of communities.
• Identify skills necessary to lead high-functioning teams, manage conflict and guide their newsroom through important change.
• Focus on how to recruit, grow and retain top talent.

The program is designed to be effective across experience levels and station types, including first-time leaders, experienced leaders, those new to public media and managers leading newsrooms at stations licensed to universities and state governments.

Program Overview

Training will include:

• A five-day, in-person week at Poynter in St. Petersburg, Florida, that will kick off the fellowship and deepen training and relationships.
• Twelve virtual sessions of 90 minutes each. Every other week following the kick-off at Poynter,
• Fellows will attend live executive virtual training sessions that will include instructional time and small-group work.
• Fourteen one-hour executive coaching calls via phone or video conferencing.
• A virtual closing session in which program leaders will wrap up the teaching themes of the program and reinforce ways to keep applying and building on what they’ve learned. Fellows will share lessons learned and commitments from their leadership action plans.
• A private Slack workspace

How to apply

The deadline for applications for the first cohort is December 6, 2024. To learn more and apply, please click here.