Project Manager, Journalist, photographer

Lauren Whaley (she/her) is the Senior Project Manager at Crosstown, a non-profit local news organization based out of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. She leads a team of journalists, software engineers and designers to turn publicly available data into stories and visualizations for the diverse communities of Los Angeles. She led a Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge launch, delivering hyperlocal weekly newsletters to each of Los Angeles’ 110 neighborhoods. She also manages a Local Media Association and Facebook Journalism Project funded pilot, bringing Crosstown’s tools to two newsrooms, WRAL-TV and NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune/The Advocate. 

As a journalist, she specializes in topics related to reproductive health care, mental illness and health equity.

She is a past recipient of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism and a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.  She is also a past president of the national Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS). and spent her early 20s guiding expeditions for young women, including a solo-led 45-day canoe trip in the Canadian Arctic.

She is deeply invested in anti-bias education and parenting.

Get in touch if you want to work together!