Founder and CEO, Civic News Company

Elizabeth is the Founder and CEO of Civic News Company, the publisher of nonprofit newsrooms Chalkbeat, Votebeat, and Healthbeat. With 15 local newsrooms across the United States regarded as must-reads by their communities and a team of award-winning journalists and media executives, Civic News Company is a leading model to address the crisis in local news. Elizabeth co-founded Chalkbeat in 2014. Since its launch, Chalkbeat’s reporting has spurred changes in education funding, legislation, policy, and practice, and is regularly cited and republished in dozens of publications. In October 2020, Elizabeth and the Chalkbeat team launched Votebeat, a pop-up newsroom designed to provide independent, nonpartisan coverage of election integrity. After the success of the pop-up, Votebeat launched as a permanent newsroom in 2022. In 2023, the Chalkbeat team introduced Civic News Company as the parent organization of Chalkbeat and Votebeat, and shared their goals to expand to new geographies. In the summer of 2024, the Civic News Company team launched Healthbeat, their third newsroom, in partnership with KFF Health News. Healthbeat reporters cover public health in New York City and Atlanta, with more geographies to come. Elizabeth is recognized as a national leader in the field of local news. In addition to Civic News Company, she led the Summit for Local News in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation and published the Roadmap for Local News in 2023, helping to spur MacArthur’s $500 million Press Forward initiative for local news. She co-founded the American Journalism Project, the first venture philanthropy firm dedicated to local news, in 2019, and served as the Chair of its Board of Directors. Elizabeth is also a journalist known for her 2014 book Building a Better Teacher, which was a New York Times bestseller and notable book of 2014. She started her career covering the New York City schools at The New York Sun. Elizabeth has been a Spencer Fellow in education journalism at Columbia University and an Abe Journalism Fellow studying education in Japan. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University with an A.B. in Social Studies. At Harvard, she served as Magazine Chair of The Harvard Crimson and earned the Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work.