Teresa Gorman is the Program Manager for the Public Square program at Democracy Fund, an independent foundation working to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the American people. The Public Square program works to ensure all people have access to the news and information they need to engage in civic life, and use their voices without fear of being harassed, silenced, or ignored. This includes the foundation’s efforts to support trustworthy local news and investigative reporting, more equitable newsrooms, press freedom, community engagement, and digital spaces that advance democracy, not hate.
Teresa runs the Public Square’s local ecosystem news funding portfolio, including support of local news ecosystems in North Carolina, New Jersey, Chicago, New Mexico, and Colorado, and grantees such as the Colorado Media Project, News Revenue Hub, Center for Cooperative Media, NewsMatch, and Chicago’s City Bureau. She also co-edits the Local Fix, a weekly newsletter full of big ideas for local newsrooms. Subscribe at https://tinyletter.com/localfix.
Teresa joined Democracy Fund in 2016. Previously, Teresa spent her career working at the intersection of local-national collaboration, public media, and innovative digital transformation. At the Association of Independents in Radio, a network that supports a global community of audio freelancers, Teresa was the Supervising Producer for Localore: Finding America, which brought community engagement and freelancers to public radio and television stations from Alaska to upstate N.Y. She previously worked on NPR’s first editorial training team dedicated to local member stations. The training team served dozens of stations and hundreds of staff in a bold initiative to help public radio embrace digital and social media best practices. Teresa led that digital transformation prior to NPR as one of PBS NewsHour’s first ever social media editors.
Teresa received her B.S. in Journalism from Boston University. She serves on the board of the American Journalism Project.