Naasha Dotiwala
Current Title: Team Leader Center for Community Journalism
Organization: USA Today Co. Design Center.
Country: United States
Candidate for: Director
My vision for SND is to find a way to build up our presence within newsrooms across the world in order to create a stronger membership base that can sustain annual in-person events, such as the creative competition and multi-day workshops, more frequent virtual educational sessions and long-term training programs to demonstrate the value of retaining an annual membership, and most importantly, a strong professional network that can guide anyone, regardless of whether they are new to the industry or are seeking opportunities to grow.
The people I have met at past Creative Competitions and workshops are passionate about this field and deserve to have a one-stop shop organization that helps them learn and advance their careers no matter how long they have been working in visual journalism. SND has done, and continues to work on, all of these things, but it has become increasingly difficult due to the tumultuous nature of the journalism industry over the past few years.
Personally, I feel like I learned about SND much later in my career and I have seen how beneficial it has been for those who joined early on, both in terms of their own professional development and in relation to participating in SND. It would be rewarding to work with collegiate, and possibly even high school, organizations to show what professional opportunities are out there for students who want to pursue visual storytelling as a career. It would also be useful to provide certification programs and mentoring opportunities that benefit the students and the professionals teaching them. Educational institutions are constantly preparing their students for the evolving journalism field and having SND as a primary source of inspiration, mentorship, and potential in the field experiences will help secure the future of SND.
A key way to find inspiration for design is by looking at past work, something many SND members are familiar with due to the annual books the organization used to produce of the winners of the Creative Competition each year. While I would love to see a return of those books, the main focus right now should be on refining the digital archive in order to make it easily searchable and a clear repository for the best work within the field.
I am part of a team that works on collecting pages within the USA Today Co. Design Center and have learned a lot about how to build an archive so that we can provide inspiration for our own designers. In addition to the USAT archival team, I am also a member of our internal DC AI Council which works to create internal guidelines for when it is appropriate to use AI in our work. While personally I do not believe in using AI to create artwork, some of the in-house agents that have been built have been useful for administrative tasks such as renaming files to match our archive process or helping plan out long-term projects more swiftly. As an organization we have the opportunity to set the guidelines for what is considered appropriate usage of AI when it comes to news design and it is important to speak to our members in order to get a wide variety of perspectives so we can understand where and how it is being used already.
I want SND to be the ultimate resource for visual storytellers no matter where they are in their journey into the field. SND has a network of amazing and dedicated professionals, but it can go further by sharing information about SND within news organizations, hosting in-person and virtual educational and networking events, and by providing a strong professional network that can help foster connections so designers always have a place to turn when searching for their next opportunity.
It must be a center for training young information designers and close this gap that is raising: junior designers that can’t find experienced people because the newsrooms across the world are shrinking or just disappearing