Jaya Padmanabhan is an Emmy-award winning editor, veteran journalist, opinion columnist/essayist, and author of a short story collection.

She is executive director of American Community Media, a network of community news outlets, founded by the legendary journalist Sandy Close. American Community Media conducts weekly briefings with experts speaking on issues of the day, produces original stories, syndicates content and partners on initiatives to financially sustain the community media sector. 

Jaya was most recently at USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, where she served as the editor of a collaborative framework of ethnic media in California who reported on health and health equity topics essential to their communities. The stories from the Collaborative have influenced legislation and received numerous prestigious awards - 18 awards, including 6 Emmys - and continues to receive accolades. Jaya counts the importance of listening, building trust, tailored mentoring and mutual respect for the reporters in the program as essential parts of her toolkit for success.

As one reporter put it, beyond the edits and insights that Jaya offered throughout the year, it was the "mentorship, kindness and patience" that mattered most and an LA Times editor thanked Jaya "for going beyond to be attentive to all the elements that make up a multicultural fellowship."

As an editor and project manager, she has immersed herself in fact-based, research driven journalism. She has spent time contouring stories within the equity framework, writing headlines, editing pitches and stories, sourcing distribution channels, and refining copy for diverse platforms.

Jaya applies her background in computer science to newsroom digital strategy. To bolster newsroom capacity and capability, she draws insight from story metrics, guarding against the reductive tyranny of quantification, and not losing sight of the dignity and complexity of the reporter’s craft and audience need.

Her journalism career spanned a six-year stint at the San Francisco Examiner where she wrote a bi-weekly column called "In Brown Type." She was also a consulting editor at Ethnic Media Services during that period. Prior to that she was an editor of the print publication India Currents, where she steered the print publication to digital-readiness. As a freelance journalist, her bylines have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, PBS Next Avenue and Forbes.

Jaya has received more than 30 awards for her journalism and fiction, notably from the San Francisco Press Club, Writer's Digest, New America Media, Lorian Hemingway Contest, and the Page Turner, among others. In 2015, she was the convocation speaker addressing the graduating class of computer science graduates at San Jose State University. Her speech was titled "Why a Software Engineer became a Writer."

She served on San Francisco's Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, advocating for transparency and accountability in all the city's dealings and departments.

Jaya sits on the boards of the San Francisco Public Press and India Currents and consults and speaks on the power of community and collaborative journalism.

 She is the author of "Transactions of Belonging," a collection of short stories published in 2014.