NAHJ’s Adelante Academy celebrates graduates of the 2024 Latina Leadership Program
For Maite Fernández Simon, her participation in a National Association of Hispanic Journalist leadership program for Latinas has been a career-changer.
“It has really changed the way I’m going to approach my career, my career development and start to make it a priority in a lot of ways that I wasn’t before and just putting myself out there,” Fernández Simon said.
The six month initiative — called the 2024 Latina Leadership Program — was created to equip Latinas with the necessary skills to assume leadership roles in their newsrooms.
The inaugural cohort started in January, and ended this week.
At a graduation ceremony that took place during NAHJ’s 2024 conference, journalists cheerfully raised their glasses to Fernández Simon and the other graduates.
According to a 2019 Diversity Survey by the News Leaders Association, Latinos hold 6% of leadership roles in newsrooms across the United States, while Latina women hold just 2.6% of these positions.
To address this pitfall, NAHJ launched Adelante Academy this year. The program is divided into four phases, focusing on hard leadership skills, Latina leadership, AI and technology in leadership and future planning.
Nora Lopez, NAHJ’s former president, was the behind the creation of the Adelante Academy’s Latina Leadership Program. Although she was unable to oversee its implementation during her tenure, Lopez is grateful that NAHJ’s five-year strategic plan included this initiative.
“It felt like for so long, our focus had been on trying to get more Latinos in news, but the reality is that we have a lot of Latinos in news,” Lopez said. “Of course, we want more. We have a lot of them there. Now, the point now is to get more Latinos in those positions of decision-making roles.”
The academy’s advisory board selected ten Latina journalists to partake in the mentorship program out of 70 applicants. The participants hail from newsrooms across the nation, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, and CNN. The program focused on mentees developing custom projects aimed at enhancing Latino representation in their newsrooms.
Fernández Simon, an audience strategy editor at The Washington Post, based her Latina Leadership project on developing a process to improve translation needs in her newsroom.
Mentees enhanced their leadership skills through in-person and virtual training sessions led by experienced professionals, including prominent news leaders like Maria Elena Salinas, a former co-anchor of Univision’s flagship newscast “Noticiero Univision.”
Based on the training and resources she received, Fernández Simon is confident her project will succeed in her newsroom.
“One of the other things I have to say was great is the people who are selected, it’s just such an amazing group of women,” Fernández Simon said. “We’re just trying to lift each other and support each other and our challenges and successes, and that has been one of the most amazing outcomes.”
Despite receiving positive feedback in the program’s evaluation, Adelate Academy’s project manager, Natalia Algarín, plans to make improvements to the program by increasing the mentor-to-mentee ratio and implementing career coaching.
“I think that being the first edition, there are many things as a curator that I can tell you that we can improve,” Algarín said. “For example… (mentees) had people they look up to, but they need also counseling or something more in product and project management. I see that many journalists struggling a lot with that.”
In discussing the introduction of future programs targeting diverse Latino communities, Algarín said an Afro-Latino mentoring program could also be instated in the future.
Elizabeth Jazlyn Dieguez is a recent journalism graduate from San Diego State University. She is a California Student Journalism Corps reporter at EdSource and aspires to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. Reach her at elizabethjdieguez5 [at] gmail [dot] com or on X at @Elizabeth Dieguez.
