Ashley Kang
a content producer for WAER 88.3 FM and director of The Stand, Syracuse’s South Side Community Newspaper Project. That project targeted Syracuse’s South Side neighborhood and was produced in partnership with Syracuse University’s Newhouse students, city residents and a community board of directors. Both the print and online news source aimed to show the positive things happening within the neighborhood as well as the obstacles to success residents face.
In her roles at the university, much time was spent assisting students to find stories reflective of city residents who aren’t often covered by mainstream media.
She has experience coordinating and leading community journalism workshops and overseeing community-led projects. With The Stand, she managed the project’s day-to-day needs, including writing articles, maintaining the website, all social media channels and coordinating community programming, the most popular being The Stand’s annual Photo Walk and Photo Contest. She also has a proven track record of developing and sustaining partnerships.
In 2021, she partnered with the Syracuse Press Club to launch the Syracuse Journalism Lab, an effort to diversity the local media landscape. She oversaw the 2021 J-Lab educator and took on the role leading a 10-week after school program in 2022 and again in 2023.
She’s also worked with the American Press Institute as a consultant, assisting with research to learn how newsrooms and media outlets launched strategies to intentionally listen and engage with communities previously underserved or undercovered. She co-authored a paper on how “Focused Listening” can address journalism’s trust problem. In March 2018, she convened with other community-minded journalists across the nation at API’s 2018 Thought Leader Summit on opportunities and challenges to pursuing community journalism through listening. In addition to sharing what she learned from her research, she discussed her direct work with the South Side Newspaper Project. API’s summits are highly participatory and include only a limited number of invitees.
Also in March 2018, The Stand’s annual Photo Walk project, coordinated each year by Kang, was selected as one of seven Finding Common Ground grant awardees. The selection committee reviewed more than 50 proposals. Winners received 10,000€ to support an engaged journalism project. She served as a co-author to the cohort’s final report “Building Engagement: A Report on Supporting the Practice of Relational Journalism.”
She was selected as one of 33 John Jay/H.F. Guggenheim Justice Reporting Fellows, which promotes criminal justice journalism. Fellows were selected from a wide pool of applicants based on editors’ recommendations and investigative reporting underway. Kang has written several articles on neighborhood trauma in Syracuse’s South Side and next pursued an in-depth piece focused on a Syracuse re-entry pilot program. Final stories were featured in The Stand and The Crime Report. Additionally, she was selected to the Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Media in 2020.
Before joining Syracuse University, she worked at The Citizen, a daily newspaper based in Auburn, NY, first as a copy editor and then as the paper’s features editor.
She is a graduate of the Newhouse School and the Syracuse University School of Education.