Annie Shreffler

Annie Shreffler currently serves as the first Audience Impact Producer for GBH News. Her work is centered around ensuring GBH’s journalism reflects and is informed by the diverse communities it serves. Her professional journey into journalism has been a non-traditional path. She was 35, married to a medical student and raising a family when she enrolled in school at CUNY in New York. During her time as a student, she became editor of the college paper, played NCAA softball, and tutored students in writing. Upon graduating in 2007, she received a Chancellor’s scholarship to attend the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York. There she trained as a digital-first, urban reporter and started stringing for community newspapers. After training, she took a job at WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, where she produced a year-long, crowdsource-reported series titled, “Your Uncommon Economic Indicators,” which followed the 2008 financial crisis with hundreds of story submissions from the public. From that experience, she wrote “Crowdsourcing: A Field Guide from WNYC,” to help other public media stations consider how to work more closely with the audience to tell the stories of the day. When her family moved to Boston in 2010, she landed a job at GBH on a national crowdsourcing campaign for the PBS show, “Stonewall Uprising.” Since then, she has worked on newsletters, websites, produced and shot video, and she was an early adopter to live streaming video from the field. Before becoming the Audience Impact Producer, she served as the producer of GBH’s Forum Network, collaborating with partners around Boston to build an accessible video archive of public speaking in the region. Now she has the opportunity to consolidate mhery professional life experiences and years of relationship-building in Boston to help lead the newsroom in a transformative, audience-centered approach to journalism.