Amanda Barrett

Amanda Barrett is passionate about serving audiences and ensuring that journalism reflects the wide diversity of the world we live in. She is VP of News, Standards, and Inclusion at The Associated Press in New York, where she oversees digital news and global news coordination, including the AP Nerve Center.

In 2020, she created an Inclusive Journalism Initiative focused on broadening the global AP news report to bring in more diverse audiences and viewpoints. She also works to recruit a wide range of journalists and mentors staff and colleagues across the industry as they seek to create fulfilling career paths.

Amanda is the only fellow to have gone through MTC twice. In the 2017 cohort, she worked on developing an editorial planning tool that AP uses to share its plan with customers. In the 2020 cohort, she developed an inclusive storytelling program that has helped AP expand its coverage of many different communities around the world and brought more diverse voices and sources to the fore. The Fellows may have been different but both groups were bound by tools, a common approach to challenges and much friendship and laughter.

Amanda started in journalism as a teenager when she attended a minority journalism program at The Roanoke (Va.) Times. She worked in sports there and at the Orlando Sentinel before spending 10 years at Newsday in New York in a variety of editing roles in the newsroom and for the news organization’s online sites. She joined AP in 2007 and helped start the East Region editing hub and led the New York City news team before moving to the Nerve Center in 2015. She lives in Long Island with her longtime partner.