Beena Raghavendran is a journalist who specializes in crowdsourcing, community engagement and news accessibility. She currently works at The New York Times as an editor, focusing on digital storytelling and training journalists. Beena was awarded a 2021 Online News Association MJ Bear Fellowship, recognizing her efforts to engage with and make journalism accessible to communities with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Prior to The Times, Beena worked as an engagement reporter at ProPublica, where she crowdsourced in communities across the country for local investigations, ran events and community meet-ups, and trained reporters on engagement reporting. She started her career as an education beat reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Beena has also led the Asian American Journalists Association’s young professionals network, and has served as AAJA Minnesota chapter president. She’s a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism.
Beena loves building creative, scalable strategies to invite communities to participate in, access and trust journalism. She’s also passionate about the ways theater brings people together: Beena wrote, produced and performed a virtual one-woman play at a theater festival in 2021.