Want to kickstart your career as a freelance journalist or go independent, but you’re not sure where to start? Learn about the basics of the business side and how to fund your independent journalism through fellowships and grants from Erika Hayasaki from the IIJ and UC Irvine, and Robert Lopez, current McGraw fellow at the CUNY Newmark McGraw Center for Business Journalism.
Plus pizza, boba and networking! Hosted by AAJA-LA and the LA Press Club.
Where: 2535 W Temple Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026
When: Thursday, Aug. 6 at 3 p.m.
Open to members and other freelancers.
Become a member of AAJA LA and the LA Press Club!
Meet our Speakers
Robert J. Lopez is an independent investigative journalist and fellow at the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. His investigation of regulatory failures and child labor abuses on California farms won a 2026 James Beard Media Award, a Sidney Award and several other national and regional awards. A former Los Angeles Times staff writer, he was part of a team at the newspaper that was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for stories that uncovered corruption in the city of Bell. He and several Times colleagues were Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2023 for investigations of California’s legal
cannabis industry.
Erika Hayasaki is a journalist based in Southern California whose feature stories appear in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, and others. She is a professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine. A former national writer for the Los Angeles Times, Erika is the author of two nonfiction books: The Death Class and Somewhere Sisters, which was named an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2022 and received a Nautilus Book Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting, honoring books about social justice. As an independent journalist, her feature stories have also appeared in The Verge, The Cut, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, MIT Technology Review, Men’s Health, Elle, InStyle, Glamour, Foreign Policy, Slate, The New Republic, Newsweek, Time, and Narratively.
