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When the Challenge Gets Real “September feels like a tsunami,” Student Press Law Center Executive Director Gary Green says. EVANSTON, IL  (September 18, 2026) — By Week Four, MTC feels different. The challenge is well past theoretical. Fellows have spent months testing assumptions, building support, encountering resistance, making progress and finding out where the work […]

The Media Transformation Challenge @ Northwestern Medill is celebrating its 20th year with renewed support from Google, expanding MTC’s ability to help journalism leaders turn urgent industry challenges into measurable results and longer-term resilience.

Orlando Bailey’s MTC @ Medill experience helped sharpen Outlier Media’s strategy to move from unknown to indispensable in Detroit, driving major gains in newsletter growth, event attendance, small-dollar giving, and community impact through experiments in in-person engagement, gamified information, and print.

Media Transformation Challenge Fellows gathered at Northwestern’s downtown Chicago campus for a June session focused on performance challenge momentum, negotiation, stress and leadership, value proposition, and the hardest dynamics leaders must resolve between now and September.

An MTC @ Medill alumni-led info session highlighted how the program helps leaders take on a single, high-stakes challenge and drive measurable progress in real time.

Inkstick Founder and CEO Laicie Heeley came into the Media Transformation Challenge thinking her independent national security journalism outlet had a revenue problem. It turned out to be something more fundamental; the right readers didn’t know about it.

MTC @ Medill Fellows gathered at Northwestern last week for its second full-week session focused on locking in performance challenge updates, learning temperament styles, deepening strategy, expanding wins, keeping score and – as always – connecting as a cohort.

MTC @ Medill Fellows gathered at Northwestern last week for its second full-week session focused on locking in performance challenge updates, learning temperament styles, deepening strategy, expanding wins, keeping score and – as always – connecting as a cohort.

MTC is built on the simple but rigorous premise that meaningful organizational change happens when leaders can diagnose what’s broken, imagine what’s possible, and design practical ways to move from here to there.

Organizational change isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a human one. Even the strongest strategy can stall if the people who hold power are misaligned, resistant, or simply unknown.