MTC Fellows Scale New Heights in Salt Lake
“After just three weeks together,” Fellow Vandana Kumar says, “we’ve built an unexpected intimacy.”
June 24, 2025
SALT LAKE CITY, UT – The Media Transformation Challenge Fellowship Class of 2025 gathered in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range last week to reflect, reconnect, and accelerate progress on their respective performance challenges.
“Every story begins with the setting, and in week three of MTC, our setting was the majestic, mountainous Salt Lake City,” Barbara Chai, Deputy Editor of The New York Times’ Culture Desk, said. “There were hikes up steep mountainsides and Olympic-calibre bobsledding. Indoors, it felt just as treacherous and thrilling to navigate our challenges and hold each other accountable for applying the tools and pushing toward outcome goals.”
Participating organizations are mission-driven, nonprofit, digital-first, and legacy newsrooms tackling a range of structural, cultural, and sustainability challenges. Centered on a range of initiatives — transforming newsroom culture, strengthening sustainability, and deepening public impact through shifting from reactive to strategic cultures, diversifying revenue, cultivating deeper community connection, and innovating distribution and engagement strategies – each innovates a series of design/do experiments to gain insight, create momentum, and drive outcomes and impact.
Siobhan Bennett, Chief Revenue Officer of the New York Amsterdam News, reported 260% subscription growth and a remarkable ABC News micro-documentary on the organization’s historic Harlem headquarters.
“MTC’s June session continued to transform us professionally and personally, positioning us to be powerful agents for positive change in our organizations. The momentum is real!”
Hosted by MTC Coaches Lauren Gustus and Danyelle White of The Salt Lake Tribune, the week blended deep-dive sessions, performance challenge updates, and plenty of personal connection.
Coach White led a session on measuring success in your performance challenge using scorecards, followed by Coach Fran Scarlett’s hands-on workshop on negotiation. The workshop offered tangible strategies and meaningful language to move beyond distributive (win/lose) outcomes toward integrative (win/win) outcomes, and focused on cultivating a cross-cultural lens.
Coaches Amanda Barrett and Stéphane Mayoux led a resonant session on impostor syndrome, prompting many Fellows to rethink their stories about their legitimacy, authority, and worth. Mayoux and Director of Community Engagement, Benjamin Wagner, followed with a session on the stresses and strains of leadership, anchored in a practical introduction to the nervous system – how it functions under pressure, and strategies for regulating it to lead with clarity, connection, and resilience.
Throughout the week, Fellows revisited the S-curve, a central metaphor in the MTC framework. In Friday’s closing session, Barrett challenged participants to assess their momentum by evaluating not just direction, but momentum – a calculus of each challenge’s mass and velocity.
Structured sessions were punctuated by moments of connection and reflection, including Tuesday’s walking tour of historical Salt Lake, Wednesday’s group excursions to Park City, and Thursday’s mountainside happy hour. This is where the magic happens.
“What’s truly special about this program is that it’s designed not just for learning new tools and frameworks to move my challenge forward, but for connection,” India Currents CEO & Publisher, Vandana Kumar, said. “From hikes and dinners to wine tasting and storytelling, our cohort has grown into something more than colleagues. After just three weeks together, we’ve built an unexpected intimacy. We share fears and aspirations, yes. But more than that, we champion each other.”
“At the halfway point,” Chai said, “It feels like a privilege to be part of this community.”
Fellows regroup for their fourth session in New York City in September, before wrapping transforming to Alumni in January.
Want to join the Class of 2026? Here’s how.
