Eva Rodriguez, whose 14-year career at the Washington Post includes serving as deputy foreign editor and as the founding editor of the Post’s freelance Talent Network, has been named editor-in-chief of The Fuller Project, the global nonprofit newsroom dedicated to groundbreaking reporting on women.
“Eva is bringing rigorous and revelatory journalism that benefits from all the lessons of legacy news to spur issue-focused and locally-rooted journalism about women in a global context,” said Xanthe Scharff, CEO and co-founder of The Fuller Project. “A proven news leader and expert editor, her dedication to impactful journalism will propel our mission to report women’s unheard stories around the world.”
“I’ve been fortunate to work in large newsrooms with some of the best journalists in the world and in various capacities – from reporter to editorial writer to editor. I’ve learned a tremendous amount, particularly during the last 14 years with incredibly talented and generous colleagues at The Washington Post,” says Rodriguez. “But I’ve also had some of my most gratifying professional experiences in smaller newsrooms. The Fuller Project brings the opportunity for a bigger, freer, bolder and more immediate impact on the journalism and the reporters, focusing squarely on the lives and experiences of those who are too often footnotes in more traditional coverage. Here, every voice, every viewpoint, every contribution is essential. The team may be small, but the ambition is not.“
As deputy foreign editor at The Washington Post, Rodriguez shepherded coverage of Ukraine, Afghanistan and every major global news story in the last three and a half years. She will stay on those stories at The Fuller Project, focusing on women, their voices and their roles in conflict, peace negotiations and democracy building — at times long after other media have moved on to the next story. Her experience as the founding editor of the Post’s Talent Network, overseeing a network of freelancers around the United States and world who could diversify and enrich the outlet’s reporting and extend the reach of their news coverage, will deeply inform The Fuller Project’s work to center local stories in a global context. Prior to The Washington Post, Rodriguez worked at The Wall Street Journal as a Justice Department reporter, at The New York Times as a legal affairs editor, at Politico Magazine as a senior editor, as Washington bureau chief for Businessweek and in her hometown of Miami at the Miami Herald and at the much smaller but hugely impactful Miami Review.
Founded in 2015, The Fuller Project is an award-winning nonprofit newsroom dedicated to groundbreaking reporting on women in the U.S. and around the world. We seek to address the systematic underrepresentation of women in the news, with a focus on those whose voices are most marginalized, and fulfill journalism’s promise to inform, expose abuses of power and human rights, and inspire urgent action. When the voices, stories and perspectives of women are disproportionately left out, the result is reporting that reinforces bias and harm, missing the full story. The barriers and dangers that women face are central to understanding the security, economic, legal, environmental and other issues societies face each day.
The Fuller Project is focused on exposing injustice, raising awareness and spurring impact by rigorously reporting stories that aren’t covered elsewhere. Our reporting on women deported from the United States days after giving birth was followed by updated guidance by President Biden and officials paroling the women back to the U.S. to collect their infants’ birth certificates, exposed dangerous child care conditions in New York City and forced a local government response, and brought the work of indigenous women in the United States fighting for environmental justice to national attention. We forced immediate action from Kate Hudson’s clothing brand Fabletics after we exposed sexual abuse in the supply chain; the story also prompted the Lesotho government to step in on behalf of factory workers. Fuller Project investigations have led to the rescue and repatriation of Filipina migrant domestic workers stranded by an abusive employer during the COVID-19 pandemic and amplified the voices of Afghan women during the fall of Kabul in a series widely sourced by mainstream media. In 2021, our reporting won an ILO Global Media Competition on Labour Migration Award, a Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender and a NAJA National Native Media Award for Best Coverage of Native America.
We seek to change the way the industry thinks about gender journalism through partnerships at the local, national and global levels, fostering a community of editors dedicated to addressing gender bias. As well as publication partnerships with outlets including TIME, The Guardian and The New York Times, The Fuller Project has long-term partnerships with newsrooms around the world. We work closely with the Nation Media Group, the largest media company in East Africa, where we supported the launch of the organization’s first gender desk. We’re partnering with Reckon to cover women’s issues, lives and perspectives in the American South, and collaborating with FiveThirtyEight to report on what teachers and schools are facing in the third school year of the pandemic. Our partnership with THE CITY covers the often unheard stories of women across all five boroughs of New York City. We’re working with the Afghan woman-led Rukhshana Media to document what the end of America’s longest war and Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban mean for the women living through it, with The Wire in India to provide climate, science and health coverage through a gender lens, and our partnership with Foreign Policy shines a spotlight on the underexplored impact of U.S. foreign policy on women and girls around the world.
“I hope to bring the skills and wisdom honed at The Washington Post to bear on the essential work of telling global, 360-degree stories of women and girls in today’s world — the distressing, the inspiring and the joyful. We’ll use fresh approaches and even deeper collaborations within The Fuller Project newsroom and with our partners to build and expand on our mission, reach and body of work,” says Rodriguez.
Contact: Mariyah Espinoza 702-355-9551
