Like his mentor Julian Bond, Jealous’ leadership in Civil Rights has been enhanced by his training as a journalist.

He cut his teeth in 1994 as an investigative reporter at Mississippi’s Jackson Advocate newspaper. His stories were credited with both helping exonerate a black farmer accused of arson and free a white inmate that guards were threatening to kill because he had exposed their corruption.  It was frontline journalism. The black community weekly was firebombed four times and shot up once between 1980 and 1998.

In the midst of that, Jealous quickly saw that technological change was the true existential threat to the paper and its mission.

Throughout the past quarter century, Jealous has actively wrestled with how to best serve grassroots communities’ need for local news in a rapidly changing technological landscape. In the mid 1990’s, he was managing editor of The Jackson Advocate when they digitized it’s production. In 2000, while leading the NNPA, he developed a platform that allowed dozens of Black Community Newspapers to publish online for the first time and exchange content. While at the NAACP, he served on the Knight Foundation/Aspen Institute Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Today, he advises Citizen, an app that provides 911 alerts in real time and allows its users who are on location to broadcast what they are witnessing.

A former Rhodes Scholar, Jealous is a graduate of Columbia University and Oxford University. He is a former Visiting Professor at Princeton Univeristy’s Woodrow Wilson School where he taught social entrepreneurship. He is currently co-teaching social innovation at Penn’s School of Social Policy and Social Practice. He is co-editor of the national-bestseller Reach: 40 Black Men Speak of Living, Leading and Succeeding. His next book is due out in 2021.