Sally Lehrman, an award-winning journalist, founded and leads the Trust Project, an international collaboration she began building in 2014 to strengthen public confidence in the news through accountability, integrity and transparency. Hundreds of news organizations now show the Trust Indicators® on their pages, helping the public and news distribution platforms easily identify reliable news sites. Lehrman provides vision and strategy, guiding the effort and leading collaboration as acceptance and adoption expand globally. Lehrman was awarded a Gold Globee as Female Achiever/Communicator of the Year and named one of MediaShift’s Top 20 Digital Innovators for this work.

Previously an award-winning reporter on medicine, science and related policy, especially in the areas of genetics, race and gender, Lehrman’s honors include a Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Programming, a duPont/Columbia Silver Baton, various other reporting and writing awards and the John S. Knight Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Nature, Health, theAtlantic.com, Salon.com, and the public radio documentary series, The DNA Files, distributed by NPR, among others.

Lehrman is co-editor and co-author of Reporting Inequality: Tools and methods for covering race and ethnicity (Routledge, 2019) with Venise Wagner of San Francisco State University, and author of News in a New America (Knight Foundation, 2004), a fresh take on developing an inclusive U.S. news media. She also has written several chapters for textbooks on covering the sciences. 

She held the Knight-Ridder Chair in Journalism in the Public Interest at Santa Clara University from 2008 to 2013, and was Senior Director of the Journalism Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. 

Lehrman has long evangelized journalism values, ethics and diverse voices in the news as a local and national leader in the Society of Professional Journalists and the SPJ Foundation, and with other organizations such as the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. She is affiliated with the UC-Santa Cruz Center for Science and Justice as Science and Justice Professor.