Library Newsroom Project - Incite at Columbia University

Project Leadership

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  Terry Parris Jr. Founder and Director terry@librarynewsroom.org

  Terry Parris Jr. is an award-winning journalist, librarian, and educator whose work brings together journalism, public institutions and civic life. He founded and leads the Library Newsroom Project, a national initiative building community-based local information practices in public libraries. Most recently, he was Public Square Editor for Headway at The New York Times and a 2025–2026 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. Previously, as Engagement Director at THE CITY, he created the Open Newsroom, Civic Newsroom and MISSING THEM, a collaborative memorial project that published nearly 600 stories about New Yorkers lost to COVID-19. He served as a deputy editor at ProPublica, where he was part of a team that was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He was also a fellow at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. He currently advises a national cohort of libraries through the Urban Libraries Council’s Libraries and Local News Initiative, works with News Futures as a network weaver and teaches journalism at Queens College. He holds a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute.

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  Daniel Laplaza Head of Operations danny@librarynewsroom.org

  Daniel Laplaza is a community engagement specialist and participatory systems designer. At the Library Newsroom Project, he designs the editorial, operations and production workflows. He was previously Engagement, Audiences and Communities Manager at Epicenter NYC, where he led more than a dozen multilingual outreach campaigns that connected thousands of New Yorkers to health services, job support and small business resources. Before that, he was a community engagement producer at THE CITY, helping run the Open Newsroom and Civic Newsroom, the library-based programs the Library Newsroom Project grew out of. He began his career reporting on information access for New Yorkers with disabilities while pursuing his M.A. in Engagement Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.