Zuade Kaufman

Zuade Kaufman co-founded Truthdig LLC and its website 17 years ago and has been publisher and CEO ever since.

Her vision for Truthdig remains as it always has been: To create a source of serious and intellectually rigorous journalism and a voice for progressive politics, social justice, humanitarian issues, women’s rights, the environment and arts and culture.

She is committed to finding innovative ways to shine a spotlight on issues that often go unnoticed. Her many initiatives have included Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, which recruits women journalists throughout the world to report on important stories in their home countries, as well as the Countering Violence Against Women project that calls attention to the horrendous impacts of the mistreatment of women and girls. Kaufman also produced multimedia coverage of front-line activism so vital to a vibrant democracy.

Kaufman’s love of journalism and the media began as a child, inspired by her father who was a prolific consumer of news. She began her career at age 16 at Los Angeles PBS station KCET and remained affiliated with its news and current affairs department for more than 10 years. Later, she worked at the Los Angeles Times, first as a researcher and then as a staff reporter.

Kaufman earned her bachelor’s degree in film theory and criticism from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California. She completed post-graduate publishing studies at Stanford and Yale.

Kaufman is a board member of the ACLU and was formerly on the board of Human Rights Watch and on the Los Angeles Advisory Group for the International Women’s Media Foundation.