Tiffany Walden

Co-founder and Editor-in-chief - The TRiiBE

.Tiffany Walden has impressively built a news organization that has become a vital piece of Chicago’s media landscape and a voice for black Chicago.

Tiffany began as a Breaking News reporter at the Orlando Sentinel before returning to Chicago to continue her reporting career and co-found, with Morgan Elise Johnson, The TRiiBE in 2017, an independent, alternative news source and digital media platform that is reshaping the narrative of black Chicago and giving ownership back to the people. As an on-the-ground reporter, editor, media visionary and fierce advocate for systemic change, she uses resources and access to advocate for others while also creating a pathway for them to gain agency. She envisioned The TRiiBE as a radical act to spark change in Chicago media. She has openly critiqued legacy media’s portrayals of black Chicagoans in crime reporting and opened the door for a new demographic of journalists and storytellers to reshape that narrative. Within The TRiiBE, she is rewriting the rules of media & storytelling, proving that the makers can also be the owners.

Since The TRiiBE’s founding, their audience grew to an average 30,000 monthly page views by spring 2020, with a combined social media following of over 15,000, making The TRiiBE a recognized and stalwart news source in Chicago. In 2018, they started partnering with the Chicago Reader to publish “The Block Beat,” an award-winning multimedia series about black Chicago musicians and the neighborhoods they cherish. Tiffany has placed outreach and community impact at the core of its mission, producing stories that spark necessary dialogue within Chicago’s black communities and reaching beyond the digital realm into face-to-face interactions. She pushes community access to news and information to the forefront, asserting, “It’s unfair to ask someone, ‘Can I come in your community and write a story on you?’ and then they turn around and don’t have access to that story.” Tiffany strives to repair the relationship between the most disenfranchised communities and the media while simultaneously humanizing black life.