Jim MacMillan

Jim MacMillan is the Director of the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting and its parent organization, the Initiative for Better Gun Violence Reporting, which he launched in 2019 during a residential fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

His work is reflected in our 5 Years of Impact report, visible in his leadership of our What Now national conference and demonstrated through co-authorship on five studies published by our Multidisciplinary Research Collabborative. He also contributed to the launch of our Association of Gun Violence Reporters, the Survivor Connection, The Second Trauma documentary and our Better Gun Violence Reporting Toolkit.

Previously, MacMillan served as Journalist in Residence at Swarthmore College, a Fellow with the Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Practitioner in Residence at the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. He was also an Ochberg Fellow with the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma (formerly the Dart Center at Columbia University) and the Knight Fellow in Medicine and Health Sciences Journalism with the Knight-Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan.

MacMillan has held faculty appointments at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Swarthmore College, New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute, and Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. He has designed and taught courses in peace journalism, solutions journalism, and trauma journalism.

His administrative roles have included Director of the Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple University, Assistant Director of the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting, and Manager for Media and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.

Earlier in his career, MacMillan spent 17 years as a photojournalist at the Philadelphia Daily News, where his work received a National Headliner Award among other honors. He later reported from Baghdad for The Associated Press during the Iraq War, after which his team was honored with the Pulitzer Prize and he was recognized individually with the Bayeux Prize for War Correspondents.