Sisi Wei
Sisi Wei is the Chief Impact Officer at CalMatters and The Markup.
Before the two newsrooms merged in 2024, Sisi was editor-in-chief of The Markup, where she spearheaded an update to the newsroom's mission: challenging technology to serve the public good. Her leadership led to transformative impact, including the removal of privacy-invading Meta Pixel trackers from dozens of websites across multiple industries, reforms by local and state governments nationwide to address or discontinue the use of biased algorithms, and the filing of multiple class action lawsuits in response to investigative reporting. Under her tenure, The Markup won the prestigious ONA General Excellence award, after the newsroom expanded its journalism to be directly responsive to the public's needs — publishing story recipes for journalists, step-by-step research and accountability guides for the public, and skills workshops for communities.
Previously, she was co-executive director of OpenNews, where she envisioned and executed transformative initiatives for journalism. As part of her work, Sisi founded the DEI Coalition For Anti-Racist, Equitable, And Just Newsrooms in 2020, and led more than 100 members of the journalism community in co-creating and launching the DEI Coalition Slack space in March 2021. The Slack is dedicated to sharing knowledge and taking concrete action in service of a more anti-racist, equitable, and just journalism industry.
She was the Assistant Managing Editor at ProPublica from 2018 to 2020, where she oversaw three editorial teams focused on news apps, interactive storytelling, and visual investigations. She also managed large, interdisciplinary investigations across the newsroom, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2020. Sisi worked at ProPublica for seven years, investigating abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust across a range of topics, including health care, higher education, government, and immigration.
In 2021, IWFM awarded Sisi the Gwen Ifill Award, which recognizes an outstanding woman journalist of color whose work carries forward Gwen’s legacy, especially by serving as a role model and mentor for young journalists. In 2019, Sisi and her fellow Journalists of Color Slack administrators also won the ONA Community Award, which recognizes a person or small teams in online journalism that has made outsize contributions to creating tools or work environments that allow digital journalists to do their best work.
She serves on the board of News Revenue Hub and The Open Notebook, and is the co-founder of Code with me, a nonprofit that teaches journalists how to code. In her role as a journalist/developer/designer, Sisi has won numerous Malofiej, SND Digital, and ONA awards, the Gannett Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism, and the 2016 Data Journalism Award for Best Individual Portfolio. She has previously worked at the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.