Richelle “Rich” Gordon, professor and director of digital innovation at Northwestern University’s Medill School, came out as transgender in 2023. At Medill, she launched the school’s graduate program in new media journalism and has directed the Media Innovation and Content Strategy Specialization. She has spent most of her career exploring the areas where journalism and technology intersect. Gordon was an early adopter of desktop analytical tools (spreadsheets and databases) to analyze data for journalistic purposes. At The Miami Herald, she was among the first generation of journalists to lead online publishing efforts at newspapers. At Medill, she has developed innovative courses through which students have explored digital content and communities and developed new forms of storytelling that take advantage of the unique capabilities of interactive media. Gordon also was a co-founder of Medill’s Knight Lab, and in 2007, won a Knight News Challenge grant allowing Medill to offer full scholarships for journalism master’s degrees to people with computer programming experience. In addition to teaching and writing about digital journalism, she was director of new communities for the Northwestern Media Management Center, where she oversaw a research initiative focusing on the impact of online communities, including social networks, on journalism and publishing.