Dana Coester

Notable work and positions

100 Days in Appalachia - Founder and Editor in Chief (2017-present)
West Virginia University Reed School of Media and Communications - Professor; Creative Director, Media Innovation Center

Biography

Dana Coester is a journalism educator and founder and editor in chief of 100 Days in Appalachia, a Murrow Award-winning collaborative digital media outlet covering the Appalachian region. She holds a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is a professor at West Virginia University's Reed School of Media and Communications, where she also serves as creative director of the school's Media Innovation Center. She founded 100 Days in Appalachia in January 2017, the day after Donald Trump's election, with support from the College of Media, West Virginia Public Broadcasting and the Center for Rural Strategies' national rural news site The Daily Yonder; the outlet has since received a national Edward R. Murrow Award, two multi-year Report for America positions, selection for the Poynter Table Stakes Program, and a $1 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation's Press Forward initiative in 2024. Her research and reporting focus on domestic extremism and disinformation in rural communities, and she founded the Rural Digital Resilience Project to address unique digital and offline safety challenges facing rural Americans and local journalists. She directed the documentary film Raised by Wolves, on the risks of online radicalization for young Appalachians, which received a JustFilms award. She serves on the Poynter Institute Advisory Board and in a leadership role for the International Women's Media Foundation's Coalition Against Online Violence, and has been named a Benedum Distinguished Scholar and received a Media Democracy Fund "Unicorn" award.