Irene McKisson

Principal Executive

Arizona Luminaria

Irene Fischler McKisson is the co-founder and Principal Executive of Arizona Luminaria, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to in-depth local news and community-centered journalism that launched in Feb. 2022. Before leaving to launch a startup, she spent 18 years in local news at the Arizona Daily Star where she started as a sports designer and copy editor and ended her tenure as the co-founder and editor of #ThisIsTucson — a digital vertical experimenting with audience development and digital revenue. As part of that role she was also the general manager of niche audience development for the Star. She has been a speaker for the Online News Association, SXSW, Google News Initiative programs and the Independent News Sustainability Summit, among others. She has been a participant in ONA's Women's Leadership Accelerator, GNI's Innovation Challenge and Startup Bootcamp and the Poynter Media Transformation Challenge. She was also among the recipients of a 2019 Tow Center for Digital Journalism research grant. She has been an adjunct instructor at the University of Arizona for eight years teaching editing and teaches social media and digital storytelling in the UA's iSchool. She is a lifelong Tucsonan and is raising two second-generation Tucsonans in a 100-year-old haunted house.