Anita Varma

Program Manager, Trust Project
408-551-3578
avarma2@scu.edu

Anita Varma is the program manager for the Trust Project (Journalism Ethics). Varma works across many Trust Project areas including newsroom partner relations, research, bookkeeping and scheduling. She also coordinates public engagement activities related to developing strategies for improving trust in news.  

Prior to joining the Markkula Center, Varma was a doctoral candidate at Stanford University in the Department of Communication, where she focused on journalism ethics and received her PhD in 2018. Her dissertation (Solidarity in Action: A Case Study of Journalistic Humanizing Techniques in the San Francisco Homeless Project) analyzed the role of solidarity in American journalism using a case study of how and why Bay Area journalists humanize homeless people.

Before Stanford, Varma was an online advertising strategist at Google for three years. Varma received her BA in Media Studies with honors from Vassar College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the only student-run campus newspaper, and interned at The New Yorker magazine as well as the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press.