Here are biographies of speakers you can expect to see during the 2019 “Democracy Runs on Journalism” Regional Conference in Boston.

Speakers presenting on Friday, April 5th

Friday Conference Speakers PDFDownload

Bill Bleyer@BillBleyer

Bill Bleyer was a prize-winning staff writer for Newsday for 33 years before retiring in 2014 to write books and freelance for magazines and Newsday. He is the author of Long Island and the Sea: A Maritime History (The History Press 2019), The Fire Island Lighthouse: Long Island’s Welcoming Beacon (The History Press 2017), Sagamore Hill: Theodore Roosevelt’s Summer White House (The History Press 2016) and co-author of Long Island and the Civil War (The History Press 2015).

He was part of the Newsday team that won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. He has recruited for Newsday. He is a former SPJ Regional One director and president of the Press Club of Long Island pro chapter and currently the treasurer for the region and chapter.

Callum Borchers@callumborchers

Callum Borchers covers the Greater Boston business community for WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station. He joined WBUR in 2018 from The Washington Post, where he reported on the intersection of politics and media. He previously covered politics, business and sports at The Boston Globe and was editor of Citizen’s News in Naugatuck, Connecticut.

Callum holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northeastern University and is a member of the Park Scholar Alumni Advisory Board at Ithaca College, where he completed his undergraduate work.

Paula Bouknight

Paula Bouknight is the Assistant Managing Editor for Hiring & Development. She oversees recruitment and the Globe’s college summer internship and coop programs. She works with department and section heads to identify and attract top candidates and improve diversity in the newsroom.
Bouknight began her career at The Globe in 1986 in the Sports department as a copy editor. Since then, she has worked on the news copydesk, overseen production of New Hampshire Weekly and City Weekly, and served as night editor. When The Globe embarked on the Bulldog experiment in 2000, she was placed in charge of production, and when the experiment ended, she was named one of two editors for the expanded Globe North section.

Phil Davis@PhilDavis_CG

Phil Davis worked for NJ.com, The Daily Times and currently covers criminal justice for The Capital. He was in The Capital Gazette newsroom on the day five of his colleagues were shot and killed by a gunman last June.

Diane Foley

Diane M. Foley is the mother of five children, including American freelance conflict journalist James W. Foley. She founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation in September 2014, less than a month after his public execution. Diane is currently serving as the President and Executive Director of JWFLF.

Since 2014, she has led JWFLF efforts to fund the start of Hostage US and the international Alliance for a Culture of Safety, ACOS. In 2015, she actively participated in the National Counterterrorism Center hostage review which culminated in the Presidential Policy Directive-30. This directive re-organized US efforts on behalf of Americans taken hostage abroad into an interagency Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs and a White Hostage Response Group.

Previously, Diane worked first as a community health nurse and then as a family nurse practitioner for 18 years. She received both her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH.

Stephen Kurkjian@kurkjian

Stephen Kurkjian spent much of his 40 years at The Boston Globe as an investigative reporter and editor. A founding member of The Globe’s investigative Spotlight team, Kurkjian was a reporter on the team when it won its Pulitzer Prizes in 1972 and 2003, an its chief when it was awarded the prize in 1980. In addition, he won more than 25 regional and national reporting awards as well as the Yankee Quill in 2003. Between 1986 and 1991, he served as The Globe’s Washington Bureau chief overseeing the work of eight reporters while covering the Justice Department and legal issues. In his retirement, Kurkjian wrote MASTER THIEVES: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the Largest Art Heist in Wold History, the definitive account of the 1990 theft from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Museum. He has also written extensively about the Armenian Genocide, and is a non-practicing member of the Massachusetts Bar.

Meagan McGinnes@meaganmcginnes

Meagan McGinnes is the newsletter editor for WBUR, Boston’s largest radio newsroom and an NPR affiliate. Before joining WBUR, Meagan was a senior reporter at NOSH, an online trade publication that focuses on the healthy, organic, natural packaged food industry.

Prior to her time at NOSH, Meagan was a staff writer at Boston.com where she wrote breaking news stories and features, while also assisting on special projects. Meagan additionally has contributed to the Society of Grownups, a Mass Mutual website that provides personal financing information for millennials. She graduated with a degree in journalism from Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications in 2014.

At her core, Meagan is a writer and digital media strategist with interests in New England culture, locally sourced food, fitness, and telling engaging stories in innovative ways.

Brian McGrory@GlobeMcGrory

Brian McGrory, who served as a metro columnist, White House correspondent, and metro editor, is the editor of The Boston Globe.

He graduated from Weymouth North High School, then Bates College in 1984. His first newspaper job was as a reporter with the Patriot-Ledger in Quincy, MA. In 1985, he moved to the New Haven Register as a reporter, and later became the newspaper’s first Washington correspondent.

McGrory came to the Globe in 1989 as a suburban reporter covering the South Shore. He worked as the Globe’s roving national reporter in 1995 and 1996 before moving to the Washington Bureau that year in the job of White House correspondent to cover Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign against Bob Dole, and then Clinton’s second term.

McGrory moved back to Boston as a Metro columnist in 1998. He added the title of associate editor to his portfolio in 2004.

In 2007, McGrory left column writing to become the paper’s Metro editor, formally the deputy managing editor for local news, running the newsroom’s largest department. He served in that position until January 1, 2010, when, by previous design, he returned to his twice-weekly column. He was named editor of the paper in December 2012.

Bruce Mohl@BruceMohl

Bruce Mohl is the editor of CommonWealth magazine. Bruce came to CommonWealth from the Boston Globe, where he spent nearly 30 years in a wide variety of positions covering business and politics. He covered the Massachusetts State House and served as the Globe’s State House bureau chief in the late 1980s. He also reported for the Globe’s Spotlight Team, winning a Loeb award in 1992 for coverage of conflicts of interest in the state’s pension system. He served as the Globe’s political editor in 1994 and went on to cover consumer issues for the newspaper. At CommonWealth, Bruce helped launch the magazine’s website and has written about a wide range of issues with a special focus on politics, tax policy, energy, and gambling. Bruce is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He lives in Dorchester.

Kristen Pope@KristenLPopeTV

Kristen L. Pope is an Award-Winning Journalist, TV Host, sought-after Speaker, and Creator of the On-Air Academy. 

Kristen won a documentary award from the New York Association of Black Journalists; A Women in Media Award and also been listed as a Woman to Watch. 

Most recently, Kristen contributed as a on-air reporter to NBC Boston. 

Kristen runs her own boutique production company, “Pope Productions,” and created the flagship variety show, “The Positive Controversy with Kristen Pope,” set to release it’s second season. Through Pope Productions, Kristen has packaged her decade of expertise as a television broadcaster in her recently released first online course, the “On-Air Academy,”  – the go-to course to secure your next job on air!
In addition to a love for media, Kristen has a passionate heart for women. That fire lead her to create, “The King’s Daughters, Inc” in 2008 – a community for women to anchor their identity in Christ and grow through personal development. 

Jason Pramas@jasonpramas

Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of the metro weekly DigBoston and network director of the investigative reporting incubator Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. He was also the founder of: Open Media Boston (a nonprofit online news weekly that he ran from 2008 to 2015), As We Are: the magazine for working young people (1994-1996), and the international wire New Liberation News Service (1990-1993, a restart of the famed Liberation News Service). A photojournalist by trade, he holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the Art Institute of Boston and a BA in Community Media and Technology from UMass Boston. His work has been published in hundreds of news outlets in over a dozen countries. Pramas is also an educator, an artist, a longtime labor and community activist, and a Boston native.

Alejandro Ramirez@ramirezalej

Alejandro Ramirez is the editor-in-chief of Spare Change News. He is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in VICE, Boston Globe, Buzzfeed Reader, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and Dig Boston. He received his MFA in Creative Nonfiction form the Solstice program at Pine Manor College.

Karyn Regal @Karynregal

Karyn Regal is an experienced crisis reporter.  Originally from Massachusetts, she started her career at WCCM in Lawrence when she in high school. She went on to work at WTAG in Worcester, covering the Cold Storage Fire, where six firefighters died; she covered the Station Nightclub fire at WHJJ in Providence, which killed 100 people. As a CBS News Correspondent in New York, she anchored for over 400 stations across the country, and anchored for WCBS and 1010 WINS.  She came home to Boston and WBZ in 2014, just in time for the winter of 2015 and nine feet of snow.  Here at WBZ, Karyn has covered a broad spectrum of stories including Campaign 2016 in New Hampshire, multiple storms, high-profile trials, Boston and state politics, and the Columbia Gas Explosions.

Angela Rowlings@angelarowlings

Angela Rowlings has been a staff photographer with the Boston Herald since 2004 and an active board member of the Boston Press Photographers Association since 2010. Prior to her work at the Herald, Rowlings freelanced for The Associated Press as well as various national and international publications. Fluent in Spanish, she is frequently asked to interview native-speaking subjects and to interpret for reporters. A lifelong Bostonian with an appreciation for her city’s rich history and diversity, she works to capture the humanity behind some of the city’s most critical issues. Above all, she strives to ensure all members of the community are fairly represented in her coverage. While her primary responsibility at the Herald is to document news events visually, Rowlings has also reported on breaking news and generated feature stories. Rowlings has taught visual journalism at Boston University and photography classes for teens at ICA Boston. She attended Boston Latin School and graduated with a BS in journalism from Boston University. She was a 2018 New England First Amendment Institute fellow, and she enjoys the challenge of covering everything from double Dutch tournaments in Roxbury to presidential elections in Venezuela.

Adam Sennott@AdamSennott

Adam Sennott is a Metro Correspondent for the Boston Globe. His work has also appeared in publications including The Washington Post, The Cambridge Chronicle, CommonWealth Magazine, and Real Change News

Emily Taylor

Emily Taylor is the director of One Step Away, Philadelphia’s street magazine. Emily works to identify and create innovative solutions to address homelessness and poverty in our city. Through One Step Away she works directly with individuals experiencing homelessness to develop meaningful income and personal growth opportunities as vendors. Additionally, she edits, writes, and designs the monthly One Step Away Magazine, giving a platform and a voice to marginalized communities. “Homelessness is not a singular issue, so we need multiple solutions to help people,” says Emily. A strong believer in social impact, Emily and the One Step Away vendors work with the community to break down the stereotypes of homelessness. “We want to empower people and facilitate cross-cultural communication to help people understand that often their idea or picture of a “homeless” person may not be correct. There are so many people who are invisible, whether on the streets or couch-surfing, and we want to bring positive visibility to homelessness and engage the community to help develop solutions.”

Speakers presenting on Saturday, April 6th

Saturday Conference Speakers PDFDownload

Mike Beaudet @Channel_Mike

Mike Beaudet, the Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, brings years of groundbreaking reporting to Boston’s most experienced investigative unit, 5 Investigates. As a multimedia investigative journalist, Mike is teamed with reporters Kathy Curran and Karen Anderson in the market leading investigative unit on WCVB NewsCenter 5.

Before joining WCVB, Mike spent nineteen years at WFXT as an investigative reporter and anchor and also worked as an anchor/reporter for WCVB’s sister station WMUR. Mike left his last position at WFXT in September 2015 to become a full-time Journalism Professor at Northeastern University. Mike continues his teaching position at Northeastern and taps the talents of his students to assist in the in-depth investigations that dualy serve as case studies in the classroom.

Over the course of his distinguished career, Mike has received national and regional awards including sixteen New England Emmys. His most recent Emmy came in 2016 following a series of investigations exposing government ineptitude and dysfunction. Mike and his team have also won numerous Associated Press and Edward R. Murrow Awards for coverage of topics ranging from wrongful convictions to organized crime. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) awarded Mike and his investigative unit the national Award of Excellence for their coverage of repeat drunk drivers who continue getting behind the wheel.

A Massachusetts native, Mike graduated from Emerson College in 1992 with a Bachelor of Science in Communication. In 2008, Mike received his Master’s in Journalism from Northeastern.

Felice Belman@FeliceBelman

Felice Belman is the Boston Globe’s deputy managing editor for local news. She joined the paper in 2014 and was previously politics editor. A graduate of Oberlin College, she spent nearly 25 years at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, including six years as editor. She was Maryland politics editor for the Washington Post from 2000-2002. In addition, she was co-editor of The New Hampshire Century, a collection of 100 profiles of 20th-century New Hampshire figures, published in 2001.  

Sarah Betancourt@sweetadelinevt

Sarah Betancourt is an investigative reporter for Commonwealth Magazine. Sarah was a reporter for The Associated Press in Boston, and a correspondent withThe Boston Globe and The Guardian. She has written about immigration, social justice, and health policy for outlets like NBC, The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and the New York Law Journal. Sarah has reported stories like how databases are used by police departments to procure information on immigrants, how a faulty policy decisions kept TPS holders from commercial drivers’ licenses, and uncovered the spread of an infectious disease in children at a family detention center.

Sarah received a 2018 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for her role in the ProPublica/NPR story, “They Got Hurt at Work and Then They Got Deported,” which explored how Florida employers and insurance companies were getting out of paying workers compensation benefits by using a state law to ensure injured undocumented workers were arrested or deported. Sarah attended Emerson College for a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Communication, and Columbia University for a fellowship and Master’s degree with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

Alexi Cohan@lexcohan

Alexi Cohan is a general assignment reporter covering local news and government as well as health and medicine stories. Alexi is from Springfield, Massachusetts and attended college at Hofstra University in New York where she majored in journalism and Spanish. Alexi’s professional experience encompasses print, television and radio at NY1, CNN en Español, 88.7FM WRHU and The Republican newspaper. She enjoys making connections with the community she covers and imploring others to use journalism as a tool to stay informed and engaged.

Nancy Crevier

Nancy K. Crevier is the editor of The Newtown Bee, the weekly hometown newspaper of Newtown, Conn., a position she has held since 2016.

Prior to this, she was employed at the paper as a reporter for 11 years, covering features, business, health, and general news. She writes the semi-regular food column, “Nourishments” for the paper, reflecting on food to nourish the body and soul, in between editing duties.

She has lived in Newtown since 1995, where she and her husband, Philip, raised two children.

Life experiences and observations of life in Newtown over the past 23 years have allowed her to connect with the community on many levels, and provided her with the privilege of sharing the stories and news of Newtown with Newtown Bee readers.

Chris Faraone@FARA1

A Queens, NY native who came to New England in 2004 to earn his MA in journalism at Boston University, Chris Faraone is the editor and co-publisher of DigBoston and a co-founder of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. He has published several books including 99 Nights with the 99 Percent and I Killed Breitbart, and has written liner notes for hip-hop gods including Cypress Hill, Pete Rock, Nas, and various members of the Wu-Tang Clan.

Edward Fitzpatrick@FitzProv

Edward Fitzpatrick worked for 28 years as a reporter, editor and columnist at daily newspapers, including 16 years at The Providence Journal and eight years as its political columnist. He is now director of media and public relations at Roger Williams University, where he started the RWU First Amendment blog and teaches journalism. He is a member of the New England First Amendment Coalition board and president of the Common Cause Rhode Island board. He received the 2016 Excellence in Public Service Award from Common Cause Rhode Island for his reporting on the importance of open and transparent government. He previously worked at the Hartford Courant, the Albany Times Union and The Saratogian. He grew up in Greenville, R.I., graduated from Mount St. Charles Academy and from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science.

Angela Fu

Angela Fu is the managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, the nation’s oldest continuously published daily college newspaper.

Felicia Gans@FeliciaGans

Felicia Gans is the digital producer and a reporter for the Globe’s marijuana section. In her role at the Globe, Gans oversees the marijuana section’s digital presence, manages the section’s various audience engagement channels, and reports on the latest news in New England’s marijuana industry. Gans started at the Globe covering crime and general assignment stories, and she began full-time on the overnight desk after graduating from Boston University. On the overnight shift, she led homepage strategy, keeping readers informed on everything from national politics and sports triumphs to local crime waves and natural disasters. Gans has covered a wide range of regional stories, including the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the death of former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. Gans is an alumna of The Daily Free Press, BU’s independent student newspaper, where she won two regional awards for the newspaper during her term as editor-in-chief.

Mitchell Garabedian@migarabedian

Since 1979 Attorney Mitchell Garabedian has focused his law firm on helping individuals and representing victims of sexual abuse. He has represented thousands of victims of clergy sexual abuse worldwide and his groundbreaking legal work has encouraged thousands more to come forward.

Marcela García@Marcela_Elisa

Marcela García is an editorial writer and member of the Boston Globe editorial board. She writes editorials, the daily unsigned essays representing the official view of the Boston Globe as an institution, as well as opinion columns under her byline. Marcela has been part of the Globe opinion and editorial pages since early 2014. She has more than 10 years of experience working as a bilingual journalist in Boston, focusing on immigration policy and Latino issues coverage in the US. Previously, she was a correspondent for Telemundo Boston; a special contributor to the Boston Business Journal; and the editor of El Planeta, Boston’s largest Spanish-language publication. Marcela is originally from Mexico; she received a graduate degree in journalism from the Harvard Extension School in 2005 and also holds a B.S. degree in Economics.

Kevin Grant@kevindgrant

Kevin Douglas Grant is co-founder and executive editor of The GroundTruth Project, an award-winning nonprofit media organization that supports the next generation of correspondents, as well as vice president of Report for America, a service-based initiative for revitalizing local journalism. Previously senior editor at GlobalPost, he has led reporting projects around the world and his work has been recognized by the Edward R. Murrow, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University and Online Journalism Awards among others. He holds an M.A. in Online Journalism from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, where he was a Dean’s Scholar and the founding executive editor of Annenberg’s pioneering news organization Neon Tommy. Grant is the former operations director of semantic news aggregator Inform.com. He is currently based in Washington, D.C.

Irwin Gratz@ilgratz

Irwin Gratz has been a radio journalist for 40 years.  He has worked for both commercial radio stations, and, for the last 26 years, at Maine Public Radio, where he anchors local segments of “Morning Edition.”

Irwin is a past national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and was a member of the Society’s ethics committee, which updated the SPJ Code of Ethics in  2014.  He’s currently serving as President of the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation which provides financial support for the Society’s educational efforts.

Roy Gutterman

Roy Gutterman is an associate professor of communications law and journalism and director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.  He is a former newspaper reporter and lawyer and now teaches courses in communications and First Amendment law.

Cameron Hickey@cameronhickey

Cameron Hickey is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, cinematographer and software developer, and has covered science and technology for the PBS NewsHour with correspondent Miles O’Brien for the last 10 years.

Since the 2016 election he has focused on building tools to investigate misinformation on social media. At the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Cameron leads the Information Disorder Lab a research project focused on monitoring and investigating and analyzing problematic content online.

David Joyner@D_Joyner

David Joyner is executive editor of The Eagle-Tribune and the North of Boston Media Group’s other newspapers and websites, which include The Salem News, Daily News of Newburyport and Gloucester Daily Times. Prior to that he was a vice president for the group’s parent company, CNHI LLC,  where his duties included directing a team of reporters assigned to cover statehouses across the country as well as the nation’s capital. Joyner is a former reporter of the Gloucester Daily Times, where he also served as editor. He was also a managing editor of The Salem News. He has worked as a journalist for news organizations in Georgia, Alabama and Washington, D.C. A graduate of George Washington University, Joyner was the Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Community Journalism at Harvard from 2011-12. He is a past president of the Alabama professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Dan Kennedy@dankennedy_nu

Dan Kennedy is an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a nationally known media commentator. He is a regular panelist on “Beat the Press,” a media program on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), and he writes a weekly column on media and politics for WGBHNews.org. Kennedy’s most recent book, “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century,” was published by ForeEdge in 2018. His blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net.

Thomas Maier

Thomas Maier is an award-winning author, TV producer and longtime Newsday investigative reporter. Maier’s new book “MAFIA SPIES” is coming out April 2019. His book “Masters of Sex” became a Emmy-winning Showtime series and Golden Globe drama nominee. 

Bill Marcus@BillMarcusWBZF

Bill Marcus is a business and technology reporter, a contributor to IDG’s Computerworld, and a host of the Think Further podcasts produced by Fred Alger Management.

Based in Boston since early 2014, he covers New England for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and, from March of 2018 to March of 2019, was a reporter for WBZ NewsRadio 1030. He also contributes to The Irish Times, The Irish Daily Mail, and Northern Sound Radio.

From 2014 to 2018 he covered New England for Fox News Radio. Prior that, in New York, he was an editor and on-air reporter at Fox News Radio.

From 2002 to 2012 Bill Marcus was based in East Asia where he covered the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, the Japan Tsunami, the cultural and technological transformation of China and breaking news and international sporting events for Fox News Radio, American Public Media’s Marketplace, Fox TV, France 24 TV, PRI’s The World and the French wire service AFP.

Bill is also a former vice president of the SPJNE chapter.

Greg Marinovich@GregMarinovich

Greg Marinovich is co-author of The Bang-Bang Club, a nonfiction book on South Africa’s transition to democracy that has been translated into six languages. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and documentary filmmaker.He spent 25 years covering conflict around the globe, with his writing and photographs appearing in magazines and newspapers worldwide. His 2012 award winning investigations into the Marikana massacre of miners by police was called the most important South African journalism post Apartheid, and a book “Murder at Small Koppie” won the Alan Paton award for non-fiction in 2017. Marinovich was Editor-In-Chief of the Twenty Ten project, tutoring and managing over 100 African journalists’ work in all forms of media. He gives lectures and workshops on human rights, justice photography and storytelling. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2013/14 and currently teaches visual journalism and filmmaking at Boston University’s Journalism school, as well as teaching photography at Harvard.

Dan McCarthy@acutalproof

Dan McCarthy is Managing Editor for Sensi Boston, the local city edition of national cannabis and city lifestyle print magazine. A seasoned journalist and editor based in Boston covering everything from cannabis to politics to pop culture for a variety of local and national newspapers and magazines from DigBoston and The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, to The Boston Globe, Esquire Magazine, The Observer, The Daily Beast, Leafly News, Boston Magazine, VICE, BostInno, and many others. Additionally Dan previously served as an adjunct lecturer at the Northeastern Institute of Cannabis in Natick MA, a former cannabis industry vocational education center.

Maggie Mulvihill@maggiemulvihill

Maggie Mulvihill’s data journalism students have been honored with 10 regional or national journalism awards since 2011 as well as being named finalists for the prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Maggie’s students also worked on a national government ethics series, led by the Center for Public Integrity, which was a finalist for the Goldsmith Investigative Reporting Prize in 2013. An attorney, Maggie is also a Faculty Fellowat the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering and co-founder of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. She serves on the Steering Committee of the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press, the board of the New England First Amendment Coalition, was a 2004–2005 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and in 2014 was named to the Federal Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee.

Hilary Niles @nilesmedia

Hilary Niles is an independent data journalism consultant, freelance investigative and multimedia reporter, and award-winning researcher. She’s an alumna of the Missouri School of Journalism graduate program, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Freelance Community, and a member of SPJ’s FOI Committee. Her work with Charles Lewis at the Investigative Reporting Workshop in Washington, D.C., earned the SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi award for excellence in 2013. Her radio work has been featured on National Public Radio programs Only A Game, Here and Now and Weekend All Things Considered. Her business reporting has appeared in The Boston Globe and on the BBC World Service.

Cheryl Owsley-Jackson

Cheryl Owsley-Jackson began her career in the news business as features reporter and diversity columnist for The Columbus Republic. She wrote her column, “It Takes All Kinds” for more than a decade.

While earning a masters degree from Indiana University, with an emphasis on broadcast news, Cheryl worked as a features reporter on-air for WTIU Radio.

Her first job in televison was as a convergence for WSBT and South Bend Tribune in South Bend, Indiana. She flipped her on-air stories for WSBT into to print stories for The Tribune several days a week.

She continued her broadcast career as a general assignment reporter at WRTV in Indianapolis and as a reporter for CNN in the Chicago bureau.

She is currently a Journalist-In-Residence at Emerson College.  

Jessica Papin@jkpapin

Jessica Papin is a literary agent with Dystel Goderich and Bourret, LLC.  She first joined DG&B in 2003, after spending eight years as an editor at Warner Books (now Grand Central). In 2004, she moved to Egypt, where she spent three years working for the American University in Cairo Press. Upon her return to the United States, she rejoined DG&B. With a background on both sides of the desk, she loves working collaboratively with clients to shape and refine their work. Her stay in the Middle East has given her an abiding interest in the history and politics of the region, as well as the broader Islamic world. She is interested in plot-driven literary and smart commercial fiction, and narrative non-fiction across a range of subjects, including history, medicine, science, economics, and women’s issues. In every case, she looks for passion, erudition, and storytelling skill. A wry sense of humor doesn’t hurt.

Manny Paraschos

Dr. Manny Paraschos was recently named Professor Emeritus of Emerson College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and taught there as well as at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock before coming to Emerson in 1988. In 1986-87 he served as a Fulbright scholar in Scandinavia. He chaired the department of journalism in Arkansas and was the founding dean of Emerson’s European Institute for International Communication in Maastricht, The Netherlands, 1991-94. In 1995 he was honored with Emerson’s Distinguished Faculty Award.

Paraschos has been a reporter, a U.N. correspondent and an editorial writer. His scholarly works have been published in many leading mass communication and journalism journals in the United States as well as in Europe. He is the author of several books the most recent of which are The Boston Journalism Trail and Media Law and Regulation in the European Union. For more than two decades he was co-publisher of Media Ethics magazine, editor of Emerson's Journalism Students' Online News Service and author of the website entitled The Boston Journalism Trail.

Jin Park@JinnotJim

Jin Park is a recent graduate of Harvard University where he majored in biology and ethnic studies. In November 2018, he was elected as a Rhodes Scholar, becoming the first undocumented immigrant to win a Rhodes. He hopes to use his time at Oxford to pursue a doctorate degree in political philosophy to think systematically about the responsibilities that societies have to their immigrants.

Jorge Quiroga@JorgeWCVB

Jorge Quiroga is an award-winning general assignment reporter for WCVB Channel 5. During his more than forty-year tenure at WCVB, he has covered every major national and local story of importance to New Englanders including the Blizzard of ’78, the Claus von Bülow trial (the then crime if the century), the September 11 attack on America, the Sandy Hook school shootings, the Boston Marathon Bombings, just to name a few. Jorge joined WCVB in 1974 as the first producer/host of Aqui, a Hispanic public affairs program he created.

Mike Rezendes@MikeRezendes

Mike Rezendes is a former investigative reporter with The Boston Globe Spotlight Team and shared a Pulitzer Prize for revealing the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Mike was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice, once for an investigation of the debt collection industry, and more recently for an exposé of the mental health care system in Massachusetts. In 2015, he was played by Mark Ruffalo in the Academy Award-winning movie, “Spotlight.”

Shaun Robinson

Shaun Robinson is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Free Press, the independent student newspaper at Boston University. He is a sophomore in BU’s College of Communication studying journalism and political science. Shaun was born in Seattle and grew up in Princeton, NJ.

Mark Sappenfield@sappenfieldm

Mark Sappenfield is the Editor of The Christian Science Monitor – the organization’s top editorial position. Mark joined the Monitor in 1996 and has since written from Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Pentagon, and India. In addition to reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan during his time in South Asia, Mark has also written on issues of sports and science. He has covered seven Olympic Games and attended events at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including the landing of the Mars rover Opportunity. After returning to Boston in 2009, Mark served as both deputy national news editor and national news editor.

Stephanie Schorow

Stephanie Schorow has been writing since she walked into the office of the campus newspaper of Northwestern University, where she was majoring in journalism and asked for an assignment. Currently a Boston-based freelance writer and journalism instructor, Stephanie is the author, co-author, or editor of eight nonfiction books. Her most recent (and bestselling book) is a lively and somewhat salacious history of Boston’s experiment in adult entertainment zoning:  Inside the Combat Zone: The Stripped Down Story of Boston’s Most Notorious Neighborhood.  She is also the author of  Drinking Boston: A History of the City and its Spirits, The Cocoanut Grove Fire, and The Crime of the Century: How the Brink’s Robbers Stole Millions and the Hearts of Boston, which has been optioned as a potential TV series. She and co-author Beverly Ford wrote The Boston Mob Guide: Hitmen, Hoodlums and Hideouts. Ink runs in Schorow’s veins; she has worked as an editor and reporter for the Boston Herald, the Associated Press, the Stamford Advocate, the Twin Falls Times-News and the Shelbina Democrat, and other publications. She writes restaurant reviews for the Boston Globe North section. She currently teaches writing and communication at Lasell College. She is also a clay artist associated with the Mudflat studio in Somerville. After decades in journalism, Schorow is now trying her hand at fiction. She is now working on two projects, a novel about four women (and their cats) in the 1980s and a young adult fantasy novel.

Justin Silverman@JustinSilverman @FiveFreedoms

Justin Silverman is executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition. The coalition formed in 2006 when a group of local journalists and editors identified a need for more government transparency and public records access throughout the region. Since that time, the coalition has broadened its focus to include all freedoms protected by the First Amendment and other matters of concern to journalists and members of the media.

Noelle Swan@swannoelle

Noelle Swan leads a staff of several science and environmental writers and freelancers for the Monitor.

Since joining the Monitor in 2013, Noelle has worked as both an editor and writer for both the website and the weekly magazine. She has written several cover and feature stories for the Monitor Weekly, including deep dives into the “maker movement,” the impacts of wayward coal ash on American waterways, and the rise of cooperative robotics. Most recently, Noelle worked on the rapid response team, where she served as an editor and mentor to writers-in-training, and the national news desk, where she served as a reporter and junior editor.

Prior to coming to the Monitor, she worked as a freelance reporter, writing about science education for Science magazine and the Association for the Advancement of Science, contributing science and other news reports to National Public Radio affiliates in Delaware and Utah, and reporting on social services and poverty for Spare Change News. Noelle is a graduate of Harvard University where she studied natural science, environmental management, and journalism. She is active in the local and national science writing community and sits on the steering committee for the New England Science Writers.

Leah Todd@leahktodd

Leah Todd is the New England regional manager for the Solutions Journalism Network, building relationships with newsrooms in the New England states. From 2015 to 2018, Leah led SJN’s work in the Intermountain West, including launching and overseeing collaborative journalism projects between dozens of news organizations in Montana and New Mexico. Previously, she covered K-12 education at The Seattle Times, and local government at the Casper (Wyo.) Star Tribune. She has investigated and written about turmoil in Washington state’s new charter school sector; efforts to improve disproportionately high absentee rates among Native American students in Wyoming; Colorado’s attempts to divert mental health patients from overcrowded Emergency Rooms; and how residents in rural communities across the West find and use local news.

Chris R. Vaccaro@ChrisVaccaro

Chris R. Vaccaro is Assistant Director of SPJ Region 1 and chair of the Region 1 Mark of Excellence Awards. A former chapter president of the Press Club of Long Island, Vaccaro serves as Vice President of Digital News at Altice USA in New York. He is also an adjunct associate journalism professor at Hofstra University where he is the campus advisor for the Hofstra chapter of SPJ. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated, among others and he is the author of six books.

Tim White@timwhiteri

Tim White is the executive producer and host of WPRI 12’s long-running weekly current affairs program “Newsmakers.” He has moderated many live candidate debates and plays a key role in the station’s campaign coverage.

Tim is the recipient of four New England Emmy Awards for investigative reporting. He was honored for a 2010 series of stories probing government waste in Rhode Island. He won his second Emmy for 2012 coverage of Providence’s troubled pension system. A 2014 probe into a lack of accountability at a local fire district led to his third Emmy honor. A 2016 investigation that raised questions as to where a powerful state representative actually lived resulted in the politician’s indictment and was Tim’s fourth Emmy win.

Tim is a co-author of “The Last Good Heist,” the untold story of a daring heist on a secret bank of safe deposit boxes used by members of the New England mob and their associates. A half-hour documentary on the Bonded Vault heist was also nominated for an Emmy.

Charlie Wolfson@charliewolf23

Charlie Wolfson is a third-year journalism major at Northeastern University with a minor in political science. Originally from Pittsburgh, he was a co-op correspondent on the Boston Globe’s sports desk in fall 2018, and is currently the editor-in-chief of The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper. He’s been part of The News since arriving at NU, previously as the deputy city editor and as a staff writer, covering campus news, protests and activism, local environmental policy, NCAA athletics and student government oversight.