The News Literacy Project

New York Advisory Committee

Yasmin Namini (chair)

New York Times

Yasmin Namini is senior vice president for marketing and circulation at the New York Times Media Group. She has held this position since June 2007. She is responsible for marketing the Times brand across print, web and mobile platforms, including The New York Times and NYTimes.com., and for the circulation of The New York Times. She served as vice president for Circulation Marketing at The Times since 1999 and the chief customer officer for the New England Media Group and as a senior vice president at the New England Newspaper Group and The Boston Globe since 2000.

Geraldine Baum

Los Angeles Times

Geraldine Baum is the New York bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. In her 18 years as a reporter with the paper, she has been posted in Washington, New York and Paris, where she served as a correspondent and bureau chief. She has covered major national and international news events and created “New York, NY,” a 900-word weekly column about the city. After starting her journalism career at The Miami Herald, Baum spent seven years at Newsday. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer in 1984.

Byron E. (Barney) Calame

Byron E. (Barney) Calame worked at The Wall Street Journal for almost 40 years, serving as a reporter, bureau chief, assistant managing editor and senior editor before retiring as a deputy managing editor in 2004. He later served as the public editor, or ombudsman, at The New York Times for a two-year term ending in 2007. His responsibilities serving in the No. 2 position in the news department during his final 12 years at The Journal included overseeing paper-wide quality control, maintaining and monitoring reporting and ethical standards, and taking charge of the paper in the absence of the managing editor.

Linda Gelfond

Linda Gelfond is a member of the board and the treasurer of the LearningSpring School, a New York City private school for high-functioning children with autistic spectrum disorders. She has also served since 2001 on the executive committee of Project Cicero, which collects and donates books to under-resourced New York City public schools. She is a candidate for a master’s of education degree from Bank Street College of Education, specializing in reading and literacy. A retired CPA, she previously worked in the financial industry.

Allison Morrow

Allison Morrow is a former senior vice president at Lehman Brothers and at Chemical Bank. She is a trustee of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., and is a William Cullen Bryant Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In addition, she has been a trustee of First Presbyterian Church, and its nursery school, in New York City.

Dina Temple-Raston

NPR

Dina Temple-Raston is a correspondent for NPR, covering counter-terrorism efforts in the U.S. and abroad. Before joining NPR in 2007, she reported from Asia and from the White House for Bloomberg News. She has written three books: A Death in Texas, published in 2002, Justice on the Grass (2005) and The Jihad Next Door (2007), and co-authored In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties In the Age of Terror (2007). 

Julie Sandorf

Revson Foundation

Julie Sandorf is the president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, a position she has held since 2008. Previously, she was co-founder and executive director of Nextbook, a national organization dedicated to creating and promoting Jewish literature, culture and the arts. From 1991 to 1999, she was president of the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), which she founded to deliver permanent solutions to chronic homelessness. Prior to her involvement with CSH, she was a program director at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) in New York.

Chicago Advisory Committee

Sonya Anderson, Ed.D.

First Five Years Fund

Sonya Anderson is national director of the First Five Years Fund, which advocates federally for early education opportunities for at-risk children. Previously, she served as education program director for the Oprah Winfrey Foundations, overseeing development of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa and managing other domestic and international projects. She also worked as a senior associate for Creative Associates International, where she co-directed education development projects in West Africa and the Caribbean, and at the Ford Foundation as a program associate.

Angela De Paul

Angela De Paul served for eight years as director of communications at Harpo Inc., where she was a corporate spokeswoman and press representative for Oprah Winfrey and led strategic publicity campaigns for “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Before stepping down in October 2011, she also worked to obtain press coverage for all of the company’s print, online, film, radio and cable businesses and three philanthropic entities. Between 1997 and 2003, De Paul held several public relations posts at Playboy Enterprises Inc. in Chicago.

David Hiller (ex officio)

McCormick Foundation

David Hiller is the president and chief executive officer of the McCormick Foundation, the major funder of the News Literacy Project in Chicago. He joined the foundation in May 2009. David is the past publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times and, before that, the Chicago Tribune. He is a former partner in the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. Previously, he was a lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice and a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

Sheila Solomon

The Chicago Tribune

Sheila Solomon is the cross-media editor at the Chicago Tribune, where she helps to link editorial resources within the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Tribune Media Group.  From 2002 until 2009 she was the senior editor for recruitment, overseeing the newsroom’s internship and training programs and serving as a resource and liaison for the newsroom and Chicago Tribune Media Group partners. She has also worked at Newsday, The Charlotte Observer and the Daily Press (Hampton Roads, Va.), and was an adjunct journalism instructor at Hampton University. She is a member of the advisory board of the journalism department at Columbia College Chicago.

Washington, DC Advisory Committee

Peter J. Kadzik (chair)

Dickstein Shapiro

The co-leader of Dickstein Shapiro’s Antitrust & Financial Services Practice, Peter Kadzik has practiced antitrust law and represented clients in complex civil litigation for more than 28 years after serving as an assistant U.S. Attorney and judicial law clerk. He has represented clients in complex civil litigation, criminal investigations, and before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), and various state enforcement agencies. He served from 1991 to 2001 on the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and represented the Democratic National Committee and the former chief of staff to President Clinton in various investigations.

Whitney Allgood, Ph.D.

Whitney Allgood is the former chief of staff for the News Literacy Project.  She previously served as director of assessment and accountability at the District of Columbia’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, where she managed contracts to develop, produce, administer and score state tests for students in all D.C. public and charter schools. She also spent two years as a fellow with the Strategic Data Project at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research. She began her career as an English and social studies teacher and holds a doctrate in education policy from Vanderbilt University.  

Maggie Farley

LuckyG Media Inc.

Maggie Farley was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times for 13 years before partnering in an educational technology company, LuckyG Media Inc., in 2008. The company recently sold luckygrasshopper.com, a website and smartphone app for learning Chinese characters, and is now setting up a nonprofit group to promote digital learning in underserved communities. At the Times, Farley headed the paper’s Hong Kong and Shanghai bureaus, reporting on the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China, China’s rise as a world power, and the Asian economic crisis. She moved to New York in 1999 to cover the United Nations and Canada for the Times and reported on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and their aftermath. She has also worked for The Boston Globe and Japan’s Fuji Television.

Elisa Buono Glazer

Washington Corporate & Cultural Affairs

Elisa Buono Glazer is a principal with Washington Corporate & Cultural Affairs, LLC. She works with founder Elizabeth Perry to provide strategic, comprehensive development services for major cultural and educational initiatives of non-profit institutions, public agencies, corporations and foundations. Elisa has more than 25 years of experience supporting culture and education in this country and abroad, including the non-profit, public, diplomatic and corporate arenas. Her clients have included the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National History Day, the High Museum of Art of Atlanta and the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. From 1994 to 2006,, she was an arts and sponsorship consultant based in Atlanta. She previously served as deputy corporate relations officer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Les Machado

LeClairRyan

Les Machado is a partner in the Washington office of the law firm LeClairRyan, where he is co-chair of the media, internet and e-commerce industry team.  A former journalist, he has appeared in state and federal courts nationally, representing media organizations in libel and privacy lawsuits. He also conducts pre-publication reviews and provides advice on subpoenas, retraction demands, access, the Freedom of Information Act, reporter’s privilege and all other First Amendment matters relating to the editorial content of newspapers and broadcasts.

Tom Rosenstiel

Pew Research Center’s Project of Excellence in Journalism

Tom Rosenstiel is an author, journalist, and founder and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a think tank that studies the news media and is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington. A journalist for more than 30 years, he worked as media critic for the Los Angeles Times and chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek magazine and is vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. Rosenstiel is the author with Bill Kovach of The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (Crown 2001, updated 2007), winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard University and the Society of Professional Journalist Sigma Delta Chi award for research in journalism. It is a required text in most journalism schools in the country and has been translated into more than 23 languages. His new book is entitled “Blur: How to Tell What’s True in the Age of Information Overload.” Rosenstiel and Kovach are also authors together of Warp Speed: America in The Age of Mixed Media (Century Foundation 1999).

Los Angeles Advisory Committee

Jim Newton

Jim Newton is editor-at-large of the Los Angeles Times. He serves as a member of the Times’ editorial board, advises on editorial matters and writes and edits for the editorial and op-ed pages. A 20-year veteran of the paper, he has served as editor of the editorial pages and been a reporter and bureau chief, covering the Los Angeles Police Department, Mayor Richard Riordan, federal law enforcement and state and local politics. He is also a senior fellow with UCLA’s School of Public Affairs and teaches journalistic ethics at the Communications Studies Department. He is the author of Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, a best-selling biography of the former chief justice and California governor, and is at work on a biography of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential years.

Gwen Potiker

Gwen Potiker is a former television literary and packaging agent for Creative Artists Agency. Previously, she was director of development for television movies at NBC and a creative executive in television development at New Line Cinema. She currently is active raising funds for Birthright Israel, New Visions Foundation, the Los Angeles Library Foundation and the Lung Cancer Foundation of America.

Advisory Council

Ron Claiborne

ABC News

Ron is the news anchor for “Good Morning America Weekend Edition” and a general assignment correspondent based in New York, where he reports for “World News with Diane Sawyer” and “Good Morning America.” He joined ABC News in 1986. He has previously worked in the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Boston bureaus of ABC News and has covered stories worldwide. He was part of the ABC News team that won a 2000 Emmy Award for coverage of the seizure of Elian Gonzalez in Miami. In 2003, he was an Ochberg Fellow with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, affiliated with the University of Washington. Prior to joining ABC News, he was a general assignment correspondent for WNYW-TV, New York from 1982 to 1986, and a reporter for the New York Daily News from 1980-1982, and a reporter and national editor for United Press International wire service in New York from 1977-80.

Stephen Day

International Ventures Associates and American University

Stephen is CEO and founder of International Ventures Associates (IVA), a private consulting and investment company providing strategic advice and support for telecommunications, IT and software industries. Before founding IVA in 1991, he spent nine years at COMSAT in senior management positions, including vice president for ventures, where he directed the commercialization of COMSAT’s technology through licensing, joint ventures, new business spin-offs and technology relationships. From 1969 to 1982 he worked at E.I. DuPont. He is chairman of JUSTSAP (Japan-U.S. Science, Technology and Space Applications Programs); an adjunct professor for the MBA program at American University’s Kogod School of Business; a member of the Arts Advisory Council at American University; a member of the corporation board at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and a board member of a high-growth software company. He has also served on two NASA external advisory boards.

Bill Gentile

American University and Independent Journalist

Bill is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker who teaches at American University. His career spans three decades, five continents and nearly every facet of journalism and mass communication, most especially visual storytelling. His Backpack Journalism Workshops With NOW on PBS have received wide notice and acclaim. His recent works include “Nurses Needed,” about the nursing shortage across the United States, and “Afghanistan: The Forgotten War,” about America’s deepening involvement there. He also worked as a documentary consultant on “The White House: Inside America’s Most Famous Home.” Bill previously worked in Mexico City and on the Foreign Desk in New York for United Press International. His book of photographs, “Nicaragua,” won the Overseas Press Club Award for Excellence. He has shared an honorable mention for the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights Reporting for a story on rape during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide and two National Emmy Awards.

Steve Lopez

Los Angeles Times

Steve has been a columnist at the Los Angeles Times since 2001. He previously spent four years at Time Inc., where he wrote for Time, Sports Illustrated, Life and Entertainment Weekly. Before joining Time Inc., he was a columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News and the Oakland Tribune. His columns and magazine articles have won numerous national journalism awards. He is also the author of three novels and a book of non-fiction, The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music, which was made into the critically acclaimed 2009 movie The Soloist.

Rodney C. Pratt

Nike, Inc.

Rodney C. Pratt serves as Assistant General Counsel for Nike, Inc.  Previously he was Corporate Counsel with the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation (NRUCFC).  Prior to joining NRUCFC, he was a senior associate with the law firm of Dickstein Shapiro LLP, where he worked in the firm’s corporate and finance group.  He also serves as the general counsel to the Washington Bar Association Educational Foundation, Inc.  He is a past general counsel, vice president and member of the board of directors of the Washington Bar Association (“WBA”) and a past chair of the WBA’s Young Lawyers Division.

John Quiñones

ABC News

John is the co-anchor of the ABC newsmagazine “Primetime” and a correspondent on the newsmagazine “20/20.” He is also the host of the ABC News series “What Would You Do?”, a social experiment that delves into human behavior using hidden cameras. Previously a reporter at WBBM-TV in Chicago, he joined ABC News in June 1982 as a general assignment correspondent based in Miami, providing reports for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” and other ABC News broadcasts. He spent much of the 1980s in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama and was one of the few American journalists reporting from Panama City during the U.S. invasion in December 1989. More recently he has reported for the newsmagazines “Primetime” and “20/20.” John has won seven national Emmy Awards for his reporting, including coverage of the Congo’s virgin rainforest and a look at the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela.

Howard Schneider

School of Journalism at Stony Brook University

Howard Schneider is the founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University on Long Island and executive director of the nation’s first Center for News Literacy. The School of Journalism has developed a pioneering course in news literacy; more than 1,000 students are enrolled in the class this semester. Schneider worked at Newsday for 35 years, including almost 18 as managing editor and editor. The paper won eight Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure. He previously taught journalism at Stony Brook and at Queens College.

Lynn Sherr

Formerly of ABC News

Lynn spent more than 30 years as a reporter at ABC News, including more than two decades with the news magazine “20/20.” She specialized in women’s issues and social change as well as investigative reports.  She was also a national correspondent and part of the network’s political team in every election cycle from 1978 to 2000.  Before joining ABC News, she worked at WNET in New York, WETA in Washington, WCBS in New York, Associated Press and Condé Nast Publications.  Her numerous honors include an Emmy, two American Women in Radio and Television Commendation Awards and a George Foster Peabody Award.  She is the best-selling author of six books, including Outside the Box: A Memoir, published in September 2006, and she co-edited Peter Jennings: A Reporter’s Life, published in 2007.  Currently, she writes for various magazines and online for The Daily Beast (www.thedailybeast.com), and she also appears on PBS.

Ellen Weiss

NPR

From 2007 until early 2011, Ellen Weiss was senior vice president for news at NPR, overseeing more than 400 staff members in 19 domestic and 17 foreign bureaus. She joined NPR in 1982 and was a director, a field producer, an editor and a senior producer before becoming executive producer of the daily newsmagazine “All Things Considered,” a job she held for 12 years. From 2001 to 2006 she was senior editor of NPR News’ National Desk.  She has been part of NPR News teams that have won numerous awards, including the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the Overseas Press Club Award.

Education Committee

Frank W. Baker

Media Literacy Clearinghouse

Frank W. Baker, national media literacy consultant; maintains the Media Literacy Clearinghouse website (www.frankwbaker.com); former president, National Association for Media Literacy Education; author of two books on media literacy; worked in television broadcasting in South Carolina, Maryland and Florida and in the Orange County (Fla.) schools. 

Howard Gardner

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; author of over 20 books translated into 27 languages; best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there is a single human intelligence to be assessed by standard psychometric instruments; has received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education and honorary degrees from 22 colleges and universities.

Bob Jervis

Goucher College

Bob Jervis, the former coordinator of social studies for the Anne Arundel County (Md.) Public Schools, served as the News Literacy Project’s curriculum director and played a major role in developing the project’s Classroom Guide. Bob was responsible for developing the county schools’ social studies curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade. After retiring from Anne Arundel County in 2001, Bob spent five years with the Maryland State Department of Education assisting low- performing schools to improve student achievement. Bob is currently teaching the social studies methods courses in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Goucher College in Baltimore. He has served as a consultant to the Delaware Department of Education; the Los Angeles Unified School District; the Colonial School District in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.; the Council of Chief State Schools Officers and the Goethe-Institut Washington/Transatlantic Outreach Program. 

Kelly McBride

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies

Kelly McBride is a senior faculty member for ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.  She has been on the Poynter faculty since 2002 and is frequently quoted on ethics matters by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, the BBC and other news outlets. She has a master’s degree in theology from Gonzaga University and gained a national reputation as a religion writer for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. Kelly is currently involved with Poynter’s Sense-Making Project. With funding from the Ford Foundation, she is examining the transformation of journalism from a profession for a few to a civic obligation of many, the effects of technology on democracy and the media habits of the millennial generation.

Jay McTighe

Understanding by Design

Jay McTighe is an internationally recognized educational consultant and accomplished author. Among the 10 books he has co-authored is the best-selling Understanding by Design (written with Grant Wiggins), which is widely used by teachers to develop curricula. Jay is well known for his work with thinking skills, having coordinated statewide efforts in Maryland to develop instructional strategies, curriculum models, and assessment procedures to improve the quality of student thinking. He has made presentations in 47 states and 18 countries on five continents.

Eric Schwarz

Citizen Schools

Eric Schwarz, CEO and co-founder of Citizen Schools, a national education initiative that helps improve student achievement by offering after-school programs that blend real world learning projects and rigorous academics; was a public service fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government; former executive director, City Year Boston, and vice president, City Year.

Technology Committee

Nicco Mele

EchoDitto and Harvard University

A pioneer in the social media and Web 2.0 field, Nicco is a co-founder and partner at EchoDitto, a strategic online communications firm dedicated to building vibrant communities online and empowering people through the creative use of emerging technologies. He is also a co-founder of GeniusRocket.com, a crowd-sourced creative ad agency, and ProxyDemocracy.com, an online resource for proxy voting and shareholder resolutions. In 2003 he was the Internet operations director for former Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential primary campaign and was named one of America’s “best and brightest” by Esquire magazine. Nicco teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 2008.

Walt Mossberg

The Wall Street Journal, D: All Things Digital and allthingsd.com

Walt Mossberg has been described by The Washington Post as “one of the most powerful men in the high-tech world” and “a one-man media empire whose prose can launch a new product.” He is the author and creator of The Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Personal Technology” column, which has appeared every Thursday since 1991. He is also the co-creator and co-producer of D: All Things Digital, an annual conference for the technology industry, and is co-executive editor of the technology web site allthingsd.com, which extends the experience of the D Conference to the Internet. In addition to “Personal Technology,” he writes the Journal’s “Mossberg’s Mailbox” column and edits the “Mossberg Solution” column. The only technology writer to win the Gerald Loeb Award for commentary, he appears regularly on television and Internet video as a commentator on technology issues and is a weekly contributor to the Fox Business Network. He previously spent 18 years covering national and international affairs for the Journal.

Craig Newmark

Craigslist

Craig Newmark is the founder of craigslist.org, a community-moderated website that offers classified ads and discussion forums for basic day-to-day necessities, such as finding a job and a place to live, and for diversions such as personals and events listings. Begun in 1995 as an occasional e-mail to friends of fun things to do in San Francisco, Craigslist now has local sites for more than 700 cities in 70 countries. Craig is on the National Advisory Council of Donorschoose.org, which enables individuals to fund classroom projects in schools throughout the United States. He also serves on the boards of Consumers Union (the publisher of Consumer Reports) and the Sunlight Foundation, which fosters greater openness and accountability in government.