Staff
Alan C. Miller, President and CEO
Alan C. Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the president and CEO of the News Literacy Project. He was a reporter with the Los Angeles Times for 21 years before leaving the paper in March 2008 to establish the project. He spent nearly 19 years in the paper’s Washington bureau, the last 14 as a charter member of its high-profile investigative team. His work prompted investigations by the Justice Department, Congress and inspector generals in federal agencies and led to congressional hearings, reforms and criminal convictions.
He received more than a dozen national reporting honors, including the George Polk Award, the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal for breaking the 1996 Democratic National Committee campaign finance scandal. His series on the Marine Corps Harrier attack jet won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
Before joining the Times, Alan worked at The Record of Hackensack, N.J., as a state and county political reporter and at The Times Union of Albany, N.Y. as a political and state investigative reporter.
He was a fellow with the Peter Jennings Project at the National Constitution Center in March 2008 and the Japan Society in 1998 and a student participant at the East‐West Center Communication Institute from 1976 to 1978. He has spoken at more than half a dozen colleges and universities and appeared on panels sponsored by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the International Center for Journalists, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Mary Lynn Hickey, Program Administrator
Mary has 15 years of experience with non-profit organizations as an administrator, volunteer coordinator and board member.
Most recently, she was associate director of the Falls Church Housing Corporation in Falls Church, Va., where she oversaw the staff, budget, fundraising, marketing and community advocacy and outreach. She previously worked for the Dominican Retreat in McLean, Va., the Hospice of Northern Virginia and the Northern Virginia Hotline. She is a board member of the Greater Falls Church Chamber of Commerce.
Mary is a graduate of American University with a B.A. in Economics and Urban Studies.
Darragh Worland, New York Program Manager
Darragh Worland, a journalist and multimedia educator and consultant, is the project’s New York program manager.
She worked for six years at NY1 News, a Time Warner-owned cable outlet that covers the city, and then as a senior producer for MSN Money, where she covered the financial crisis, shooting and producing video features for the web. She also freelanced for Fox News for three years as a web news editor and reporter.
Since 2007, Darragh has been an adjunct assistant professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she has worked on the Local East Village blog in partnership with The New York Times. In 2010, ABC News retained her to train its staff in digital video production as part of the organization’s move toward a “digital journalist” model. She has also designed and taught online and in-class multimedia courses for Mediabistro to help print journalists and communications professionals around the world keep pace with the changing media landscape.
Darragh is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where she studied English and drama, and has a master’s degree in journalism from NYU.
Elis Estrada, New York Program Assistant
Elis Estrada is the New York program assistant for the News Literacy Project. Her strong video production skills and her experience with New York City public education will support NLP’s further expansion in the country’s largest school system.
Elis will split her time between NLP and NY1, a Time Warner Cable-owned 24-hour news channel covering New York City, where she is an associate producer for the consumer investigative unit, NY1 for You. Elis has also worked with the station’s education reporter to help produce breaking news and enterprising stories about New York City’s public education system. Prior to her work at NY1, Elis was an intern at NBC’s "Nightly News with Brian Williams" and produced stories for PBS with the youth media program Children’s PressLine.
Elis is a graduate of Marymount Manhattan College, where she majored in communication arts, and has a master’s degree in journalism, specializing in urban reporting and broadcast media, from CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Peter Adams, National Education Director and Chicago Program Manager
Peter Adams is the News Literacy Project’s national education director and program manager for the Chicago area. An alumnus of Teach for America, he has taught in the New York City and Chicago public school systems, as well as at Roosevelt University and Wright College. Peter has also worked with the New York City Teaching Fellows Program, with After School Matters and as an independent education consultant. As an undergraduate at Indiana University at Bloomington, he co-founded an independent monthly student newspaper, and he received a Master of Arts degree in the humanities from the University of Chicago.
Peter became NLP’s national education director in September 2012. As such, he has primary responsibility for the project’s curriculum and support materials, it’s development of workshops with partner organizations, including the American Library Association, and the upgrading and expansion of NLP’s digital unit. As Chicago program manager, Peter oversees two other full-time staffers at NLP’s Chicago office. In the past three years, he has completed classroom units with more than 20 middle and high school teachers, and has worked with more than 20 youth media instructors in non-school settings. He has also provided news literacy training and workshops to teachers throughout the region.
Tim Mata, National Digital Coordinator
Tim Mata is the National Digital Coordinator for the News Literacy Project and is the digital lead for the organization nationwide. His strong background in information technology, social media and production will support NLP’s efforts to scale the project using digital innovation.
A 2010 graduate of North Park University, Tim worked in computer systems design and sales and was also an intern for the Chicago public radio station WBEZ, where he produced and edited videos, photographs and written content for the station’s website. He is also a former producer for The Paper Machete, a weekly reading series and podcast based in Chicago.
Mary Owen, Chicago Education Coordinator
Mary Owen is NLP’s Chicago Education Coordinator, overseeing most of the project’s classroom programs. She was a journalist for about 10 years, most recently at the Chicago Tribune, where she covered government, crime and courts. She earlier worked as a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Lansing (Mich.) State Journal and the Detroit Free Press and taught at a school in the Detroit area. As a Peace Corps volunteer, Mary taught English, computer literacy and journalism to students and teachers in the Philippines, and she serves on the board of the Chicago Area Peace Corps Association. Mary graduated from Michigan State University and is pursuing a master’s degree at Indiana University Northwest.
Maureen Freeman, Washington, D.C. Regional Coordinator
Maureen Freeman brings experience as both a teacher and a journalist to her position as the News Literacy Project’s program coordinator for the Washington, D.C. area.
She has worked as a staff reporter and as a freelancer for daily and weekly newspapers in Massachusetts, Ohio and New York and has taught English and journalism at private, public and independent schools in the U.S. and London. As a fellow in the State Department’s Teaching Excellence and Achievement program, she taught classes and teacher workshops at schools in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine, in 2008.
In recent years Maureen has worked at the Newseum in Washington — first as the programs coordinator and then in its education department, teaching classes on journalism, media ethics and First Amendment issues to student groups from elementary through university levels. She was also a member of the board of directors for the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.