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.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., Alan received a Master’s degree in political science from the University of Hawaii. He lives in Bethesda, Md. with his wife, a public relations executive, and their daughter, a high school student.
Mary Lynn Hickey, Program Administrator
Mary has 14 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.
Peter Adams, Chicago Program Manager
Peter Adams is the News Literacy Project’s 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. As Chicago program manager, Peter has completed units with more than twenty middle and high school teachers, and has also worked with several youth media instructors in non-school settings. He also provides news literacy training and workshops to teachers throughout the region.
Tim Mata, Chicago Program Assistant
Tim Mata is the Chicago program assistant 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 for several years 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.
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 is also a member of the board of directors for the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.