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New Voices Advisory Board |
Jane Brown is executive director of the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, a private philanthropic organization that supports technology-related programs through strategic partnerships with public colleges and universities.
She is a former trustee of the University of Maryland College Park Foundation and chairs the Board’s Committee on University-Community Partnerships. She serves on the Baltimore City Workforce Investment Board as well as the Education and Youth Development Committee of the Baltimore Community Foundation. She has served as a board member of the Baltimore Neighborhood Collaborative and the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers. She is also an Advisory Board member of the Engaged University initiative of the Democracy Collaborative.
Prior to her work in the philanthropic sector, she was the managing editor of Baltimore Magazine and a features editor for the Baltimore Sun. She is the founder of a community-wide Media Reform Coalition in Baltimore and is deeply committed to the need to support citizen voices and independent media at the community level.
Charles Fancher is president of Fancher Associates Inc., which specializes in strategic communications planning, public/private partnership planning, community involvement programs, workplace diversity, social investment, and family foundation planning.
Previously, he was vice president/communications at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. Before joining CPB, Fancher was vice president/communications and public affairs for Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., which publishes The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. He has also been a reporter and editor at The Inquirer and at the Detroit Free Press.
His career has included stints in local television news and network television publicity. His assignments at the ABC television network included “Good Morning America,” “The ABC Evening News,” and “ABC’s Wide World of Sports,” and the network’s coverage of the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.
He has extensive experience with the nonprofit community, including as a corporate grant-making officer. He is currently a member of the board of directors of The National Philanthropic Trust. He has served as board president of Delaware Valley (PA) Grantmakers, and a board member of a variety of nonprofit organizations, including Community College of Philadelphia Foundation, Pennsylvania Hospital, Freedom Theatre, Festival Theatre for New Plays, and others. He has also served on committees associated with organizations such as Greater Philadelphia First, United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and others.
He is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, and he was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Journalists at the University of Michigan.
Bill Gannon is the director of online operations at Lucasfilm Ltd., where he has strategic and operational leadership roles and responsibilities for all online activities.
Prior to joining Lucasfilm Ltd., Gannon was editorial director and managing editor at Yahoo! Inc., where he had network-wide editorial leadership responsibilities in news, product development, content programming and policy. He was previously editorial director and managing editor at the financial services firm Financial Engines Inc., where he created Investor Central, a personal-finance Internet site with more than 3 million paid subscribers. He also received two co-inventor patents for Internet product development. Gannon also spent time as a national correspondent and staff writer for The Star-Ledger in New Jersey and for Newhouse Newspapers Inc., where he specialized in investigative, political, terrorism and conflict beat reporting. His foreign reporting included prolonged assignments in Rwanda and Zaire, the Persian Gulf War, and assignments in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
In 1996 he was selected to be a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Gannon’s other awards include the National Headliner Award, four Deadline Club Awards and the New Jersey Press Association’s Journalist of the Year Award. In 2001, he and a team of colleagues received the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Jesse Levanthol Prize for Deadline Reporting and were also finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
In June 2007, Bruce Koon became the news director for KQED FM, a public radio station in San Francisco.
He had been executive news editor of Knight Ridder Digital, where he oversaw the news operations of Knight Ridder Digital’s network of city guides, including Philly.com, BayArea.com and Miami.com. Knight Ridder Digital was the Internet business unit of Knight Ridder Inc., which was bought by McClatchy in 2006. His national news team was located at bureaus across the country and programmed breaking news throughout the day and most of the evening.
Previously, as managing editor of the Mercury News’ Web site (Mercury Center), he created such popular Web features as SiliconValley.com, an award-winning business technology site.
He is a former president and a founding board member of the Online News Association; a board member of The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper at the University of California at Berkeley; and former president of the San Francisco chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association.
Koon began his journalism career as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner in 1973. In 1975, he moved to the National Observer, a Dow Jones general interest weekly based in the Washington, D.C. area. He returned to California in 1977 as a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal in the Los Angeles bureau. In 1980, he became a staff reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and in 1982 he was named business editor of the Oakland Tribune. While at the Tribune, he also worked on Gannett’s USA Today prototype team. He returned to the San Francisco Examiner in 1984, where over the next 11 years he held such positions as business editor, real estate editor and associate editor. As associate editor, he was responsible for new media and special sections.
In 1994, he co-founded the San Francisco Free Press, Internet Edition, an online newspaper that published for two weeks during the city’s newspaper strike.
He has taught journalism at San Francisco State University and guest lectured at the American Press Institute, Poynter Institute, Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism.
Peggy Kuhr was named dean of the University of Montana School of Journalism in May 2007, and is the first woman to hold the position.
She came from the University of Kansas, where she was the Knight Chair on the Press, Leadership and Community for the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications since 2002. Previously, she was managing editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., where she spent 16 years.
She started at The Spokesman-Review as a project editor, became city editor, assisting managing editor and then the managing editor for content. She oversaw the news, sports, features and business sections. In 1993, Kuhr and The Spokesman-Review staff were named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in spot news. Kuhr directed 13 days of City Desk coverage of a standoff between white separatists in Idaho and the federal government.
Kuhr has also taught journalism-related courses at Eastern Washington University and Gonzaga University. Before working in Spokane, Kuhr worked for the Great Falls Tribune in Montana and for The Hartford Courant in Connecticut. She is a former Michigan Journalism Fellow.
As director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Peter Levine conducts and funds research on young people’s civic education and participation. He is also a research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, which he joined in 1993. Both organizations are part of the UMD’s School of Public Policy.
A 1989 Yale graduate, Levine studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause, helping to advocate for campaign finance reform and government ethics.
Since 1987, he has worked part-time for the Charles Kettering Foundation, where he is now an associate. In the late 1990s, he was deputy director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, chaired by Senator Sam Nunn and William Bennett. He is a co-founder of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and chair of the steering committee of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools.
Levine is the author of four books: Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities; Something to Hide (a novel); Living Without Philosophy: On Narrative, Rhetoric, and Morality; and The New Progressive Era: Toward a Fair and Deliberative Democracy. He also co-organized the writing of The Civic Mission of Schools, a report released by Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE in 2003.
In Prince George’s County, Maryland, Levine is working with high school students to create an “Information Commons.” This is an association devoted to building a state-of-the-art Web site with asset maps, news articles, structured deliberations, and other public goods.
Adam Clayton Powell III has been at USC since 2003, having served as director of the Integrated Media Systems Center at the U.S. National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering before being named vice provost for globalization in June 2007. He is also a visiting professor at the USC Annenberg School and a senior fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
Powell previously worked at Howard University’s WHUT-TV as general manager of the broadcast and cable television channels.
After joining the USC faculty, Powell was asked to provide weekly media reports for WHUT-TV, which ran on Friday and Sunday nights in 2003-2004 and which won the 2004 award for Best Network and Major Market TV Commentary from the National Association of Black Journalists.
Before 2001, Powell served as vice president/technology and programs for the Freedom Forum. In his 15 years at the Freedom Forum, Powell developed and supervised new media conferences and seminars and training programs on Internet- and computer-based media and information technology for journalists, educators, policy makers, and researchers in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
He was also an executive producer at Quincy Jones Entertainment where he produced Jesse Jackson’s weekly television series, and served as vice president for news and information programming at National Public Radio. He was also a manager and producer at CBS News and news director of ABC News’ 24-hour cable television news service.
He has written extensively about technology, media and international issues for a wide range of publications including the New York Times, Wired and USC’s Online Journalism Review. He received the Overseas Press Club Award for international reporting for a series of broadcasts he produced on Iran.
As vice president of news, Donna Reed leads efforts to improve the quality of Media General’s newspaper journalism and focuses on growing the company’s multimedia initiatives.
Media General’s publishing operations include The Tampa Tribune, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Winston-Salem Journal and 22 other daily newspapers in the Southeast United States.
Previously, she was the managing editor of the Tampa Tribune, where she began her journalism career in 1974. In 2003, the Tribune was ranked one of the fastest growing newspapers in the country. Editor & Publisher magazine named it one of the 10 “Newspapers That Do It Right” in its June 2003 edition.
At the Tribune, Reed was heavily involved in the development and expansion of the zoned sections in the Tribune’s primary market and in the evolution of the Tribune into a fully paginated newspaper.
In recent years she led the transformation to a team-based newsroom that is immersed in a multimedia journalism environment. She was part of the team that developed the vision for The News Center, a converged news operation that houses The Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV News Channel 8 and TBO.com, all companies of Media General.
She is a member of the Associated Press Managing Editors board of directors. She has been a reporter, bureau chief, assistant suburban editor, suburban editor, assistant Metro editor, state editor and deputy managing editor. A native of Dayton, Ohio, she earned her Bachelor of Arts (1973) and Master of Arts degrees (1974) from Morehead State University (Kentucky).
Tom Kunkel is an award-winning author, former top newspaper and magazine editor and a national media critic. As dean, he oversees a college with 600 undergraduates, 75 graduate students and a full-time faculty of 20.
He was a top editor at the Mercury News and Miami Herald before joining the University of Maryland in 1997 as editor and director of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper, a landmark magazine series published by the college-owned American Journalism Review.
Kunkel developed two books from the series, a comprehensive analysis of the U.S. newspaper industry: The State of the American Newspaper, a two-volume, annotated anthology of the magazine series, and Disturbing News: The Troubled State of America’s Newspaper Industry, which is based on the series’ findings.
An Indiana native, Kunkel is the author of Genius in Disguise, the Pulitzer-nominated biography of legendary New Yorker editor Harold Ross. The volume was a New York Times Notable book in 1995.
In 1998, he published Enormous Prayers: A Journey into the Priesthood, an ethnographic portrait of 28 Catholic priests. In early 2000, his Letters from the Editor, a compilation of and analysis of Ross letters, was released.
Kunkel began his journalism career as a 16-year-old, part-time reporter for his hometown paper, the Evansville (Ind.) Courier. He later served as cultural editor of the Cincinnati Post before leaving in 1981 for a five-year stint at the Miami Herald, where he rose to Sunday editor.
In 1985, at age 29, Kunkel became the youngest executive editor in the history of Knight Ridder Newspapers when he was named to lead the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer. In 1987 and 1988, Kunkel helped the New York Times launch its national edition before taking over as editor and publisher of Arizona Trend, which won a series of awards from the Magazine Publishers of America and the American Association of Business Publications under his leadership.
In 1990 Kunkel was named deputy managing editor of the Mercury News, where he oversaw a staff of 120 reporters and editors and directed coverage of the Rodney King riots and other major stories.
As publisher and chief executive officer of American Journalism Review, he writes a column for the bi-monthly magazine.
As dean, he also directs the College’s other major operating units, including the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, the Journalism Center on Children & Families, the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowships for international journalists, the Journalism Fellowships on Child and Family Policy, the Capital News Service reporting program in Washington and Annapolis, the Maryland-D.C. Scholastic Press Association for high school journalists, UMTV (the university’s cable television station) and J-Lab.
Jan Schaffer directs J-Lab, a center at the UMD’s College of Journalism that helps newsrooms, educators and communities use innovative information technologies to develop new ways for people to engage in important public issues.
She is the former executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million, 10-year journalism reform initiative that helped to fund more than 120 journalism pilot projects that sought to involve people better in public life.
Schaffer administers the national Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism and the New Voices initiative, which is funding start-up hyper-local community news projects and the Knight Citizen News Network and J-Learning portals.
A Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, she brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to her work, including assignments as business editor and as an editor and reporter for the city desk, national desk and business news departments.
As business editor, she directed the reporting and editing of two investigative series that were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, one on pharmaceutical pricing and one on abuses in the nation’s non-profit sector.
As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series of stories that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of the Philadelphia homicide detectives involved in the investigation. The articles won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service, the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Public Service Award, the Roy W. Howard Medal for Public Service and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel.
Also while covering federal courts, she broke the Philadelphia Abscam story about the FBI sting operation that used agents posing as Arab sheiks. She was sentenced to jail for six months for refusing to reveal her sources; the sentence was stayed on appeal.
She is a former journalism fellow at Stanford University. She has been a regular discussion leader at the American Press Institute. In addition to funding demonstration projects, rewarding innovations and spotlighting best practices, she is involved in teaching, public speaking, writing, and sharing the lessons learned from the centers’ projects.
Copyright © 2004-2005 J-Lab, a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism.