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Membership Committee Roster

The Membership Committee follows membership trends in the Society and recommends membership recruitment drives to the national board and executive director. It is called upon to review chapter requirements, dues, organizational structure and other quality-of-life issues affecting the membership.

Membership Committee Chair

Holly Edgell
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Bio (click to expand) Holly Edgell lives in Cincinnati, where she recently joined Scripps-owned WCPO as Neighborhood News Editor for WCPO.com. She comes to the roster of SPJ Committee leaders with experience in journalism and academia.

From February to November 2012, Edgell worked as a content strategist, consultant and freelance journalist in St. Louis. Before that she was one of two regional editors for Patch.com in metro St. Louis, where she hired a team of 13 journalists to launch and grow 12 community news and information websites.

Edgell joined Patch.com from her position as an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and the Emmy-award winning executive producer at KOMU-TV (NBC) in Columbia, MO. She also served as the adviser for the Missouri School of Journalism student chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Her previous experience includes jobs as a newscast producer in Youngstown, Ohio, at WFMJ-TV and in Pittsburgh at WTAE-TV. Edgell's career later took her to Cleveland, where she worked as medical news producer at duopoly WOIO-TV and WUAB-TV, and to Detroit's WDIV-TV, where she worked as consumer news producer. Edgell spent more than four years as an assistant professor in Florida A&M University's journalism school.

At age 21, Edgell was the first news director for Great Belize Television in Belize, where she was born. She helped launch “News 5,” the first independent (non-government) television news program to air in that country. Edgell earned a master's degree in journalism with a concentration in media management at Kent State University in Ohio. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University. She has traveled extensively in Africa, Asia, North America and Europe and speaks Spanish.

In her spare time, Edgell coordinates training for journalists and aspiring journalists in Belize, in conjunction with the University of the West Indies, Open Campus.

She also writes fiction and had her short story, “The Means and the End,” published in Picayune Lit Review. Her story, “Heaven and the Deep Blue Sea” appears in two journals: Pisgah Lit Review and Dialogo. "Sea Change" appears in the latest issue of Caribbean Writer.