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About the Society
Board of Directors
For descriptions of SPJ Board positions, please consult SPJ's
bylaws.
President
Sonny Albarado
Projects Editor
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
121 E. Capitol Ave.
Little Rock, Ark. 72201
501/244-4321
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
Sonny Albarado is projects editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a statewide, family-owned daily newspaper based in Little Rock. As projects editor, he supervises a staff of two reporters and assists other editors and reporters in long-term investigative and explanatory journalism.
Albarado has worked as a journalist since 1970, when he became editor of his college newspaper. His first professional newspaper job began in December 1972 in Houma, La. Except for an 18-month period when he helped a couple of friends start a monthly trade magazine in New Orleans, he has worked in newspapers all of his professional life.
He doesn’t count the year he was a part-time disc jockey as work.
He has been an SPJ member since March 1979, joining in hopes of starting a chapter in the rural area he covered for the daily paper in Baton Rouge, La. Baton Rouge had an active press club but no SPJ chapter. He was president of the press club in 1988-89 and received the local PRSA chapter’s “Communicator of the Year” award in 1988.
After moving to Memphis in 1989, he joined the Mid-South Pro SPJ Chapter. He became chapter president in 1992 and remained president throughout most of the 1990s. He also served as secretary-treasurer and chairman of the chapter’s contest committee in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
Albarado became SPJ Region 12 director at the 2006 convention. As regional director, he also became co-director with Region 3’s director of the annual Green Eyeshade Awards program, which recognizes excellence among journalists in 11 southeastern states.
President's Blog
President-Elect
David Cuillier
Assistant Professor
Department of Journalism
University of Arizona
Marshall Building, Room 323
Tucson, Ariz. 85721-0158
Work: 520/626-9694
Fax: 520/621-7557
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
David Cuillier, Ph.D., is director and associate professor at the University of Arizona School of Journalism, where he teaches computer-assisted reporting, public affairs reporting and access to public records. He was a government reporter and editor at daily newspapers for a dozen years in the Pacific Northwest, was the Society of Professional Journalists Freedom of Information Committee chairman for four years, and has been an SPJ newsroom trainer since 2005. He and Charles Davis co-authored The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records” and the blog www.theartofaccess.com.
Secretary-Treasurer
Dana Neuts
Freelance Journalist
P.O. Box 6231
Kent, Wash. 98064
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
After a career in financial services, Dana (Blozis) Neuts began freelancing in 2003. Based in Kent, Washington, Dana is a freelance writer and editor as well as the owner and publisher of iLoveKent.net and iLoveCovington.com, hyperlocal blogs. Her work has appeared in many Seattle-area publications as well as national publications including GSN: Government Security News, HS Today and American Profile. She is past-president of the award-winning Western Washington Pro Chapter of SPJ, serves as the Region 10 Director of SPJ, is a member of the membership committee, and chairman of the freelance committee. She previously served on the SDX foundation board and has been a facilitator for Scripps. For more information, please visit VirtuallyYourz.com. Specialties: Business Writing and Editing, Features, Humor, Small Business, Nonprofits, Finance, Insurance, Travel, and Marketing Consulting and Implementation including Social Media.
Immediate Past President
John Ensslin
Reporter
The Bergen Record
973-513-5632
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
John Ensslin is a reporter at The Record in northern New Jersey, where he covers Bergen County government.
Born in Jersey City, N.J, he started in daily journalism at his hometown paper, The Hudson Dispatch. He went on to work for The Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Co. and The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Co.
He is a graduate of Columbia University.
He is a past president of The Denver Press Club and a member of its Hall of Fame. He helped start the club's annual Damon Runyon Award. Before becoming SPJ president in September 2011, he served as president of the Colorado Pro SPJ chapter, national membership committee chair, Region 9 director and secretary-treasurer. He also served as co-chair of the SPJ national convention and was named regional director of the year in 2010. He is a past winner of the William Burleigh/Scripps Foundation Community Service award.
He and his wife Denise live in West Milford, N.J.
Vice President, Campus Chapter Affairs
Neil Alan Ralston
Western Kentucky University
1906 College Heights Blvd #11070
Bowling Green, Ky. 42101-1070
(270) 745-5841
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
Neil Ralston serves as vice president for campus chapter affairs, a position he was elected to in 2007 and re-elected to in 2009 and 2011. He began serving on the SPJ Board of Directors in 2003 when he was elected as a campus adviser at-large. Ralston is an assistant professor of journalism at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Ky. Before joining the faculty at WKU in 2006, he was an associate professor of journalism at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches (NAK-uh-tish), La., where he advised the student SPJ chapter. He also has taught at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo. Ralston began a career in journalism in 1978 and has worked as an editor, reporter and photographer at weekly and daily newspapers in Missouri, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas. His most recent full-time reporting job was in 1985-89 when he worked for the San Antonio (Texas) Light where he covered city hall, the police, federal law enforcement agencies and the federal courthouse.
Ralston has bachelor's degrees in communication and industrial technology from Northeast Missouri State University and a master's degree in journalism from The Ohio State University where he was a fellow in the Kiplinger Program of Public Affairs Reporting. He earned a doctorate from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2002. Additionally, Ralston was named SPJ's campus chapter adviser of the year for the 1998-99 school year.
Directors At-Large
Bill McCloskey
4709 Overbrook Road
Bethesda, Md. 20816
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
Bill McCloskey, currently at large director of the Society of Professional Journalists is also a member of the Executive Committee, Bylaws Committee and the Finance Committee. He is the retired Washington, D.C.-based Director of Media Relations for AT&T, formerly BellSouth Corp.
In 2008 he was awarded the Wells Key, SPJ's highest honor for a volunteer.
Before joining BellSouth in 1987, Bill worked for 11 years with The Associated Press in Washington.
Bill's professional career started in 1961, when, as a high school junior, he took a summer newsroom job at Metromedia's WIP Radio in Philadelphia. He remained with Metromedia in Philadelphia until he was drafted into the Army upon graduation from Villanova University in 1966.
Ironically, the Army assigned him to the information office of the 1st Signal Brigade in Vietnam where he wrote press releases about the Army's telephone system.
Following his tour of duty, he was assigned by Metromedia to set up a news department for WASH FM in Washington. From 1968 until 1975, he worked as news director, network correspondent and TV news producer and writer for Metromedia in Washington.
He is past president of the D.C. Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and was the Society’s Region 2 director. He has been recognized three times with SPJ’s “President’s Award” for distinguished service to the Society.
Carl Corry
Online Local News Editor, Newsday
New York, N.Y.
E-mail
Twitter
Bio (click to expand)
Carl Corry is the online editor for local news at Newsday and an at-large director of the Society of Professional Journalists.
His experience spans the print, TV and online worlds.
Before Newsday, where he started in 2010, he was executive producer of News 12 Interactive, running the Web and interactive TV operations of the seven News 12 cable stations. He also launched and ran a hyperlocal initiative covering towns on Long Island and New Jersey called News 12 My Town.
He was previously editor of Long Island Business News and an Internet reporter for Marketwatch.com. He was also a community news and business reporter.
In between, he was an Internet reporter for Marketwatch.com, and has freelanced for numerous publications, including the New York Post.
In 2012, Corry was elected an at-large director for SPJ, and previously served as an SPJ Chapter Doctor, co-chair of the 2012 SPJ Region 1 Spring Conference, SPJ Region 1 Director (2006 Regional Director of the Year) and president of the Press Club of Long Island, leading the club from 2002-2005.
He is currently on the board of the Martin Buskin Committee for Campus Journalism at Stony Brook University, and a member of the Energeia Partnership, a regional stewardship group.
He is a graduate of Stony Brook University.
Campus Advisers At-Large
George Daniels
The University of Alabama
Associate Professor
P.O. Box 870172
Tuscaloosa, Ala. 35487
(205) 348-8618
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
Now in his second term as a campus adviser at-large on the SPJ National Board, George L. Daniels is a former chair of the SPJ Journalism Education Committee. As a graduate student, Daniels participated in the University of Georgia’s SPJ Campus Chapter.
But, his first experience with SPJ came when he received a scholarship from the Washington DC Chapter of what was then Sigma Delta Chi (SDX) in the early 1990s. Daniels was a 2006 SPJ Diversity Leadership Fellow and 2007 Scripps Institute Fellow.
Daniels is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama’s College of Communication and Information Sciences. He joined the UA faculty in 2003 after completing his master's and Ph.D. degrees at The University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Before moving into the academic arena, Daniels worked as a news producer at WTVR-TV in Richmond, Va., WLWT-TV in Cincinnati, Ohio and WXIA-TV in Atlanta. He is a cum laude graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC.
Kym Fox
Texas State University
601 University Dr.
San Marcos, TX 78666
(512) 245-3484
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
Kym Fox joined SPJ while an undergrad at Arizona State University in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. She has been president of the San Antonio Pro Chapter and is currently the co-adviser to the Texas State University student chapter. Fox spent the first 20 something years of her career as a reporter and editor, first at the Mesa Tribune, a 40,000 daily in a suburb of Phoenix, and then 18 years at the San Antonio Express-News. She was the deputy metro editor when she left the Express-News to take to the classroom at Texas State. Most of her career, she spent covering courts and legal affairs, thus her affinity for Freedom of Information projects. Over the years she has covered everything from high school sports to George H.W Bush signing NAFTA. She has interviewed the Queen of England and Michael Jackson, though not at the same time. Along with her B.S. in journalism, she earned an M.A. in communications from the University of the Incarnate Word while an editor at the Express-News. At Texas State she is a senior lecturer and coordinator of the journalism sequence. She teaches a variety of writing classes as well as multimedia journalism. Her take on the future of journalism: “Newspapers are NOT dying. They are evolving.” Find her on Twitter @kymfox.
Region 2 Director
Brian Eckert
University of Richmond
Director of Media and Public Relations
28 Westhampton Way
Richmond, Va. 23173
(804) 287-6659
E-mail
Region 3 Director
Michael Koretzky
954-292-7515
E-mail
Region 4 Director
Patricia Gallagher Newberry
Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of Special Events and Internships
Journalism Program
Miami University
513-529-5893
E-mail
Region 5 Director
Susan S. Stevens
Freelance Journalist
E-mail
Region 6 Director
Amanda Theisen
KSTP-TV
News Producer
3415 University Ave.
St. Paul, Minn. 55114
(651) 642-4532
E-mail
Region 7 Director
David Sheets
Freelance editor, media consultant
E-mail
Twitter
Bio (click to expand)
David Sheets is a former newspaper journalist in St. Louis with more than 25 years' worth of experience at daily publications in Missouri, Illinois, Florida and Nevada. He is immediate past-president and board member of the St. Louis Pro Chapter.
Region 8 Director
Eddye Gallagher
Director Student Publications
Assistant Professor
Tarrant County College
828 Harwood Road
Hurst, Texas 76054
817-515-6307
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
Eddye is a member of the Fort Worth Pro Chapter, where she has served in various offices including two terms as president. She co-chaired the 2012 Region 8 conference and does everything from planning programs and arranging speakers to putting up directional signs and cleaning tables. She is also a member of the national programming committee.
Her full-time job is director of student publications, assistant professor of journalism and adviser of The Collegian, a weekly newspaper serving the five campuses of Tarrant County College. She serves as a contributing editor for Teaching English in the Two-Year College as well as doing occasional freelance editing for other publications and writers. She worked in public relations at Texas Christian University before attending graduate school. Never intending to teach, she fell into the job as a one-year temporary position and discovered she loved helping students develop into better writers and has been doing so for more than 40 years. (She claims she was 5 when she started.) She has received several teaching awards, such as being named one of JournalismDegree.org’s 2012 Top 50 Journalism Professors in the nation, but considers her students’ achievements, including several Mark of Excellence awards, her greatest honors. Her former students are in various fields using their journalistic skills.
She holds a bachelor of arts in English from Texas Wesleyan University and a Master of Arts in journalism from the University of North Texas.
Region 9 Director
Donald Meyers
Salt Lake Tribune
90 S 400 W # 700
Salt Lake City, Utah 84101
(801) 448-6106
E-mail
Bio (click to expand)
Donald W. Meyers has been at a reporter at The Salt Lake Tribune since July 2007. Prior to that, he was the editorial page editor of the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah for more than eight years, as well as having been a reporter at daily and weekly newspapers in Utah and New Jersey. He majored in Communications:Print Journalism at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey and Brigham Young University. He was elected as Region 9 director in 2010. He is a past-president of the Utah Headliners Chapter, Society of Professional Journalists and is a member of the Utah Foundation for Open Government. He has won numerous awards from the Utah-Idaho-Spokane Associated Press Association, the Utah Headliners Chapter of SPJ and the Utah Press Association. He is also the recipient of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's regional Environmental Excellence Award for his coverage of air-quality issues.
Region 10 Director
Ian Marquand
Executive Officer, Montana Board of Medical Examiners
Helena, Mont.
E-mail
Region 11 Director
Teri Carnicelli
Editor
North Central News
602-410-1267
E-mail
Region 12 Director
Tony Hernandez
Reporter
Northwest Arkansas Times
479-571-6439
E-mail
SPJ News
Mary S. Kenney
Meg Wagner
