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About the Society
SPJ Leadership
Board of Directors
For descriptions of SPJ Board positions, please consult SPJ's
bylaws.
President
J. Alex Tarquinio
Freelance Journalist
Email
@alextarquinio
Bio (click to expand)
J. Alex Tarquinio is the national president of the Society of Professional Journalists. She also serves as a board member of the SDX Foundation.
Tarquinio has two decades of experience as a writer and editor. She has written about business and politics in the United States, Europe and Asia. Most recently, she covered the negotiations leading up to the first summit between the United States and North Korea in articles for Politico Magazine and the New York Post. Previously, she worked at Dow Jones as a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money Magazine. Her editing stints included Time Inc., the Real Deal magazine and Forbes.com. She received a German Marshall Fund fellowship for a reporting residency in the divided island nation of Cyprus. As a freelance writer, her byline has appeared in The New York Times (which published nearly 200 of her articles), The International Herald Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Barron’s and Reader’s Digest, among others.
A graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she speaks French. She lives in New York City with her husband, Frank.
President-Elect
Patricia Gallagher Newberry
Area Director
Journalism Program
Miami University
513-529-5893
Mobile: 513-702-4065
Email
@pattinewberry
Secretary-Treasurer
Matthew T. Hall
Editorial and Opinion Director
The San Diego Union-Tribune
619-293-1335
Email
@sduncovered
Bio (click to expand)
Matthew T. Hall is the editorial and opinion director at The San Diego Union-Tribune, where he has worked since 2001. He manages the Ideas and Opinion section, writing and editing editorials, and overseeing a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoon, op-ed commentary, letters to the editor and an innovative blog and podcast called “The Conversation," which shares the news of the day in dynamic digital ways. He has been a national board member of the Society of Professional Journalists since 2014 and is also a board member and past president of the San Diego chapter of SPJ. He has been named blogger, feature writer, critic and social media personality of the year by San Diego SPJ and blogger and columnist of the year by the San Diego Press Club. He has won San Diego SPJ’s Herbert Lockwood “Woody” Award for humor writing and the San Diego Press Club’s Jim Reiman Award for outstanding media management. He is married to a fellow journalist, and they have two precocious daughters. He’s probably on Twitter right now at @SDuncovered, where he’ll gladly answer your tweet.
Vice President, Campus Chapter Affairs
Sue Kopen Katcef
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
University of Maryland
301-405-7526
@umnewsie
Email
Bio (click to expand)
Sue Kopen Katcef is an award winning reporter who's currently the Broadcast Bureau Director for the Capital News Service operated by the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Sue has been a member of SPJ since 1974 (when it was still Sigma Delta Chi) while a student at the University of Maryland. She is a past president of the Maryland Pro Chapter and a former long-time board member of the Washington, D.C. Pro Chapter. She has previously served on the SPJ national board as a campus adviser at-large and is currently SPJ's National Vice President of Campus Chapter Affairs. Sue has served on SPJ's Awards & Honors Committee for a number of years. As chair of the committee, Sue led the panel in what is now an on-going review of both the MOE and SDX awards to try and contemporize both contests. Sue has submitted MOE entries (on behalf of her students) as well as judged and coordinated (regionally) the Mark of Excellence contest and served as a judge for many years of the Sigma Delta Chi contest.
Campus Adviser At-Large
Jeff South
Virginia Commonwealth University
Email
@jcsouth
Yvette Walker
Email
@ywalker
Ivette Davila-Richards
Freelance regional assignment editor
Fox News Channel
Email
@IDRichards
Bio (click to expand)
Ivette Davila-Richards currently works as a freelance regional assignment editor for Fox News in New York. She spent ten years as an associate producer at CBS News in New York.
Ivette was one of our Diversity Fellows at the EIJ conference in Baltimore this past fall, and has since joined the national Diversity committee. She is also a board member of The Deadline Club, our professional chapter in New York City.
Ivette previously served in leadership roles at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) for eight years—two years as President of the association’s New York chapter, and six years on the national board, serving as both the NAHJ Regional Director in the Northeast and as the Vice President for Broadcast. She also serves on the programming committee of the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC) in New York, where she co-produces professional development events.
Victor Hernandez
Email
@tothevictor
Bio (click to expand)
Victor Hernandez brings more than two decades of professional experience from leading-edge newsrooms, journalism education programs, and technology startups. He recently served as the Director of Media Innovation at Banjo, a fast-growth technology startup specializing in event detection used every day by global newsrooms.
Prior to Banjo, he spent a dozen years at CNN, working extensively within the organization’s editorial leadership and product technology areas. He served as the company’s ‘News Futurist,’ charged with shaping new media strategies, and as CNN’s Director of National Coverage, where he oversaw the network’s domestic news gathering operations, including the management of the strategic responses to breaking news and in-depth coverage. Prior to CNN, he worked at local NBC broadcast newsrooms in California, where he is originally from.
He completed an academic fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute at Missouri School of Journalism in 2016 focusing on wearable technologies and newsrooms, was named to the Society of Professional Journalist’s 20 Journalists/Industry Thinkers You Should Know list, 50 People in Media You Should Subscribe to on Facebook from Huffington Post, and the Poynter Institute’s 35 most influential people in social media.
As a longtime SPJ member of the Society of Professional Journalists, he has served in many leadership roles. He was a member of the 2017 task force examining potential changes to the national governing board, a lead advisor to the student news project at the Excellence in Journalism conference (EIJ) from 2013 to 2016, and a judge for the SDX digital video and audio awards. He has given back to journalism as a trainer at SPJ regional and national conferences over the past decade. Victor currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and their toddler son Maddux.
Region 2 Director
Andy Schotz
@spjregion2
Email
Region 2 Blog
Region 2 Facebook page
Bio (click to expand)
Andy Schotz was a city editor for The Frederick News-Post in Frederick, Md., for about 19 months until he was laid off on April 17, 2017.
He has been an SPJ member since 2002 and has held various positions on the Washington, D.C., Pro chapter board, including three consecutive one-year terms as president.
He served on the SPJ Ethics Committee from 2004 to 2011, including three years as chairman.
Schotz ran unsuccessfully for at-large director on the national SPJ board in 2012. The following year, he ran unopposed for Region 2 director.
He is a frequent SPJ contest judge (D.C. Pro Dateline Awards, SDX, Mark of Excellence, Green Eyeshade, high school essay) and has twice coordinated Region 2's Mark of Excellence contest.
He joined the SPJ Awards & Honors Committee in 2013 and helped work on a national survey seeking feedback about the MOE contest. He is currently the committee's chairman.
Before joining The Frederick News-Post in 2015, he was an editor at The Gazette, a chain of weekly papers, in Montgomery County, Md. He was there for almost 2 1/2 years before The Gazette folded in June 2015.
Schotz worked for eight years as a reporter and editor at The Altamont Enterprise, a weekly paper in upstate New York, then 13 years as a reporter for The Herald-Mail, a daily paper in Hagerstown, Md.
He is on the board of directors of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors.
Region 10 Director
Donald W. Meyers
Reporter/multimedia journalist
Yakima Herald-Republic
@donaldwmeyers
Email
Region 10 Blog
Bio (click to expand)
Donald W. Meyers is a reporter/multimedia journalist with the Yakima Herald-Republic in Yakima, Wash. He previously worked for The Salt Lake Tribune, Daily Herald (Provo, Utah), and newspapers in New Jersey. He also served as a regional director in Region 9 from 2010 to 2014. He is a member of the SPJ William O. Douglas Chapter, SPJ’s national Freedom of Information Committee, and is a past president of the Utah Headliners Chapter.
Region 12 Director
Kelly Kissel
Metro Editor
The Advocate
Email
@kisselAP
Regional Coordinators
Please note: Regional Coordinators no longer serve on SPJ's Board of Directors. For more information about this change, consult SPJ's bylaws.
SPJ News
Lauren Bartlett
Mike Reilley
Tess Fox
Michael Savino
Society of Professional Journalists
