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About the Society
Board of Directors
For descriptions of SPJ Board positions, please consult SPJ's
bylaws.
President
Rebecca Baker
Managing Editor
Bloomberg Law
Email
@RBakerNY
Facebook
Bio (click to expand)
Rebecca Baker is managing editor of the New York Law Journal, the largest-circulation legal daily newspaper in the country. She has been a reporter for The (Bergen) Record in New Jersey, The Journal News in Westchester County, New York, and the New Haven Register in Connecticut.
She is a member of SPJ's national board as Region 1 Director, overseeing all student and professional SPJ chapters in the Northeast. She is on the advisory council of The Deadline Club in New York City, where she also served as president, awards contest chairwoman and events chairwoman.
President's Blog
President-Elect
J. Alex Tarquinio
Freelance Journalist
Email
@alextarquinio
Bio (click to expand)
J. Alex Tarquinio is the incoming president of the Society of Professional Journalists. She will take office at the society’s annual convention in Baltimore in Sept. 2018. She also serves as a member of the SDX Foundation board, of SPJ’s Legal Defense Fund committee and of the programming committee for the 2018 Excellence in Journalism conference.
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.
Secretary-Treasurer
Patricia Gallagher Newberry
Area Director
Journalism Program
Miami University
513-529-5893
Email
Immediate Past President
Lynn Walsh
Project Manager
Trusting News Project
E-mail
@LWalsh
Bio (click to expand)
Lynn Walsh is an Emmy award-winning journalist who has been working in investigative journalism at the national level as well as locally in California, Ohio, Texas and Florida. Currently she leads the KNSD investigative team at the NBC TV station in San Diego, California, where she is the Investigative Executive Producer.
Most recently, she was working as data producer and investigative reporter for the E.W. Scripps National Desk producing stories for the 30+ Scripps news organizations across the country. Before moving to the national desk, she worked as the Investigative Producer at WPTV, NewsChannel 5, the Scripps owned TV station in West Palm Beach, Florida. She has won state and local awards as well as multiple Emmy’s for her stories. She loves holding the powerful accountable and spends more time than she would like fighting for access to public information.
Her passion lies in telling multimedia stories that deliver hard hitting facts across multiple platforms. She describes herself as a "data-viz nerd" who is obsessed with new online tools to share information on the web and mobile applications.
She is a contributor to the Radio Television Digital News Association blog and serves as Secretary-Treasurer for SPJ and is a member of SPJ’s FOI, Generation J and Ethics committees.
Lynn is always interested in new projects surrounding FOI, public information access, mobile reporting tools, social media and interactive journalism. She is a proud Bobcat Alumna and graduated from the Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.
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 Advisers
At-Large
Leticia Lee Steffen
Department chairwoman/professor
Colorado State University-Pueblo
Email
@letstef
Jeff South
Virginia Commonwealth University
Email
@jcsouth
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 4 Director
Tom McKee
Email
Region 4 Blog
Bio (click to expand)
Tom McKee has been a reporter, producer and assignment manager with WCPO-TV, Cincinnati's ABC affiliate, for 38 years. He was elected vice president of the Greater Cincinnati SPJ Pro Chapter in 2011 and took over as president in 2013. The chapter was named small chapter of the year in 2014, 2016 and 2017, also winning top honors for campus relations in 2014 and 2017.
Region 5 Director
Michele Day
Student Media Adviser/Lecturer
Northern Kentucky University
Email
Region 5 Blog
Region 8 Director
Eddye Gallagher
Director Student Publications
Assistant Professor
Tarrant County College
828 Harwood Road
Hurst, Texas 76054
817-515-6307
Email
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 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 11 Director
Matthew T. Hall
Editorial and Opinion Director
The San Diego Union-Tribune
619-293-1335
Email
@sduncovered
Facebook
Region 11 Blog
Bio (click to expand)
Matthew T. Hall has worked at The San Diego Union-Tribune since 2001. He manages the Ideas and Opinion section, writing and editing editorials, and overseeing op-ed commentary, letters to the editor and a blog called “The Conversation,” which uses social media and the internet to report the news of the day in immersive, dynamic and often funny ways. He previously managed the newsroom’s social media, compiled its Essential California newsletter and created and wrote “The Conversation.” Before that, he was a metro columnist who wrote four columns a week and a reporter who covered San Diego neighborhoods, city politics, the Chargers’ stadium search, the Padres’ TV fiasco and east and north San Diego County. He has been named blogger, feature writer and critic of the year by the San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and blogger and columnist of the year by the San Diego Press Club. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire and has worked at other newspapers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and California. He is a Red Sox fan, past president of the San Diego chapter of SPJ, a proud winner of its Herbert Lockwood “Woody” Award for humor writing and western region director for the national board of SPJ. He is married to a fellow journalist, and they have two daughters. He’s probably on Twitter right now at @SDuncovered, where he’ll gladly answer your tweet.
Region 12 Director
Kelly Kissel
News editor
The Associated Press
Email
@kisselAP
Society of Professional Journalists
SPJ News
Directors At-Large
Rachel Wedding McClelland
Rahim Chagani
Hayley Harding
