Board of directors

JAWS board members and executive director (third from right) at JAWS CAMP 2022 in Lakeway, Texas. Not shown: board members Linda Jue, Sonya Ross, Alison Bethel and Angela Greiling Keane

2023 board of director meetings: Jan. 11, Jan. 26, Feb. 27, March 27, April 24, May 30, June 26, July 24, Aug. 28, Sept. 18, Oct. 30, Nov. 27, Dec. 18

Jennifer Kho
President

Jennifer Kho is the president of JAWS and was named in June 2022 as executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. She also serves as a senior adviser for Canary Media; an adviser for Bay City News Foundation and The Pivot Fund; and – as an independent researcher – co-authored a Membership Puzzle Project report on building healthy news communities.

Her previous leadership roles include the senior director of strategic innovation at HuffPost, where she led the development of new audience engagement, storytelling and revenue models, including membership; managing editor for HuffPost; managing editor for the Guardian US; interim managing editor for GreenBiz; and founding editor of Greentech Media. She also was VP of journalism and information equity at DoGoodery, a sustainability consultancy.

Angela Greiling Keane
President Elect

Angela Greiling Keane is new director for Bloomberg Government, where she leads a team that covers congressional policy and politics. She joined Bloomberg Government in 2022 after nearly six years at POLITICO. She was most recently POLITICO’s managing editor for states, running policy and politics coverage for regional-based teams and federal policy verticals. She has been a JAWS member since 2003.

Greiling Keane was the 2013 National Press Club president, where she focused on domestic press freedom and government transparency and elevating women in the news business. She served two years as president of the non-profit National Press Club Journalism Institute and is an alumna of the Journalism and Women Symposium board.

Greiling Keane spent nearly a decade at Bloomberg News, as a White House correspondent during the Obama administration and reporter covering auto and railroad policy and freight transportation companies. Prior to that, she was an associate editor at Traffic World magazine and a Washington correspondent for the Small Newspaper Group. She grew up in the Twin Cities and graduated from the University of Missouri. She lives in Washington with her husband and daughter.

 

Sonya Ross
Deputy Vice President

Sonya Ross  is managing editor of Inside Climate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
newsroom devoted to climate change, and founder of Black Women Unmuted, a
media start-up that reports under-told stories about Black women in the U.S.
Sonya took on these twin endeavors after a 33-year career at The Associated
Press. She became The AP’s first Black woman White House reporter in 1995 and,
in 1999, the first Black woman elected to the board of the White House
Correspondents Association. During the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Sonya
was the print pool reporter aboard Air Force One with President George W. Bush
as he was evacuated to safety, also an historic first in media. Beyond reporting
roles, Sonya was an editor for AP on international affairs, national security, and
domestic regional coverage. In 2010, she established specialty race & ethnicity coverage for AP that transformed the approach to gathering news for and about people of color.
In 2018, Sonya was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists Hall of
Fame. She was the founding chair of the political reporting task force for the
National Association of Black Journalists and is currently vice-chair of the board of
the Journalism & Women’s Symposium, and secretary of the SPJ Foundation
Board. Sonya also serves on the board of the Washington Press Club Foundation,
and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

Joanna Hernandez
treasurer

Joanna Hernandez is a Journalism Department lecturer and director of Inclusion and Diversity at the University Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Hernandez’s 20-plus year journalism career included stints at The Washington Post; the New York Times Regional Media Group; the Newark, New Jersey, Star-Ledger; the San Francisco Examiner; and Newsday. Hernandez has an associate’s degree in word processing from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a bachelor’s degree in journalism from New York University, and a Master of Public Administration from Baruch College. She is a lifetime member of NAHJ and belongs to other journalism organizations, including JAWS, of course. Hernandez is a Maynard 200 mentor and is a certified trainer in Crucial Conversations.

Tanya Gazdik, JAWS board member

Tanya Gazdik
Secretary

Tanya Gazdik writes about marketing for MediaPost.com, and is the editor of Marketing: Automotive Weekly. She isthe lead programmer and emcee of MediaPost’s automotive marketing conferences at the New York and Los Angeles auto shows. Gazdik is president of the board of directors for Michigan State’s independent voice, The State News. Prior to MediaPost, she was at The (Toledo) Blade, Adweek, WardsAuto and The Associated Press. Gazdik has a JD and BA in journalism from Michigan State University.

Alison Bethel
Director

Alison Bethel is Founding Editor-in-Chief of State Affairs, a digital media company with reporters covering state houses across the country with an emphasis on how issues and policies impact everyday citizens. Bethel (formerly Alison Bethel McKenzie) was previously Vice President of Corps Excellence at Report for America (RFA).  Before joining RFA, she was Executive Director of the Society of Professional Journalists and Executive Director of the Vienna-based International Press Institute. An award winning journalist, she has served in senior management positions at The Detroit News, The Boston Globe, the Nassau (Bahamas) Guardian, the Poughkeepsie Journal and Legal Times. She has served as a visiting journalism professor at the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media in Bangalore and at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. 

Cirien Saadeh
Director

Cirien Saadeh has managed a team of primarily women (cis & trans) at The UpTake (a community journalism organization and community journalism school), as Executive Director, a position “I took after serving on their Board. As an organizational leader I have had the opportunity to support the professional and community development of women journalists, as well as these women journalists’ capacity for leadership.”

I want to serve on the JAWS Board, because I want to support the development of women journalists and specifically women journalists from historically-marginalized communities and I want to grow my own leadership in this field simultaneously.

Linda Jue
Director

Linda Jue is editor-at-large for the investigative site 100Reporters and a DEI program consultant for the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. She is also a contracted reporting and writing coach for the Fund for Investigative Journalism as well as a contributing editor for palabra. (sic), NAHJ’s news site. Linda was founding director and editor of the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, which mentored journalists of color, women and youth in public interest and investigative reporting. Linda has been at the forefront of nonprofit and independent journalism for the past 20 years, working on innovative journalism and media projects to strengthen the diversity and integrity of the field.

Suzanne Cosgrove
Director

Suzanne Cosgrove is a journalist, adjunct professor and communications professional who is a content management consultant in Wolters Kluwer’s law and regulations group. Previously, she served as deputy managing editor at John Lothian News. Formerly, she was director of corporate communications at Cboe Global Markets. Before joining Cboe, she was a freelance editor, financial writer and educator. She also was a contributing writer for Market News International.
She was an adjunct professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University for 10 years and also taught journalism at DePaul University.
Cosgrove worked as a financial editor at the Chicago Tribune from 2000 through 2009. Also previously, she served as Market News International’s Chicago bureau chief, was a reporter for Reuters, and covered the Chicago futures markets, banking and economics for Knight-Ridder Financial News.
She was JAWS first mid-career fellow in 2014.
She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Medill and a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University/Mundelein College.

Jill Cornfield
Director

Jill Cornfield is deputy editor for Money.com. A graduate of Hunter College and a former National Press Foundation fellow in retirement and aging, she was previously senior editor (personal finance and insurance) at Investopedia. Prior to that she was lead reporter for CNBC’s Invest In You channel. She’s been featured in national media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, NBC News and the Huffington Post. She joined JAWS in 2015. She lives with her family in New York City.

Amanda J. Crawford
Director

Amanda J. Crawford is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut and a former reporter for Bloomberg News, The Arizona Republic and The Baltimore Sun. She previously served on the journalism faculties of Western Kentucky University and Arizona State University and was a long-time board member of the Best of the West Journalism competition.

Crawford’s work has been published by a range of other news outlets and literary journals including People, Businessweek, Ms. Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Geographic, Phoenix Magazine, High Times, and Creative Nonfiction. Amanda teaches journalism law, ethics, press history and other classes at UConn, with an academic focus on the role of journalists in democracy. She was a 2020-21 fellow with the UConn Humanities Institute and is working on her first book about mass shooting denial and the fight against misinformation.

Amanda is also a singer, songwriter and flutist who performs nationally with A Former Friend. Amanda was the first person in her family to attend college, graduating with honors from the University of Maryland and earning her masters from ASU.

Gwyneth Doland
Director

Gwyneth Doland has been a working journalist since 1999. She divides her time between journalism and teaching courses in newswriting, media ethics and at the University of New Mexico. She has been a staff writer and editor at newspapers, magazines and online outlets, and have worked as a reporter for public radio and public television. Doland started her career as a food writer but has spent the last decade covering government accountability. She is a past executive director of our state freedom of information group. And she was one of the writers of the Center for Public Integrity’s 50-state corruption risk index, which was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Barbara Selvin
Director

Barbara Selvin, M.S., is an associate professor of journalism at Stony Brook University, where she is an award-winning teacher. In addition to teaching reporting at all levels, the major’s capstone course, and a course on the economics of the news media in the digital age, Barbara is the School of Journalism’s faculty governance lead and director of internships and careers.

Before becoming an educator, Barbara was a reporter on New York Newsday’s business desk, writing about economic development, real estate, housing and health-care reform. At Newsday, she proposed and pioneered the company’s first part-time work schedule for newsroom employees, a legacy that outlasted her tenure at the paper. Her freelance work has been published on Poynter.org and in The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Nieman Reports, and her scholarly work in Grassroots Editor and Literary Journalism Studies. She is a member of JAWS, IRE, the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors and the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies.

Barbara lives in Port Washington, N.Y. with her husband, Craig Werle. The couple has three adult children and two grandchildren. Her interests include novels, gardening, travel, yoga, beaches and birdwatching.

Nadine Arroyo Rodriguez
Director

Nadine Arroyo Rodriguez, better known as NAR, is an Emmy-nominated journalist and a Telly Award winner. NAR is residential faculty and director of the Mesa Community College Journalism and New Media Studies program in Mesa, Arizona. She teaches journalism, mass communication and humanities, and is advisor of the Mesa Legend student newspaper and podcast, and Phi Theta Kappa honor society.

NAR has more than two decades of experience in the industry and comes from a lengthy background in communications. She has worked for NPR member station KJZZ 91.5FM where she traveled to the U.S.-Mexico and the Mexico-Guatemala borders covering immigration, migration and cross border business. Her most in-depth reporting has been in education and immigration.

NAR is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago with a B.A. in Journalism and a minor in broadcasting, has a Master in Education from Northern Arizona University and completing a degree in Media, Film and Pop Culture Studies from Arizona State University.

NAR was born in Puerto Rico to Puerto Rican and Belgian parents, and raised on Chicago’s southside in La Villita (a predominantly Mexican community). She has been involved in television production and journalism since attending Marie Curie High School, one of the performing arts schools of the Chicago Public Schools. NAR is bilingual, biliterate and multicultural.

 

Board of Directors

Election of JAWS officers and new board members takes place at our annual Conference and Mentoring Project (CAMP).

Eligibility for the JAWS board: Any active member who has attended CAMP twice can run for a seat on the board. Officers and board members serve one- or two-year terms. All are elected by a vote of the membership.

Job description for the board: The primary responsibility of the board of directors is to ensure that the organization operates in a fashion true to its stated mission and principles. The board provides continuity to the organization as individual members come and go.

The board is entrusted with two duties: the group’s growth and future, and to further the group’s goals. It is responsible for setting policies, making decisions, delegating work and ensuring the decisions are carried out. The board is legally responsible for governance of the organization and adherence to federal, state and local laws, audits done annually and income tax form filing.

A director’s responsibilities include:

  • Maintain a current membership in JAWS and attend the annual conference.
  • Know the bylaws, mission, purpose, goals, strategic plan, programs and services for the organization.
  • Raise funds and actively seek financial support and donations for JAWS and its projects; The goal is for each board member to give or get $500.
  • Prepare for and attend all board meetings. The board holds regular in-person meetings in spring and in fall. The date of the spring meeting is determined by the president in consultation with other board members. The fall meeting is held immediately preceding JAWS CAMP, at the same location. In addition, the board convenes every other month via conference call. The president and committee chairs will schedule additional meetings as needed.
  • Build and guide long-range plans for membership, programming, fundraising, staffing and resources.
  • Ensure programs and services address membership needs.
  • Recruit members and attendees for annual conferences, contribute program ideas and encourage member engagement.
  • Contribute and/or solicit stories for the JAWS newsletter, listserv, social media accounts and website.
  • Review the minutes to ensure that critical matters, resolutions and topics of discussion have been adequately covered.
  • Be willing to commit at least several hours per week of volunteer time to areas such as membership, social media, programming, fundraising and CAMP.