Hall of Presidents

Jane P. Marshall was the first, and longest-serving, JAWS president. She believes in good food, good friends, good times, statement earrings and strong verbs. She’s been a reporter and editor at five daily newspapers in Texas and Colorado, is author of a children’s book and a food history book, which was named a Notable Book by the State of Kansas. She taught food writing and food history at Kansas State University before retiring to her farm in the Kansas Flint Hills.

1990 and 1991 CAMPS at Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Glenda Holste followed Jane Marshall as JAWS president. This was a fool’s errand but worked because of a smart, powerful board and member engagement. Glenda learned to lead JAWS as she was taking on editing leadership at The St. Paul Pioneer Press. JAWS mentorship shaped both roles. She is a graduate of The Missouri School of Journalism, cradle of JAWS and its home during formative years. The diverse 1992 CAMP still feeds her soul. Glenda is a JAWS Legacy Fund trustee.

1992 CAMP at Sojourner Inn in Teton Village, Wyoming

Gina Setser has worked in both print journalism and launched some of the first-ever online media offerings. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer in national news, an ONA finalist and won 1st and 2nd for online in Best of the West. And JAWS? Two days before her CAMP in Montana, the keynote speaker cancelled. The amazing women of JAWS turned this lemon into lemonade: Feminist author and mystery writer Carolyn Heilbrun stepped into the breach and knocked it out of the park.

1993 CAMP at Grouse Mountain Lodge in Whitefish, Montana

Gayle Reaves-King is grateful to have had a 40-plus years career that she has loved, that has brought her fulfillment, adventure, independence, the friendship of wonderful colleagues, and a passionate belief in the importance of journalism and journalists. A native Texan, she won a Pulitzer for her part in writing about violence toward women around the world, and advanced the truth that we are not the ones who are crazy. She’s proud to have known great women and helped young women journalists.

1994 CAMP at Jackson Lake Lodge in Moran, Wyoming

Betty Ann Williams helped put JAWS on its foundational footing before she became president, while she was an editor at USA Today in Washington. She was also a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard, spent many years at The Associated Press, and was an editor at The Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York. She was the founding director of Black College Wire and was political editor at The Gazette Newspapers in Maryland before moving to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies as director of communications.

1995 CAMP at Grouse Mountain Lodge in Whitefish, Montana

Julia Kagan’s term as president started in Napa Valley, the first CAMP that wasn’t in the mountains. She has spent most of her career in print, including at Consumer Reports, Working Woman (where she edited Peggy Simpson’s Washington column and Peggy introduced her to JAWS), Psychology Today, Fitness, Back Stage, Zagat and Ladies’ Home Journal. She is now personal finance editor at the website Investopedia. She has won a National Magazine Award, Gerald Loeb Award and Front Page Award.

1996 CAMP at Napa Valley Marriott in Napa, California

Rachel Jones started her journalism career hustling through the streets of Clearwater, Florida, covering rallies and car crashes and Seminole Town Hall meetings for the St. Petersburg Times. Now, she’s hustling through the streets of Washington, D.C., covering America’s struggles with a pandemic and a profound racial reckoning for National Geographic. The incredible jolt of mentoring and role modeling she received from the women of JAWS has helped her with the staying power to keep on kicking it in this game.

1997 CAMP at 320 Guest Ranch in Bozeman, Montana

Inevitably, a certain blue dress, an intern named Monica and Kenneth Starr’s late-breaking 453-page report against President Clinton turned the elegant lodge in Wyoming into a roving newsroom. The New York Times’s Betsy Wade engineered an overnight delivery of hundreds of papers with the first extensive coverage. Joy Cook is a Texas transplant, career-long union leader, and retiree after 15 year stints as a newswriter/producer at NBC/WNBC, and previously at the New York Post under Dorothy Schiff and Rupert Murdoch.

1998 CAMP at Jackson Lake Lodge in Moran, Wyoming

Margaret Wolf Freivogel has always depended on JAWS to be an island of sanity in the crazy journalism world. She was founding editor of The St. Louis Beacon, a nonprofit regional news organization; when it merged with St. Louis Public Radio, she was editor of the combined newsroom until she retired. She spent 34 years at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a reporter, Washington correspondent and assistant managing editor. She was on the founding boards of JAWS and of the The Institute for Nonprofit News.

1999 CAMP at Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah

Pat Sullivan has been at The Washington Post for 19 years, now as a local government and politics reporter. She’s been a local technology editor, liaison between the newsroom and technology teams, and an obit writer. She was one of the first bloggers on tech news at The San Jose Mercury News, where she moved after a dozen years as a reporter in Missoula, Montana. She also spent a dream year as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford in the early 1990s.

2000 CAMP at Port Ludlow Resort in Port Ludlow, Washington

Cheryl Imelda Hampton has the dubious distinction of being president the one year CAMP was canceled, because of 9/11. Now an editing, recruiting and management consultant, she started her journalism career as an editorial assistant at The Syracuse Herald-Journal, later becoming a reporter and editor before moving into managing newsroom operations and production as an assistant managing editor. She later moved to The Orange County Register, where she learned about JAWS, attending her first CAMP in 1994.

2001 CAMP canceled because of 9/ll

Jodi Enda became president of JAWS in 2001, when CAMP was canceled because of September 11, and oversaw three subsequent CAMPs. She is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and was editor in chief of ThinkProgress. Previously, she was assistant managing editor at CNN, where she produced the 2016 campaign book “Unprecedented: The Election That Changed Everything.” She covered the White House, Congress and presidential campaigns for Knight Ridder, and was a national correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

2002 CAMP at Grouse Mountain Lodge in Whitefish, Montana

Susy Schultz is executive director of the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. Her past titles include president of the Community Media Workshop at Columbia College Chicago, managing editor, digital editor, investigative reporter, associate publisher, reporter, columnist and editorial writer. At the midyear retreat at the Medill School of Journalism in her presidential year, young women told us they needed mentorship, diversity, inclusion and to be heard. CAMP was the first international gathering, in Alberta, Canada. The unflappable Katherine Lanpher delightfully interviewed our keynote, author Margaret Atwood, who answered many of the questions via an impromptu hand puppet.

2003 CAMP at Kananaskis Resort in Kananaskas, Alberta, Canada

Amy Bernstein is the editor of Harvard Business Review. She began her journalism career right out of college as a researcher at CBS News in New York, where she spent eight fascinating years. From there she moved to U.S. News & World Report, where she grew up as a reporter and editor. She has held senior editorial roles at a series of business magazines. Her favorite JAWS camp was her first, at Big Sky in the mid-1990s, where she had a blast making new friends and went fishing for the first time.

2004 CAMP at The Resort on the Mountain in Mount Hood, Oregon

Rosemary Armao is back from overseas in upstate New York these days, helping her mother, who wants to hit 100 still living at home. Armao first went abroad as a journalism trainer/editor the same year she became JAWS president, meaning our organization was long-distance teleconferencing before Zoom was a thing. Over a long career she reported, ran an NGO, edited, taught college and broadcast opinion on radio. She pushed young women she encountered everywhere, in the U.S., Africa, Middle East, and Eastern Europe, to also try it all.

2005 CAMP at Poco Diablo Resort in Sedona, Arizona

Pam Moreland organized the 25th anniversary CAMP, in Snowbird, Utah, a natural job given all her leadership roles. Trained as a journalist, she earned a BS. J and a MS.J from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. She was a reporter or editor at the Marin Independent Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News and the San Jose Mercury News. Now, she is editor of Stanford for You, a monthly email newsletter published by University Communications’ News Service.

2006 CAMP at Sun Valley Lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho

Julie Dunlap was JAWS’ “cheesehead president,” overseeing the first CAMP to convene beyond the Rockies and a few other Western states, meeting in Door County, Wisconsin. The year before, she had wrapped up a 35-year career, mostly as an editor with The Associated Press in New York but also including stints with The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia; The Oregonian in Portland; The New York Times; and The Record in Hackensack, N.J., to turn her life upside down. She moved to Santa Fe and started designing gardens for other newcomers whose knowledge of the wild climate, imposing altitude and miserable soil was only slightly less than mine. She still misses the pace and immediacy and comradeship of all those newsrooms and the scores of colleagues who remain friends today, many in JAWS.

2007 CAMP at Stone Harbor Resort in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Dawn Garcia credits JAWS with giving her a big boost of confidence to take on leadership roles in journalism, and give her amazing friends for life! She is director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, where she coaches journalists from around the world to become innovative leaders and change agents. She was a reporter and editor at West Coast newspapers for almost 20 years. She led JAWS’ Blueprint for the Future, a five-year strategic plan to get JAWS ready for the future.

2008 CAMP at Attitash Ski & Summer Resort, Bartlett, New Hampshire, and 2009 CAMP at Snowbird Ski Resort in Snowbird, Utah

Ever since her first CAMP in 1998 as a fellow, Megan Kamerick has relied on JAWS for support, guidance and laughs. JAWS inspired her TED talk on women and media. As a print journalist, she worked in San Antonio, New Orleans and Albuquerque. She now hosts “All Things Considered” at KUNM-FM in Albuquerque and is a correspondent for New Mexico PBS. She was a fellow with the Solutions Journalism Network and has freelanced for National Public Radio, Latino USA, Marketplace and “The Bottom Line” podcast.

2010 CAMP at Tapatio Springs Resort in Boerne, Texas, and 2011 at Crowne Plaza Resort in Asheville, North Carolina

In addition to being president, Katherine Ann Rowlands has worked to shore up JAWS’ development strategies, seeking donors and grants to keep us going. After decades as a journalist in the Bay Area, in 2018 she bought Bay City News, a regional wire service covering the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area (where she worked as a college intern three decades ago), and founded the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation to support public service journalism. The work is published at LocalNewsMatters.org.

2012 CAMP at Tamaya Resort & Spa in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, and 2013 CAMP at The Essex in Essex Junction, Vermont

Back in her early 20s, Lauren Whaley was a wilderness expedition guide, which included taking five incredible 18-year-old women on a 45-day canoe trip in the Canadian Arctic, perfect training for being JAWS president. She’s the project manager at Crosstown LA at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism, overseeing the organization’s Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge. She is also a health care reporter and photographer specializing in maternal health and mental illness.

2014 CAMP at La Quinta Resort in La Quinta, California

Linda Kramer Jenning stepped in as JAWS president after the longtime executive director had resigned and members were fractured by her departure. It also was time to plan the JAWS 30th anniversary CAMP. Her presidency focused on rebuilding and reuniting the membership, stabilizing staffing, sorting out and stabilizing financial accounts and overall trying to establish a solid foundation for JAWS moving forward with an emphasis on diversity and mentoring.

2015 CAMP at Grouse Mountain Lodge in Whitefish, Montana

Sandra Fish is a data journalist in Colorado specializing in politics. She works with the Colorado News Collaborative, Colorado Sun and others in the state, as well as doing some editing for OpenSecrets and teaching data journalism at University of Colorado Boulder.

2016 CAMP at Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center in Roanoke, Virginia, and 2017 CAMP at The Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa in Hot Springs, Arkansas

Yumi Wilson is a tenured professor in the Department of Broadcast and Electronic Communications at San Francisco State University and an occasional lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She is author of “The Social Media Journalist Handbook” and co-author of “Writing and Reporting the News for the 21st Century.” A former news reporter and editor for newspapers and The AP in California, she received a Fulbright grant and a Knight-Wallace fellowship. For three years, she was a corporate communications manager at Linkedin, teaching hundreds of people around the world how to build their brand.

2018 CAMP at Mt. Hood Oregon Resort in Welches, Oregon

City girl, Southern roots. Mira Lowe is assistant dean for student experiences at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications and directs the Innovation News Center, training the next generation of news leaders. She’s been senior editor at CNN Digital; editor-in-chief of JET magazine; and associate editor at Newsday in New York. When she thinks of JAWS, particularly her term, the word is “resilience.” Despite personal and professional challenges, the women of this organization don’t give up on themselves or one another.

2019 CAMP at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia, and 2020 CAMP online (COVID-19 made in-person CAMP untenable)