Board of Directors

Global Influencer and Publisher.

Award-winning journalist Sarah Toce was honored with the 2017 Community Builder Award by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. In June, she was recognized as one of the most powerful journalists of 2017 by Curve magazine. She was also the recipient of the distinguished 2016 LGBT Leadership Award from the Washington Diversity Council.

In 2014, she was named one of GO Magazine’s Red Hot Entrepreneurs. In 2012, the McCormick Foundation named Sarah one of their New Media Women Entrepreneurs for her work developing and publishing Seattle’s daily LGBT online newspaper – The Seattle Lesbian. In its first year alone, The Seattle Lesbian reached a threshold of one million readers on a global scale.

Toce currently serves on the boards of the Society of Professional Journalists – Washington Chapter, GALECA -The LGBTQ Entertainment Critics Association, and is a founding member of Seattle Women’s Pride and Burien Pride.

Follow her on Twitter or be left behind @sarahtoce.

Ashley Stewart is technology and finance reporter for the Puget Sound Business Journal. Previously, Ashley covered the Oregon statehouse for Northwest News Network, a collaboration of NPR-affiliate stations in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. She has covered the Washington State Legislature for KUOW, TVW – Washington’s public affairs network – and The Seattle Times.

Stewart last year graduated from the University of Washington, where she helped launch the student SPJ chapter. She’s been on the SPJ Wash board since then and previously served as treasurer. Find her on Twitter: @ashannstew.

Daniel Person’s journalism career has more or less followed Interstate 90 to Seattle. His first job out of college was at Big Horn County News in Hardin, Montana. From there, he moved to Bozeman, where he was a reporter and later city editor at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

Person did a short stint as a deputy city editor at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane before joining Seattle Weekly as the managing web editor in 2012. After a spell of freelancing, he returned to the Weekly in 2015, where he now serves as news editor. In 2015 he co-wrote a book, 26 Songs in 30 Days, about Woody Guthrie’s time in the Pacific Northwest.

In his spare time he volunteers for Creative Colloquy, a South Sound literary group, and enjoys writing fiction and drinking beer, sometimes at the same time.

Erika Schultz works as a staff photographer for The Seattle Times and as part-time faculty at The University of Washington.

In 2017, Pictures of the Year International awarded Schultz an award of excellence for Newspaper Photographer of the Year. Her video work with Corinne Chin won second place for Individual Multimedia Portfolio in NPPA’s 2017 Best of Photojournalism Awards, as well as an honorable mention for Cliff Edom’s “New America Award.”

Schultz’s work has been recognized by the Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism, National Edward R. Murrow Awards, The Alexia Foundation, Society of Professional Journalists, and was a finalist for the 2010 and 2013 ASNE Community Service Photojournalism award. She also was part of The Seattle Times’ 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning team for Breaking News Reporting. She also is a co-founder of NW Photojournalism.

Karen Ducey is a documentary photographer and writer and founder of Animal News Northwest, SPC an independent news site reporting on animal protection issues. Her photography, rooted in social justice and environmental issue reporting, has been published in The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, NationalGeographic.com, Marketplace radio, the New York Times, Crosscut and many others.

Ducey was a staff photographer at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Indianapolis Star and the Puget Sound Business Journal for over ten years. Two stories she produced on her independent news site helped influence bills in the 2016 Washington state legislative sessions. In 2011 she directed a documentary short film that was screened at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Her work has been honored by ASNE Community Service Photojournalism (finalist), DART coverage of Trauma (finalist), Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism (finalist), Society of Professional Journalists, the News Photographers Press Association Best of Photojournalism, and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2011 she was a Knight Digital Media Center, News Entrepreneur boot camp fellow and in 2017 she was a Darrell Barton Foundation scholar at the NPPA news video workshop. She also serves as past-president on the board of Blue Earth Alliance, a Seattle-based organization supporting the work of documentary photographers and filmmakers worldwide. Twitter: @karenducey

Susannah Frame is the Chief Investigative Reporter at KING 5. Her stories have exposed many wrongs, including government waste, real estate fraud, homeland security breaches, civil rights violations of the disabled, and the mismanagement of nuclear waste. Frame’s investigations have led to changes in public policy, congressional and Dept. of Justice investigations, federal indictments and created new state laws.

Frame is on the Board of Directors for the Society of Professional Journalists, Western Washington Chapter, and is a frequent lecturer for groups such as the Society of Professional Journalists, the Washington State Bar Association, Rotary, and the University of Washington Department of Communication.

Frame has also won many journalism and civic awards for reporting in the public interest.

Kaitlin Gillespie is the education reporter for The Columbian, where she reports on K-12 schools as well as area colleges.

In her role, she’s uncovered elevated radon levels and structurally unsound roofs at school campuses, dived into complex state data to report on the challenges low-income children face from their first day of kindergarten, and offered an intimate portrait of families recovering from the suicides of their children.

Prior to that, she was the education reporter with the Redding Record-Searchlight in Redding, Calif., where her work on kindergarten readiness was recognized with a statewide first place Better Newspapers Contest award.

She also helped launch Washington News Nerds, a data training workshop for women and gender non-binary journalists.

In her spare time, Kaitlin enjoys exploring Vancouver and Portland’s restaurants, hiking in the Columbia River Gorge and taking photos of her cat.

Matt Mill McKnight is staff visual journalist at Crosscut.com and KCTS 9, where he finds himself covering the news of our city as it is happening. He previously worked as a freelance photographer in the region for various news organizations. During that time, he was also a photo editor & content producer at MSN News & Bing’s editorial apps.

In 2015, McKnight was awarded the inaugural SPJ WW Passion Projects grant for his work covering Big Oil in the American West, after traveling on numerous occasions to follow life along the proposed route for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Mike Rosenberg has been a reporter for The Seattle Times for the past two years. He covers the city’s explosive housing market and development scene as part of the paper’s business team. He chronicles how the once-sleepy city has transformed into one of the most expensive places in the country.

Before that, he spent a decade reporting in the San Francisco Bay Area, including six years at the San Jose Mercury News covering a wide array of Silicon Valley stories, from the region’s transit systems to the new 49ers stadium to a break-in at the late Steve Jobs’ house.

He spends a lot of time pouring through spreadsheets to find data that can illustrate how our world is changing. Outside of work, he’s often hanging out with his wife and their two cats, Pot and Kettle, or trying out one of the new breweries near their Seattle apartment.

Follow him on twitter @ByRosenberg

Taylor Mirfendereski is a special projects reporter at KING 5 in Seattle, focusing on digital storytelling. She uses video, photos, text, graphics, and emerging digital tools to produce multimedia stories that take a deep dive into complex issues – from the nationwide heroin crisis to the sex trafficking of American women and children.

Prior to moving to the West Coast, Mirfendereski was a digital reporter at WCPO in Cincinnati, where she covered public safety and justice. In 2014, she embedded with the U.S. military in Afghanistan to produce a special report about the military medical teams who treat the country’s most severely wounded soldiers.

Mirfendereski is a longtime SPJ member, who served two terms on the group’s National Board of Directors. She also led the SPJ Digital community and was the president of Ohio University’s SPJ chapter.

Vernal Coleman is a reporter at the Seattle Times, but got his start about 10 years ago as a writing fellow at the Seattle Weekly. He worked at the Seattle Weekly and several other alternative newsweeklies before making the jump to daily newspapers in 2013, when he took a job covering cops, crime and city politics in Newark for the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

In 2016, he joined the Seattle Times, where he was one of two reporters assigned to Project Homeless, a grant-funded team tasked with examining the region’s homelessness crisis and the local efforts to address it.