News

04 Aug Say hello to the 2014-2015 SPJ Western Washington Board

In June, our chapter members cast their votes in our annual board elections. This month, we’re proud to introduce the members of the 2014-2015 Western Washington Pro Chapter Board!

Six of us are returning members. Five are new. Among us are two photojournalists, two radio broadcasters, a Web editor, a columnist, two magazine editors, two news reporters and a UW journalism professor.

Get to know us! We’re happy to hear ideas, share insights and welcome you into the process of building a great year of great programs for all local storytellers. Oh – and you can follow us all on Twitter with this handy board Twitter list.

The new board will meet for the first time at our annual retreat Aug. 23. Stay tuned for more in September!

Monica Guzman — President

Monica is a Sunday columnist for The Seattle Times and a weekly columnist for GeekWire, covering issues in digital life. She was a juror for the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes, serves on the National Advisory Board for the Poynter Institute and contributed the closing chapter, “Community As an End,” to the 2013 Poynter book “The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the 21st Century.” From 2007 to 2010, Monica launched and ran the innovative Big Blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and seattlepi.com, complementing news and culture coverage with weekly reader meetups. From 2010 to 2012 she developed user communities for Seattle startups like Intersect, Trover and Glympse before kicking off her Times column. A member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers community, Monica emcees the popular quarterly community speaker series Ignite Seattle and is assisting the American Press Institute with a newsroom innovation project. Have ideas for the chapter or feedback on local programs? Reach her on Twitter, Facebook and via email.

Athima Chansanchai – Vice President

Currently a news reporter writing blog posts and stories for the Microsoft News Center, Athima Chansanchai was most recently a technical writer for Office for Mac at Microsoft. Prior to that, she was a daily contributor to msnbc.com‘s Tech-Sci blogs for nearly two years, writing about consumer tech and editing posts on all the section’s blogs and wire content. She did so as founder/President of Tima Media, after almost 10 years as a reporter at the Seattle P-I and The Baltimore Sun. She’s also been a columnist for msnbc.com: “DigiGirl” and worked at The Village Voice. Tima began her career in journalism more than 15 years ago at Florida Trend magazine, before receiving a master’s degree in Communications/Journalism at Stanford University. In addition to serving as Treasurer of the SPJ Western Washington chapter board last year, she has also served as National Secretary for the Asian American Journalists Association in 2011 (after serving nearly a decade as a national board member and chapter officer), and is also a member of the Online News Association. Follow her on Twitter: @TimaMedia.

Ethan Chung – Past President

Ethan is deputy editor at 425 and South Sound magazines and is a staff writer for 425 Business, a new monthly business publication serving the 425 area code. In his daily work for the magazines, he helps create editorial budgets, manages freelance writers and photographers, assigns features and photo shoots and oversees all web content. He also writes features about food, travel and health and occasionally shoots photography for both publications.

Jillian Raftery – Secretary

Jillian Raftery is assignment editor at KIRO Radio. She has previously been an anchor, producer and editor for KIRO, and worked as social media captain for the Dori Monson Show. In between KIRO postings she contributed to dozens of Seattle-area stations as a traffic anchor for Clear Channel’s Total Traffic and Weather Network. She is a proud Claremont McKenna College graduate

Berit Anderson – Board Member

Berit Anderson is editor at Crosscut.com, a Seattle-based online news organization dedicated to the creation of a thriving and livable Northwest. Read by 140,000 Northwest leaders and residents each month, Crosscut analyzes political, business and cultural news and trends and identifies solutions to local problems in these areas. A 2009 graduate of Occidental College, Berit was formerly community manager of the Tribune Company’s Seattle blogging network. Her work has also appeared in YES! Magazine and on the Huffington Post, GeekWire and Q13Fox.com. She occasionally contributes news segments to KBCS 91.3 radio. She formerly served as Communications Director at Strategic News Service, a weekly newsletter that predicts global trends in tech and economics, and Future in Review, Strategic News Service’s annual conference that brings leaders in those fields together to identify and solve global problems. Berit relies on hiking, adventure, poetry, and international travel to feed her muse and temper all of that computer time, and she frequently succumbs to her nurturing instincts, feeding her plant collection and her cat, Scout.

Andrea Brown – Board Member

Andrea Brown is a features reporter for The Daily Herald in Everett and has been a journalist for three decades in three states. From 2003 to 2010 she was a reporter and metro columnist at the Colorado Springs Gazette, after 14 years reporting for The Evansville Press in Indiana. She likes to write about everyday life and the characters in it. Her biggest career award was for a story about a married couple sharing the same toaster for 50 years. As for Andrea, she met her husband at a state mental hospital (where they both worked) and they’ve gone through at least five toasters. She has four children. Only one was reckless enough to get into journalism. Follow her on Twitter: @reporterbrown.

Caley Cook – Board Member

Caley Cook teaches journalism in the University of Washington Department of Communication and has over a decade of experience as a reporter and editor. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Diego CityBeat, Orlando Weekly, San Diego Union-Tribune, VIBE magazine, CBS Sports and others. Cook won the 2013 Nevada Press Association Outstanding Journalist of the Year award as well as their 2013 Freedom of the Press Award for work investigating law enforcement corruption. She led an investigative team at the Elko Daily Free Press that took home the NPA award for investigative work for a series on DUI. She received the 2001 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists Award for her coverage of Sept. 11, a 2011 Demmler Award for journalism education innovation, and the 2007 USC Annenberg Award for Outstanding Print Journalism. Cook has an M.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California Annenberg School. She served as a research fellow at USC Annenberg and at University of Colorado-Boulder. Cook is also a member of the Online News Association, Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Center for Investigative Reporting. She has contributed to multiple books, including “Journalism of Ideas” (2013, Routledge) and is a regular speaker at writing and journalism conferences across the country.

Lauren Foster – Board Member

Lauren Foster is the assistant editor for 425 magazine and South Sound magazine. She writes about everything from farming to education. She recently won SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi Award for public service reporting for her features on the state of family homelessness in Pierce County. She also covers all the fashion news for 425 magazine and produces and styles its fashion photo shoots. She’s interviewed Sarah Jessica Parker, Steve Madden and Diane von Furstenberg and writes the fashion column It List. She especially enjoys profiling people who seem simple from the outside but are full of inspiring stories that no one has bothered to tell; the quiet heroes in communities who may not be seeking the limelight but deserve it.

Sara Lerner – Board Member

Sara is a reporter and news anchor at KUOW Public Radio in Seattle. As anchor, Sara ably handles fast breaking news events, like the recent Oso landslide and the 2012 Café Racer shooting. In her eight years with KUOW, she’s covered a wide range of topics both locally and nationally: from the Dalai Lama’s Seattle visit to the ups and downs of the real estate market. Meanwhile, she continues to cover human trafficking, her area of expertise. She was awarded a KUOW Program Venture Fund grant in 2009 which supported her four-part documentary on the topic. She continues to produce original reporting on the issue, as in her March piece on a new state bill that allows human trafficking victims to clear their records. Sara won a national award from Public Radio News Director Incorporated in 2008 for her story on a move to all mail-in ballots in Washington. She says her motivation as a journalist is to continue asking questions and telling stories, truthfully.

Erika Schultz – Board Member

Erika Schultz was raised in Fremont County, Wyoming and attended college at Northern Arizona University and Syracuse University London. She loves the American West, well told tales, Spanglish and to travel. As a staff photographer for The Seattle Times, Erika tells stories about the Pacific Northwest through photography, video and social media. She believes in the power of visual storytelling, and believes support of the craft is vital as the media landscape changes and evolves. Also a strong believer in community, Erika helped found NW Photojournalism. The group, comprised of professionals and students, meets once a month to provide support and foster inspiration for visual journalism. Erika’s work as a photojournalist has been recognized by the Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism, Pictures of the Year International, National Edward R. Murrow Awards, The Alexia Foundation, Society of Professional Journalists and was a finalist for the 2010 ASNE Community Service Photojournalism award. She also was part of The Seattle Times’ 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning team for Breaking News Reporting.

Joshua Trujillo – Board Member

Joshua Trujillo is a visual journalist for seattlepi.com. He looks for light, moment, expression, composition, irony and truth in the viewfinder of his camera. Trujillo worked at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper from 2003 until the presses stopped in 2009. In recent years his job has been redefined in dramatic ways as he uses an assortment of online tools to convey information to readers, has embraced the use of social media, often writes and reports his own stories, and even broke news of a major local economic story in 2009. He has created a network of sources, both human and digital, that help him stay aware of news and events happening in the Seattle metro area. Trujillo is a visual storyteller who embraces the craft of traditional photojournalism, but if a story can be told more effectively or immediately via another method he is not shy about trying it. He advocates for photographers to not only use technology and gadgets to convey their stories, but to also become strong writers. Prior to working at the P-I, he was in the Hearst Fellowship Program where he worked at the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News, the P-I and did a tour for Hearst Newspapers covering the war in Afghanistan in 2001.Trujillo also teaches photography, and can often be found guest lecturing in area colleges and high schools. Josh is a co-founder of Northwest Photojournalism, a group that supports photojournalists in our corner of the country. He helps organize the group’s monthly meet ups that feature guest speakers, portfolio critiques, and other events to support photojournalists: www.facebook.com/nwphotojournalism