Advisory Board

Dean Baquet

Dean Baquet leads the local investigative Times fellowship. He served as executive editor of The New York Times from May 2014 until June 2022. Mr. Baquet served in the highest ranked position in The Times’s newsroom and oversaw The New York Times news report in all its various forms. Before becoming executive editor, he served as The Times' managing editor, Washington bureau chief, national editor, deputy metro editor, special projects editor and metro reporter. In between two lengthy stints with The Times, Mr. Baquet served for several years with The Los Angeles Times as editor and managing editor. Before joining The Times in 1990, he reported for The Chicago Tribune for nearly six years and The Times-Picayune in New Orleans for nearly seven. While at the Tribune, Mr. Baquet served as associate metro editor for investigations and chief investigative reporter, covering corruption in politics and the garbage-hauling industry. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1988 for leading a team of three in documenting corruption in the Chicago City Council, and was a Pulitzer finalist in investigative reporting in 1994. Mr. Baquet received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University.

John Battelle

Editor in chief and CEO of NewCo Platform, Mr. Battelle is also chair of Sovrn Holdings Inc.; a director of Acxiom Inc., a NYSE‐listed company, and a director at Chute Inc. Best known for his work creating media properties, Mr. Battelle founded Federated Media Publishing in 2005 and served as CEO and chair until the company was acquired in 2014. In addition, he was co‐founder, executive producer and program chair of the Web 2.0 Summit, author of the international bestseller "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture," founder and CEO of Standard Media International--publisher of The Industry Standard--and a co‐founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures. He holds a bachelor's degree in anthropology and a master of journalism degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Robert Bishop

Bob Bishop is the former editor and publisher of Gold Mining Stock Report, a financial newsletter focused on early stage natural resource companies. Published from 1983 to 2007, Gold Mining Stock Report was best known for its early advocacy of what became the Canadian diamond industry, and for a boots-on-the-ground approach that took its editor to more than 50 countries. A longtime supporter of U.C. Berkeley’s Journalism School, for many years Bob funded Mark Felt Scholarships at the Investigative Reporting Program, in addition to supporting the J-School’s narrative writing and photography programs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley.

Chris Boskin

Chris Boskin is a highly respected veteran of magazine publishing, with a career that has included publishing and marketing positions with Worth Media, The New Yorker Magazine, Hearst Corporation, East West Network, and Knapp Communications. She is currently a consultant to several media and tech companies. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Boskin holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Art History and English and also studied at the Academia in Florence, Italy.

David Corvo

David Corvo has worked at NBC News for more than 20 years as a producer and executive. In his current role as senior executive producer for Primetime News, he produces the newsmagazine Dateline NBC and other series and news specials. Mr. Corvo previously was an executive at CBS News and was executive producer of several programs, including CBS This Morning, which he created. He began his career in local broadcast news in Oakland and Los Angeles, and also produced the newsmagazine Front Page for the Fox TV network in Los Angeles. He holds an undergraduate degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and was Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Californian.

Simone Coxe

Simone Coxe is engaged with quality, fact-based reporting, journalism sustainability and innovation. She is the co-founder and director at CalMatters, director at Internews, and served on the KQED board for over a decade. Her business background is in high-technology public relations. She is an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College and UC Berkeley.

Angela Filo

Angela Filo leads the Yellow Chair Foundation, a family foundation established in 2000 that gives grants in education, civil liberties, public interest journalism, gender equity and the environment. As a photojournalist, Ms. Filo has created extensive projects examining how economic cycles transform the landscape. Her photographs of Silicon Valley and Bangalore, India, are in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and have been exhibited there and in other museums, galleries and public installations. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Stanford University and on the Stanford Graduate School of Education advisory board. She is co-chair of the American Civil Liberties Union's national Centennial Campaign. Ms. Filo formerly taught journalism and photography at Eastside College Preparatory School, in East Palo Alto, Calif., and was a member of the board of directors of the Student Press Law Center, in Washington, D.C. She earned her undergraduate degree in human biology from Stanford in 1993 and her master of journalism degree from UC Berkeley in 1999.

Richard Gingras

Richard Gingras is vice president of news at Google, where he guides Google's strategies relating to the media ecosystem and oversees many of its news- and media-related products. Mr. Gingras is a key instigator of the recently-announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, an effort to make Web content instantaneous and in doing so, preserve the vitality, utility, and openness of the Worldwide Web. He also is co-founder of the Trust Project, a global effort within the journalism community to ensure that high-quality journalism is recognized for the credibility it deserves. Mr. Gingras has been involved in digital media since 1980--or as he once put it, "since the days of steam-powered modems." He helped found Salon.com, where he once worked with Pulitzer-winner Glenn Greenwald, and has worked at Apple, the @Home Network, and the Excite portal, among other digital ventures. He serves on the boards of the First Amendment Coalition, the International Center for Journalists, and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. He is a graduate of Boston College.

Kathy Im

Kathy oversees the Foundation’s Journalism and Media program, which supports the foremost institutions of public service journalism, documentary storytelling, and participatory civic media. During her tenure, MacArthur has contributed to numerous impactful and award-winning investigative reports and documentary films. She also led the Journalism and Media program work to center racial equity and dramatically increase the number of grants awarded to organizations led by and serving communities of color. In the Fall of 2014, Kathy took a sabbatical from the Foundation to be a Visiting Fellow at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, where she explored the intersection of interactive documentaries and digital journalism and laid the groundwork for new collaborations between interactive media makers and major news organizations. Prior to joining the Foundation, Kathy worked at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Bank of America Foundation. Kathy is a member of the Peabody Award Board of Jurors, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Harris Council at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and the Advisory Board of UC Berkeley School of Journalism. In 2021, President Biden nominated Kathy to serve on the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Previously, she was a Board member of Media Impact Funders and the Center for Asian American Media, and Board Chair of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. In 2007, Kathy was named a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow, which recognizes Chicago’s civic leaders. Kathy earned her bachelor's degree in government from Smith College and her master's in public policy degree from the Harris School at the University of Chicago.

Tamara Keith

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. In that time, she has chronicled the final years of the Obama administration, covered Hillary Clinton's failed bid for president from start to finish and threw herself into documenting the Trump administration, from policy made by tweet to the president's COVID diagnosis and January 6th. In the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden administration, she focused her reporting on the White House response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her reporting often highlights small observations that tell a larger story about the president and the changing presidency. Previously Keith covered congress for NPR with an emphasis on House Republicans, the budget, taxes and the fiscal fights that dominated at the time. Keith earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She serves on advisory boards for the University of California Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and the UC Berkeley J-School.

Zainab Khan

Zainab Khan is a multimedia journalist and an audience strategy editor at The New York Times. She previously worked at AJ+ as a social content editor. Her work at AJ+ focuses on YouTube strategy and publishing. She is founder of Mozzified, Muslim Pop Culture and Mozzified Studios. Ms. Kahn has written for several American-Muslim publications including The Islamic Monthly, Patheos AltMuslim, and AltMuslimah. She received her BA in history and Middle Eastern Studies from Wesleyan and her master of journalism from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, where her concentration was New Media.

Deborah Kirshman

Deborah Kirshman is retired Assistant Director and Director of Development at the University of California Press where she worked for 25 years. Deborah also served as art history editor, acquiring over 200 titles from authors in the U.S. and abroad. Upon retirement, Deborah formed a consulting firm specializing in fundraising, publications, and nonprofit program development and evaluation. She currently serves as Chair of the Helzel Family Foundation. Deborah holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in art history from the University of Michigan.

Gary E. Knell

Gary Knell has four decades of experience in leading some of the world’s most iconic organizations at the intersection of media, education and social impact. He has served as President and CEO of National Geographic, NPR and Sesame Workshop where he led transformational changes for the purpose of achieving their important missions, inspiring global audiences through the power of storytelling. Today, Gary serves as a Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in its Media and Social Impact practice. He is a sought after board member and counselor to several nonprofit and for profit organizations including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where he chairs the Nominating and Governance Committee, the US Global Leadership Coalition, the Economic Club of Washington and WAMU (public radio in DC). Knell has a B.A. in political science from UCLA, where he was editorial director of the UCLA Daily Bruin and a stringer for the Associated Press. He has a J.D. from Loyola University of Los Angeles.

Jonathan Logan

Jonathan Logan is a member of the advisory board of the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley. He is the Founder and CEO of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports investigative journalism, documentary film, arts & culture and democracy. The Foundation’s impactful investigative journalism grantees include the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ProPublica, FRONTLINE, the Marshall Project and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The Foundation proudly supports and has helped catalyze the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting at Temple University, the Black Press Archives digitization project at Howard University and the Logan Nonfiction Program, which empowers multimedia creators of long-form nonfiction. The Foundation has also launched innovative media centers at both the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. A long-time resident of Berkeley, California, Jon is also on the boards of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Center for Investigative Reporting. 

Richard Logan

Richard Logan is dedicated to making a difference through innovative approaches in both the nonprofit and commercial worlds. In addition to his 25 years as a founding executive with a UK-based Mac software company, Mr. Logan has been a hands-on funder/participant in projects across a wide range of disciplines worldwide. His efforts range from language and archival preservation to bettering outcomes for the underserved, to advancing independent media of all kinds--radio, film, print and more. Mr. Logan brings healthy skepticism and sharp business acumen to his philanthropic efforts. As president of The Reva and David Logan Foundation he works to increase the efficacy of the Foundation's many grant recipients, evaluating grantee enterprises to discover new synergies, and leveraging the pursuits of seemingly disparate partners. Based in Chicago, The Reva and David Logan Foundation is a substantial program contributor to the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, as well as investing heavily in investigative journalism in the US and Europe--sponsoring training, scholarship, community, production, and promotion of original investigative work. The Foundation also supports major projects in social justice and the arts and outstanding scholarship in multiple fields, both in urban Chicago and around the world.

Carrie Lozano

Carrie Lozano joined the Sundance Institute in 2020 as the director of the Documentary Film Program, where she works to elevate and support nonfiction filmmakers worldwide at all stages of creating and distributing new cinematic work. Lozano is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, and former lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She joined the Institute from the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Documentary Fund, where she co-founded and oversaw the program, which supported dozens of filmmakers through robust partnerships with an emphasis on journalistic rigor, diversity, and inclusion. Prior to the IDA, Lozano led the Bay Area Video Coalition’s National MediaMaker Fellowship, and was an executive and senior producer at Al Jazeera America. Films that she has directed or produced have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and serves on several boards including the Graduate School of Journalism’s and PBS Frontline’s Advisory Boards and Kartemquin Films.

Mark Luckie

Mark S. Luckie is a digital strategist, former journalist, and author of “The Digital Journalist's Handbook,” “DO U.” and the novel “Valley Girls.” Mark currently serves as the director of digital strategy of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He has led media partnerships for some of the influential social platforms in the world, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Mark has also led digital initiatives for the Washington Post, the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Los Angeles Times, and Entertainment Weekly. Mark is a GLAAD Media Award nominee, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a part of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist team for Local Reporting. He was named by The Root as one of the most influential African-Americans of 2013 and 2014. Mark is a graduate of Bethune-Cookman University and the University of California, Berkeley where he received his master's degree in journalism.

Minette Nelson

Minette Nelson is the founder of the Filmmaker Fund. For 15 years Ms. Nelson honed her production skills creating commercials for national and multinational clients. The results of that work were profiled in Advertising Age and New York Magazine. She then turned her expertise to the nonprofit sector both as a marketing consultant and producer, and has served on the boards of several organizations. In 2012, shortly after forming a documentary film fund with philanthropist David Eckles, she approached director Marc Silver with the story that eventually became "3 ½ Minutes." It was chosen to premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

Ron Nixon

Ron Nixon leads global investigations at The Associated Press. Nixon, in his role at the AP, has overseen investigations that have won major journalism awards: News and Documentary Emmy, IRE, Worth Bingham, Selden Ring and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He also led an investigation that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2021, Nixon received the News Leader of the Year award from the News Leaders Association. Nixon is also co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a news trade organization increasing the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of color. Nixon is a Marine Corps infantry veteran who saw combat in the 1990 Persian Gulf War and was part of the Marine Corps security forces battalion, the security and counterterrorism unit. He attended Alabama State University, majoring in music.

Shana Penn

Shana is Executive Director of Taube Philanthropies and a scholar-in-residence at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies, in Berkeley. Her award-winning book, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (University of Michigan Press, 2005) was published in Polish in 2014 as Sekret Solidarnosci (W.A.B. Publishers). She has a Master’s degree in European Studies from Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Other books include Gender Politics and Everyday Life in Central and Eastern Europe, co-edited with Jill Massino (Palgrave USA 2009) and chapters in Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women Writers edited by Wendy Martin (Beacon Press 1996), and the Routledge Handbook of Women in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2020).

Stephen Silberstein

Stephen M. Silberstein served as the first president of Innovative Interfaces Inc., the world's leading supplier of computer software for the automation of college and city libraries. Innovative's software is used by libraries in almost every state of the U.S. and in 40 other countries. Mr. Silberstein sold his interest in the company in 2001 and now devotes his time to philanthropic and civic matters. Before founding Innovative, Mr. Silberstein worked in the administration of the University of California, Berkeley, where he also taught in the Computer Science Department. He is a life member of the American Library Association and serves on the boards of Belvedere-Tiburon Library Foundation, The University of California Berkeley Foundation, and the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. Mr. Silberstein is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a B.A. in economics and a master's degree in library science. He also earned a master's degree in econometrics from the University of Stockholm, Sweden.

Jo Anne Wallace

Jo Anne Wallace is a journalist and public media consultant who currently works with NPR, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and several local public radio stations. In 2018, she retired from KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, having served as vice president and general manager for almost 30 years. At KQED, Wallace spearheaded development of one of the most-listened-to public radio news and information stations in the nation. While there, she was elected to three terms as a member of the NPR Board of Directors, for which she served as vice chair during two of these terms. In the 1980s at NPR in Washington, D.C., Wallace was director of planning in the network’s News Division. At the network, she worked on the development of Weekend Edition Saturday and Sunday, and she acquired Car Talk and Fresh Air for national distribution. Prior to NPR, she was station program manager of WGBH-FM in Boston, general manager of KPFA-FM in Berkeley, and station manager of WYSO-FM in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She is a Stanford graduate.

Bill Whitaker

Bill Whitaker has covered major news stories domestically and across the globe for CBS News over four decades. He is the 2018 winner of the RTDNA’s highest honor, and the Paul White Award for career achievement. He was named a 60 MINUTES correspondent in March 2014; the 2020-’21 season will be his seventh on the broadcast. Whitaker’s investigation with the Washington Post into the origins of the opioid crisis has won more awards than any other 60 MINUTES work. The first report in the two-part series revealed how the DEA’s efforts to curb the epidemic were hampered by a law pushed by drug industry lobbyists. Whitaker graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges with a B.A. degree in American history and from Boston University with a master's degree in African-American studies. Whitaker also holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1997.

Ernest Wilson

Ernest James Wilson III, Ph.D., is the Walter Annenberg Chair in Communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He is also a professor of political science, a faculty fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School, a board member for the Pacific Council on International Policy and the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from 2000 to 2010, the last year as chairman. Dean Wilson's experience at the intersection of communication and public policy spans the private and public sectors. He founded the CPB's New Digital Media Committee and Public Awareness Initiative Committee. He is also a member of the Carnegie-Knight Commission on the Future of Journalism Education and The National Academies Board on Research Data and Information, and was deputy director of the Global Information Infrastructure Commission from 1994 to 1995. Originally from Washington, D.C., Dean Wilson received his A.B. from Harvard and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley.

Andrea Wishom Young

Wishom Young serves as president at Skywalker Holdings. Prior to Skywalker, she spent more than 20 years at Harpo Productions, where she held various production, programming, development and executive roles for “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. As executive producer of “Super Soul Sunday,” she won a GLAAD award for an interview with Janet Mock. Andrea serves on the boards of Pinterest, Nextdoor and Tory Burch, LLC along with several nonprofits. She grew up in San Francisco and lives in Chicago. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from UC Berkeley.

Esther Wojcicki

Esther Wojcicki is an internationally known journalism educator and founder of the Palo Alto High School Media Arts Program, which has grown to be one of the nation's most distinguished scholastic media programs, with 600-plus students, six teachers, nine publications, and a new 25,000-sq. ft. Media Arts Center. Among her honors, Ms. Wojcicki was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at MediaX at Stanford, a 2009 MacArthur Foundation Research Fellow, a California Teacher of the Year, and recipient of the 2011 Charles O'Malley Award from Columbia Scholastic Press. She has been a speaker at multiple conferences including TED (2015), G20 Summit, and Singularity University Summit. She co-authored "Moonshots in Education: Launching Blended Learning in the Classroom," (2015) a guide to revolutionizing education for the digital age by giving students agency to empower their innovation skills. She is the mother of Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube; Janet Wojcicki, pediatrics professor at UCSF Medical School, and Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andMe. She is married to Stanford Physics Professor Stanley Wojcicki. She received her master of journalism degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Edward Wong

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times who reports on foreign policy from Washington, D.C. In more than 22 years at the Times, he has been based in New York, Baghdad, Beijing and Washington. As Beijing bureau chief, he ran the Times’ largest overseas operation.

He has spent 13 years abroad and filed dispatches from dozens of countries, including North Korea, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Indonesia. He has written on the final trans-Atlantic flight of the Concorde, a walk through the Wakhan Corridor of the Afghan Pamirs and a cruise in North Korea.

Edward began reporting for the Times in 1999 and worked for four years on the metro, sports and business desks before going overseas. He covered the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007 and reported from China from 2008 to 2016.

He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and done fellowships at the Belfer Center of Harvard Kennedy School and at the Wilson Center in Washington. He has taught international reporting as a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. He is on the advisory board of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Edward has been interviewed on CBS News, MSNBC, PBS NewsHour, NPR, BBC, CBC and ARTE. He has given talks at universities and conferences on journalism, war and foreign policy. He has appeared in documentary films by Laura Poitras and Vanessa Hope and produced his own short film on China.

Edward received a Livingston Award for his coverage of the Iraq War and was on a team from the Times’ Baghdad Bureau that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He has two awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia for coverage of China. He was on the Times team that received an award for best documentary project from Pictures of the Year International for a series on global climate change migrants. He has a prize from the Associated Press Sports Editors.

Edward graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree with honors in English literature. He has joint master’s degrees in journalism and international studies from U.C. Berkeley. He has studied Mandarin Chinese at the Beijing Language and Culture University, Taiwan University and Middlebury College. He was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Alexandria, Va.