NATIONAL ADVISORS
Penelope (Penny) Muse Abernathy is a visiting professor at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. She is a former executive at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and previously served as the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina specializing in research into business models for community newspapers and the spread of “news deserts.”
Jason Alcorn is Vice President of Learning and Impact for the American Journalism Project. Previously he was the project manager for NewsMatch, an annual matching gifts and capacity building program for nonprofit newsrooms that in 2017 raised $4.8 million in partnership with Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. Jason is also an award-winning journalist. He served as associate director of Seattle-based nonprofit news organization InvestigateWest from 2011 to 2016.
Sue Cross is executive director of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a network of more than 200 public service news media across the U.S. that are strengthening the sources of news for thousands of diverse communities. Cross is a former senior vice president for the global news agency Associated Press. She brings more than 30 years’ experience as a journalist, digital media business executive and nonprofit consultant. She is based in LA.
Molly de Aguiar is President of the Independence Public Media Foundation. Previously she served as managing director of the News Integrity Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and as program director for Informed Communities at the New Jersey-based Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, which she helped establish as a nationally known innovator in funding local journalism.
Kathy Kiely the Lee Hills Chair for Free Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she is teaching and working to advance the cause of free speech nationally and internationally. She has worked as a reporter and editor for numerous regional and national news organizations, covering Congress and national politics and has advocated on First Amendment issues as a Free Press Fellow for the National Press Club.
Stefanie Murray is the Director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She previously worked in Michigan and Tennessee as a reporter, editor, digital media manager and news executive. Before joining Montclair State, she worked for Gannett Co. as vice president and executive editor of The Tennessean in Nashville, and was with the Detroit Free Press before that. Her professional passions are collaborative journalism, local journalism, community engagement, and audience analysis.
Erika Owens is a journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. As Director of OpenNews, Erika convenes people and projects in journalism and open source technology. Erika and the OpenNews team seek ways to build enduring connections by creating inclusive, caring spaces for the journalism-tech community. Previously, Erika was web editor at the Philadelphia Public School Notebook. She loves nonprofit journalism, people watching, and laughing heartily.
Mike Rispoli directs Free Press’ News Voices project, which connects local communities and the newsrooms that serve them via public engagement, advocacy campaigns and collaborative projects. He also teaches journalism as a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University. Before joining Free Press, Mike reported for Gannett New Jersey and The Star-Ledger, and worked for the human-rights organizations Privacy International and Access. Mike also served as the technical editor on the 2015 book You: For Sale, a look at protecting user data and privacy online.
Dan Schultz is a technologist who helps people make things for the public good. He has earned degrees from MIT and Carnegie Mellon, and became professionally involved in the civic media space through the Knight News Challenge as well as an Open News fellowship at Mozilla and the Boston Globe, as consulting director of technology at Civic Hall, and as a senior engineer at the Internet Archive. Dan has helped dozens of startups design and build out their products as a partner at the Silicon Valley Software Group. In addition to his work as a consulting engineer with civic and media efforts, Dan is creating open source media analysis projects as Overmind of Bad Idea Factory.