Alan Abrahamson
Alan Abrahamson is an award-winning sportswriter, best-selling author and in-demand television analyst. He has covered the Olympics full time since 1998 as a columnist for NBCsports.com and a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. He also co-wrote bestselling memoirs by sports stars Michael Phelps and Apolo Ohno. In 2010 Abrahamson launched his own website, 3WireSports.com. He recently covered the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.
Victoria Baranetsky
Victoria Baranetsky is general counsel at The Center for Investigative Reporting. Previously, Baranetsky was the first staff member on the West Coast for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She worked as legal counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation on trademark and First Amendment issues. Baranetsky served as the First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times and clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Pooler of the Second Circuit.
Chris Blow
Chris Blow is a designer living in Oakland. He was trained as a journalist and now works as design director at Meedan, an international nonprofit making new tools for journalists dealing with viral misinformation.
Nate Cardozo
Nate Cardozo is a senior staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s digital civil liberties team. He works on EFF’s “Who Has Your Back?” report and Coders’ Rights Project. Cardozo has projects involving cryptography and the law, automotive privacy, government transparency, hardware hacking rights, anonymous speech, electronic privacy law reform, Freedom of Information Act litigation and resisting the expansion of the surveillance state.
Terry Collins
Terry Collins is a veteran journalist who has covered sports, politics, health and social networks for CNET, the Associated Press and the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis. He also serves on the board of the National Association of Black Journalists. Collins was a John Jay College of Criminal Justice Langeloth Fellow as well as a Journalism Law School Fellow at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles. He has judged the National Headliner Awards.
David DeBolt
David DeBolt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Bay Area News Group, covering Oakland. DeBolt grew up in the Bay Area and has worked for daily newspapers in Palo Alto, Fairfield and Walnut Creek. He joined the Bay Area News Group in 2012. DeBolt was part of the team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for covering the “Ghost Ship” fire in Oakland.
Daniel Duane
Daniel Duane has written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, National Geographic Adventure, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine and many other publications. He is the author of six books, including the surfing memoir “Caught Inside.” Duane won a 2012 National Magazine Award for an article about cooking with Chef Thomas Keller, and a 2017 International Association of Culinary Professionals award for Narrative Food Writing for a profile of Harold McGee. He has twice been a finalist for a James Beard Award.
Jessica Estepa
Jessica Estepa is the lead writer and editor for OnPolitics, USA TODAY’s politics blog and newsletter. Past lives include being an editor on USA TODAY’s digital and copy desks, working as a producer for National Geographic and covering Congress and the federal government for E&E News and Roll Call.
Matthias Gafni
Matthias Gafni is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group. He has reported and edited for Bay Area newspapers covering courts, crime, environment, science, child abuse, education, county and city government, and corruption.Along with his colleagues at the East Bay Times, he won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for their coverage of the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland.
Robert Hernandez
Robert Hernandez’s primary focus is exploring and developing the intersection of technology and journalism — to empower people, inform reporting and storytelling, engage community, improve distribution and enhance revenue. He is an associate professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. He has worked for seattletimes.com, SFGate.com, eXaminer.com, La Prensa Gráfica, among others. Henandez is the co-founder of #wjchat and co-creator of the Journalism Diversity Project.
Victor Hernandez
Victor Hernandez is director of media innovation at Banjo, an information company that captures the world’s social and digital signals and organizes them by time and location. Hernandez spent 12 years at CNN working in its news editorial and product technology areas. He was charged with shaping new media strategies against CNN’s journalistic objectives. Hernandez earned Peabody awards for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill disasters and is among the Poynter Institute’s 35 most influential people in social media.
Rachele Kanigel
Rachele Kanigel is a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University, where she teaches reporting, writing and media entrepreneurship classes and advises the award-winning student newspaper, Golden Gate Xpress. She is the author of “The Student Newspaper Survival Guide” and “The Diversity Style Guide.” Kanigel was a daily newspaper reporter for 15 years and continues to write for magazines and websites. She leads summer journalism study-abroad programs with ieiMedia.
Marisa Kendall
Marisa Kendall is a reporter for the Bay Area News Group, covering housing affordability issues for The Mercury News and East Bay Times. She has written about everything from murders to tech companies to city government. In prior roles, she covered Silicon Valley court cases for The Recorder in San Francisco, and crime for The News-Press in Southwest Florida.
Kim Komenich
Kim Komenich is an assistant professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University. He won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography for his photographs of the Philippine revolution. Komenich has earned numerous awards, including the Military Reporters and Editors’ Association’s Photography Award; the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists; the World Press Photo News Picture Story Award; three National Headliner Awards and the Clifton C. Edom Education Award.
Thomas Peele
Thomas Peele is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter on the Bay Area News Group’s regional team. He has worked at newspapers, including Newsday, for 34 years in California and elsewhere. Peele focuses on government accountability, public records and data, often speaking publicly about transparency laws. In addition to a 2017 Pulitzer, he has won more than 60 journalism awards. Peele is the author of the book “Killing the Messenger,” on the murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey.
Greg Retsinas
Greg Retsinas is director of digital strategy for KGW Media Group, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Ore. Under his leadership, KGW.com has been recognized with several awards, including Regional Murrow awards for best website and excellence in social media, the Local Media Association award for best digital innovation and the Oregon Association of Broadcasters award for best use of digital media. Retsinas spent 15 years with New York Times Co. properties, serving as an online director, newspaper editor and reporter.
Salvador Rodriguez
Salvador Rodriguez is a reporter for the San Francisco bureau of Reuters, covering enterprise technology, cloud computing and companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce and Oracle. Rodriguez covered the tech industry for Inc. Magazine, the International Business Times and the Los Angeles Times, and he has contributed to Vice, Digital Trends and the Federal Times, among others.
Susana Sanchez-Young
Susana Sanchez-Young is a visual journalist specializing in graphic design and photo illustration. As art director for the Advance Digital Inc. media group, she is responsible for newspaper design and illustration of special projects and features. Previously, Sanchez-Young worked in the style, Sunday arts and food sections of The Washington Post. She also worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. Her work has been recognized by the Society for News Design.
Lakshmi Sarah
Lakshmi Sarah is an educator and journalist with a focus on South Asia, the environment, identity and the arts. She co-founded Tiny World Productions to focus on immersive video content. Projects have included a series on asylum-seekers in Germany called The Wait, a 360 video on homelessness in San Francisco, and daily 360 content for The New York Times. Sarah works as a digital producer with Rise Up: Be Heard, a fellowship program for young people in California to report on local health and immigration issues.
Vince Sturla
Vince Sturla learned how to hone the art of storytelling as a deep-sea diver, sharing tales during long months offshore. He has worked for CNN and NBC News, covering a wide range of stories, from mass shootings to Nelson Mandela’s funeral to investigations leading to new legislation. He received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for his work covering Hurricane Katrina.
Jane Tyska
Jane Tyska is an award-winning staff photographer, videographer and picture editor based in Oakland. Tyska has worked for the Bay Area News Group since 1997. She responds rapidly when news breaks and has been known to arrive on assignment by many modes of transport, including motorcycle and boat. Tyska recently received her commercial drone pilot’s license from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Sameena Usman
Sameena Usman is a government relations coordinator and frequent media spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in San Francisco. A graduate of San Jose State University, where she majored in political science and minored in communications, Usman works on legislation important to the Muslim community. Usman has appeared on MSNBC and NBC Bay Area and in the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle.