Karen Ager is Director of Communications for the Endowment for Health. In that capacity, she oversees strategic message development for both internal and external stakeholders, including key opinion leaders and the media.

Karen is a seasoned communication professional. Prior to joining the Endowment, she served as manager of corporate communications for Fisher Scientific International, a global provider of health care, research and scientific technology. Other past positions included C-suite messaging at Staples Worldwide, Bank of America (formerly BankBoston), and Boston Edison. Karen spent several years as managing partner at Public Image Corporation, a public relations firm with offices in downtown Boston and Newburyport. She is a former president of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC Yankee Chapter, Boston) and the Public Relations Society of America. She is a graduate of Leadership NH, Class of 2011. Karen has a Bachelor of Science in mass communications from Emerson College, Boston.

Gregory V. Sullivan has served as General Counsel for the Union Leader Corporation for the past 34 years. He also currently serves on the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s Committee on the Judiciary and the Media, as well as the Committee for Public Access to Courts, and is President of the Hingham, Mass.-based media law firm, Malloy & Sullivan.

Mr. Sullivan has argued before the New Hampshire Supreme Court in several landmark First Amendment and public access cases. Recently, he appeared with media and First Amendment experts on a special “New Media” television segment for WSBE, Rhode Island’s PBS station. He is also an instructor at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Manchester, N.H. and a faculty member of Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Mass, where he teaches First Amendment and media law.

Nina Sachdev brings more than 20 years of journalism, news editing and marketing experience to her role as a communications director for Media Impact Funders (MIF). Nina served as MIF’s communications director for more than five years before joining the Rita Allen Foundation to lead communications there. After a brief stint, Nina re-joined MIF in February 2022. Nina cut her teeth in journalism at The Dallas Morning News, where—as an intern on the copy desk—she was tasked with editing the obituaries of famous people who hadn’t yet died. Since then, Nina has worked at The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, The Philadelphia Daily News and The Philadelphia Weekly in almost every editorial capacity imaginable, including senior editor, A1 editor (when that used to be a thing) and slot (does anyone remember that being a thing?). Nina is the creator and editor of the award-winning The Survivors Project: Telling the Truth About Life After Sexual Abuse, which exposes the reality of healing from the effects of sexual abuse. Nina holds an M.A. in journalism from Temple University. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

Steve Leone joined the Monitor as editor in April of 2014 and served through 2020, when he became publisher and vice president of news for the Newspapers of New England. He’s worked for the Newport Daily News in Newport, RI, the News & Advance in Lynchburg, Va., the Portland Press Herald in Portland, Maine, the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., and most recently was the editor of the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in Peterborough. He lives in Concord with his wife and two children.

Melanie Plenda is a member of the NENPA Board of Directors and an award-winning freelance journalist and the Director of The Granite State News Collaborative. Her role with The Collaborative includes coordinating coverage for the group’s editorial projects, building partnerships and handling the day to day operations of the organization. Melanie’s freelance work has appeared in a variety of regional and national publications including The Atlantic.com, The Daily Beast, and The Washington Post. Melanie is based in New Hampshire.

Angie Drobnic Holan is the editor-in-chief of PolitiFact. She has extensive experience fact-checking the presidency, Congress and political campaigns, and was a reporter on the PolitiFact team that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She serves on the advisory board of the International Fact-Checking Network.

She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a master’s of library science from the University of South Florida. Her undergraduate degree is from the Plan II liberal arts program at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a native of Louisiana and attended the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts.

Joy Mayer founded Trusting News in 2016 after a 20-year career in newsrooms and teaching. She spent 12 years at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she created an audience engagement curriculum and a community outreach team in the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian and also taught web design and print design. She lives in Sarasota, Florida, and can be reached at joy@TrustingNews.org or on Twitter @mayerjoy.