Judith Meyer is executive editor of the Sun Journal, Kennebec Journal, the Morning Sentinel, and six weekly newspapers owned by the Sun Media Group.

A journalist since 1990 and former editorial page editor for the Sun Journal, she was named Maine’s Journalist of the Year in 2003 and was inducted into the Maine Press Association Hall of Fame in October 2021.

She serves as vice president of the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition and is a member of the Right to Know Advisory Committee to the Legislature.

She is the former president of the New England Newspaper & Press Association Board of Directors, is on the board of the New England First Amendment Coalition, and was the 2018 recipient of the Judith Vance Weld Brown Spirit of Journalism Award in New England.

Evan Allen is an investigative reporter on the Globe’s Narratives and Quick Strike investigative teams. She began freelancing for the Globe in 2011 and joined the staff in 2013. She has covered police, breaking news, and major events including the Boston Marathon bombings. She was part of a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series about dangerous drivers. She has won the Scripps Howard Award and the Meyer “Mike” Berger Award; she was a finalist for the Livingston and Goldsmith awards; and her work has been published in The Best American Newspaper Narratives. She grew up in Quincy, Mass., where she still lives, and graduated from Emerson College.

Richard E. Brown is a News/Media Alliance Rising Star recipient, the former director of renewals and digital sales strategy at LPi, and the former director of digital operations and sales of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He recently served as the head of digital subscriber churn for Gannett | USA TODAY NETWORK and is now the senior director of retention for The Daily Beast. He is also a member of the board of directors for the Wisconsin Newspaper Association Foundation.

Richard Watts is a member of the NENPA Board of Directors and the founder of the Center for Community News, Co-Director of the Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program at the University of Vermont and coordinator of the Community News Service – a state-wide, multi-outlet academic-news partnership with a mission to provide content to community news outlets and give students applied learning experiences. Richard has a master’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University and a Ph.D. related to media studies from the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and has worked as a reporter, campaign manager, policy analyst, and researcher.

Reuben Fischer-Baum is an editor on the graphics team at The Washington Post, where he leads a team of reporters focused on trackers and reader tools. He previously worked as a visual journalist at FiveThirtyEight and Deadspin and has taught data visualization at Parsons School of Design. He was a 2021-2022 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and a 2017-2018 Paul Miller Fellow at the National Press Foundation.

John Voket has primarily worked in journalism, broadcasting and communications all his life, holding positions as an Associated Press stringer; a reporter, designer and editor for numerous community papers in Connecticut; and is currently Editor of The Newtown Bee serving Newtown and Sandy Hook, CT.

In his tenure with “The Bee,” John has covered virtually every local municipal department, board, and commission; written about hundreds of local personalities, community events, cultural & arts activities; and he was the first working journalist on the scene following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings — delivering some of the initial video and reporting that fateful morning in 2012 to local, state, and global audiences. He continues to report regularly on the aftermath and outcomes of that tragedy, and in July 2021, he was promoted to lead the newspaper’s editorial team.

As director of Public Affairs for Connecticut-based Connoisseur Media, John’s award-winning radio program ‘For the People’ is syndicated on Connecticut’s largest radio network – 99.1-WPLR / STAR 99.9 / 95.9-The FOX / WEBE 108 / WICC-AM/FM – and is available as a weekly podcast on various platforms. John has also served on the board, and previously held an executive board seat with NENPA – the New England Newspaper & Press Association – and served as President in 2018.

Jerry Berger had a passion for Statehouse reporting from the start of his journalism career at a small daily newspaper, checking in with area legislators on key issues facing Beacon Hill and their local impact. He took that interest along with him to United Press International, where he reported from Beacon Hill for six years. Rising to bureau chief, he covered a presidential campaign and two gubernatorial elections. He’s also seen government and policy from the inside, working as communications director for the Senate Ways and Means Committee and the state arts agency.

He served as media relations director at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for over a decade, leading the institution through the communication challenges during the attack on the Boston Marathon. He keeps his writing and reporting skills sharp as a freelancer for health care-related organizations, consults on media strategy and is active on social media.

He brings that background to the Statehouse Program, where students get hands-on experience covering state government for regional outlets across Massachusetts. Reporters, elected officials and advocates join the discussion to help lay the groundwork on the do’s and don’ts of reporting on public affairs and politics.

Dr. Lara Salahi is an award-winning health journalist, author, and Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. She studies news-academic partnerships as a sustainable business model for local news. She and her co-researcher coined the term “news-academic partnerships,” which is now regularly used in scholarship that examines the collaborations between media outlets and academic institutions. She founded and oversees a news-academic partnership with the largest local news parent company north of Boston, and is expanding that model into a news service to cover stories for all local outlets in the region. She is a Faculty Champion with the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, where she has received a grant to support this work.