Leslie Garrett is a journalist who has covered the environment for 20 years, she is currently the Editorial Director of Bluedot Living. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and more. She is the author of more than 15 books, including The Virtuous Consumer, a book on living more sustainably. Leslie lives most of the year in Canada with her husband, three children, three dogs, and three cats, and seasonally on Martha’s Vineyard.
Leslie Garrett
Sadie Babits
Sadie Babits guides Cronkite News students who are interested in pursuing sustainability reporting, and she directs this professional program’s audio program. Before coming to the Cronkite school, Sadie spent nearly two decades as a journalist and editor covering environmental stories primarily for public radio. Her work has aired on public radio stations throughout the West and on National Public Radio shows including Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
Sadie came to the Walter Cronkite school as a visiting professor in 2018 after completing the prestigious Ted Scripps Environmental Reporting fellowship at the University of Colorado in Boulder where she studied public land policy, environmental policy and Native American law. Previously she was the news director at Colorado Public Radio where she set the strategic direction for the newsroom and oversaw environmental coverage.
Sadie serves as the president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the largest member organization of environmental journalists in the U.S. which has opened doors to help champion access for environmental journalists with federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Interior Department about government transparency and media access.
Her work has been honored by the Society of Environmental Journalists for her overseas reporting on water conflict and scarcity in Kenya, and she’s the recipient of a national Edward R. Murrow award for investigative journalism among many other professional accolades. She also helped guide and edit the reporting on an investigative audio and digital story called “Missed Treatment,” about thousands of disabled veterans who lost their benefits during her work at Colorado Public Radio. That reporting done in a collaboration with NPR was honored with a DuPont Award in 2017.
David Abel
An award-winning reporter on the Globe staff since 1999, David Abel has covered war in the Balkans, unrest in Latin America, national security issues in Washington D.C., terrorism in New York and Boston, and climate change and poverty in New England. Abel, also a documentary filmmaker and an occasional professor of journalism, was part of the team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for the paper’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. He now covers the environment for the Globe.
Greg Lee Jr.
Gregory Lee is the Senior Assistant Managing Editor, Talent, and Community, and helps run the newsroom as one of the Globe’s senior editors, leading recruitment efforts for staffing the Globe newsroom. He will also serve a role in assisting the Globe to build communities around the newsroom’s work to attract new readers and strengthen the bonds with the subscribers that the Globe has. This is Greg’s second stint with the Globe, spending eight years from 2004 to 2012 as a senior assistant sports editor. He returns after a two-year stint as senior managing editor of The Athletic DC. He has had previous stops over a career that started in 1993 at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, The Washington Post, The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, and NBA.com at Turner Sports. He is the former president of the National Association of Black Journalists and a 2013 winner of the Missouri Honor Medal. The New Orleans native is married and is an avid New Orleans Saints fan.
Lex Weaver
Lex Weaver is the editor-in-chief of The Scope: Boston, a digital magazine operated by Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and focused on telling stories of justice, hope, and resilience in Greater Boston. She is also a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellow.
Frank Mungeam
Frank Mungeam is Chief Innovation Officer for the Local Media Association, which works with over 3,000 local media brands (newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, digital news sites & more), as well as several hundred R&D partners in the industry. LMA’s mission is to help local media companies develop sustainable business models for news.
Mungeam leads LMA’s Center for Journalism Funding, focused on developing philanthropic and collaborative models for supporting local journalism; and he leads the Covering Climate Collaborative, a network of 25 local newsrooms and six science partners reporting on the effects of climate change, climate justice, and climate solutions. Prior to joining LMA in September 2020, Mungeam was Knight Professor of Practice in TV News Innovation at ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism. At ASU, he worked with Cronkite News students and faculty on news story and format innovations; coached cohorts of local TV broadcasters in the Table Stakes performance-driven transformation model; and published innovation case studies via the Cronkite News Lab. Previously, Mungeam was VP of Digital Content for TEGNA’s portfolio of local broadcast stations and news websites. His extensive media experience includes radio, print, TV production, and digital.
Mungeam has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a master’s degree in Leadership and Communication from Gonzaga and is a frequent speaker and writer on news transformation, innovation, and leadership. Mungeam lives on a floating home in Portland, Oregon, and is the proud author of one son and two books, including Dream It, Do It, which profiles the repeatable habits of successful innovators.
Jeremy Fox
Jeremy C. Fox is a reporter, editor, and online producer for The Boston Globe and an associate editor of The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. In 2019 he joined the board of directors of the New England Society of News Editors, and since 2015, he has been president of the Boston chapter of The NLGJA: The Association of LGBQT Journalists. He is the 2019 recipient of the association’s national award for excellence in political reporting for his 2018 Boston Globe article, “‘Gays for Trump’: The president’s small, vocal — and unlikely — fan club.” Fox also teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level journalism courses at Harvard Extension School. He is a previous staff writer for The Watertown Tab and co-author, with Andrew Elder, of the 2013 book, “Boston’s Orange Line.” He is a cofounder of the entertainment website Pajiba, where he was lead critic and managing editor from 2004 – 2007. His writing has appeared in publications including The Bay State Banner, Bay Windows, The Boston Phoenix, The Film Experience, Film Threat, The Jamaica Plain Gazette, Maryland Matters, Time Out, and The Weekly Dig.
Jamie Kageleiry
Jamie Kageleiry is the former executive editor of the community newspaper The Martha’s Vineyard Times, formerly worked as an editor at Yankee Magazine, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, and Edible Vineyard. She is currently the director of publications for Bluedot Living Magazine, which aims to tell the stories of local changemakers addressing climate issues in their communities.
Meg Heckman
Meg Heckman is a journalist, author and educator focused on building a news ecosystem that is robust, diverse and equipped to serve all segments of society. Her core research examines the practice and evolution of journalism through a feminist lens with the goal of better understanding the role women have played in the creation of news and, by extension, civic life.
Because an important element of inclusive journalism is ensuring the tools of media innovation are available to all communities, Meg also engages in research exploring the contours of digital news production and dissemination, especially as it relates to local newspapers. She embraces a variety of qualitative practices—oral history, archival research, case studies, ethnography—and collaborates often with colleagues using quantitative methods in the digital humanities, gender studies, sociology and data science.
Her book, Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party, documents the lasting impact of publisher and conservative activist Nackey Scripps Loeb, who, during the second half of the twentieth century, used her New Hampshire-based newspaper to shape national politics in ways that still reverberate today. The book, according to one reviewer, “not only chronicles the life of a fascinating woman but also the rise of right-wing populism in American politics and the strategies and tactics conservative media organizations… successfully implemented to foster growth over the past several decades.”
Meg strives to distribute her research in ways that contribute to building more inclusive news organizations now and in the future. Her work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including the Columbia Journalism Review, USA Today, Poynter.org and The Conversation, as well as scholarly publications such as the Newspaper Research Journal and Teaching Journalism and Mass Communication. She’s presented work at academic conferences in the U.S., Europe and Canada, and is a regular speaker at events for news industry leaders. In 2019, she was a delegate to the World Journalism Education Congress in Paris where her duties included serving on a committee tasked with developing best practices for gender-inclusive journalism education.
She is currently an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and Media Innovation. Before coming to Northeastern in the fall of 2017, Meg was a journalism lecturer at the University of New Hampshire where she served as a faculty fellow at the Peter T. Paul Entrepreneurship Center. She spent more than a decade as a reporter and, later, the digital editor at the Concord (NH) Monitor, where she developed a fascination with presidential politics, a passion for local news and an appreciation for cars with four-wheel drive.
Kristen Nevious
From the first time she met him, Marlin Fitzwater has said that he wanted the Center to be more than a name on a building, and that was her cue.
In the summer of 2002, only a couple of months after its dedication, Dr. Kristen Nevious joined The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication as a staff member and was named director in 2004.
Alongside her three degrees in journalism, her professional experience has been in student media, public relations for non-profit organizations, and she has taught media law, journalism, public relations, advertising, photography, and more at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Southern Missouri State University, the University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of South Dakota, where she earned tenure.
Her first task as director was to frame its mission: to engage intellects, challenge perspectives, teach skills and help people find their voices in the public discourse that is essential to the health of our democracy. Since becoming Director, she has established numerous programs and organizations including the Pierce Media Group, The Fry Lectures, Franklin Pierce University Polling, The Presidency and the Press, PoliticsFitzU, and she produced a Forum on Civility in Presidential Election Discourse with the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Dr. Nevious is also a producing partner for IndieLens Pop-Up.
Dr. Nevious is a founding member of the Granite State News Collaborative. Through the GSNC, she has created opportunities for FP interns to work remotely on top video and podcast internships with New Hampshire Public Broadcasting and Citizens Count.
She serves on several professional boards, including as chair of New Hampshire Public Broadcasting’s Community Advisory Board, and as a member of the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s Board of Directors, and the New Hampshire Press Association.
In 2018, she was named the Journalism Educator of the Year by NENPA.