A lawyer, journalist, academic, and advocate, Traci Griffith currently serves as the Racial Justice Program  Director for the ACLU of Massachusetts. Her transition to the staff of ACLUM comes after serving the organization on the National ACLU Board of Directors, on the Executive Committee, and as the National  Board Secretary.  

Her previous career as an Associate Professor in the Communications Department at Simmons University and as Chair of the Media Studies Department at St. Michael’s College in Vermont focused on First  Amendment law and ethics, as well as Race and Gender representation in media. She continues to teach as an adjunct at Simmons and also runs a cultural competency training business.  

Traci is a former correspondent and national editor for the Associated Press and continues to pursue journalism with recent work that includes a 4-part series with New England News Collaborative on racism in New England, Titled, NENC/America Amplified Special: New England’s Abolitionist History at Odds  With Racist Realities · New England News Collaborative.

She holds University degrees from Notre Dame Law School, an M.S. in Journalism from Florida A&M, and a BA in Political Science from DePaul. 

She lives in Cambridge with her son Jaden and her 4-pound chihuahua Bessie. 

Jim Rotche is a top-performing professional accomplished in revenue development, finance, marketing, and operations.  He is a high-energy leader who motivates and inspires, fosters collaboration, and instills shared vision and purpose in alignment with aggressive business goals.

Jim has extensive experience in the media industry currently serving as President Of Advantage Informatics and publisher of their newspapers. Advantage Informatics helps extend local journalism by providing hyperlocal content in your community’s voice. The bulk of Jim’s career was at the Chicago Tribune, most recently serving as Publisher/GM of 39 local publications.

While at the Tribune he spent several years as the Director of Business Development, Joint Ventures, and Acquisitions leading strategies for maximizing new revenue growth and profitability across key business areas within the organization. Considered a corporate entrepreneur, Jim has brought in millions from new revenue streams.  He accomplishes this by identifying opportunities, developing effective monetization strategies, creating partnerships, and launching new product development initiatives.

A native of Chicago, Jim holds an MBA in marketing and finance from California State University- Fullerton and a BA from Michigan State University. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.