Felicia Gans is a producer and reporter for the cannabis team at The Boston Globe, where she has overseen the digital strategy of the Globe’s marijuana section since its launch in November 2018. She has covered the opening of recreational marijuana stores in Massachusetts, CBD regulations in Massachusetts and nationwide, the outbreak of vaping illnesses, and so much more. She also writes a daily marijuana newsletter called “The Daily Rip.” Gans started at the Globe covering crime and general assignment stories in 2015 and began full-time on the overnight desk after graduating from Boston University two years later.

Greg Saulmon is assistant managing editor at The Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he manages coverage ranging from breaking news to investigative projects.

With a strong focus on multimedia work, Saulmon has won reporting, video and photography awards from the New England Newspaper and Press Association. He has also edited stories and projects recognized with the association’s Publick Occurrences award for four consecutive years.

As his newsroom’s de facto data expert, he uses the programming language R for data analysis and produces visualizations in Tableau Public and other software.

A lifelong resident of the Pioneer Valley and past managing editor at The Daily Hampshire Gazette, he majored in English and economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

In his spare time he plays guitar in several indie rock bands and photographs birds in downtown Holyoke.

Matthew Karolian is director of audience engagement at The Boston Globe, where he oversees the development and execution of strategies to bring the newsroom’s journalism closer to readers. During his tenure, the Globe’s social audiences have grown to more than 2 million followers and its reporting has expanded to new platforms such as Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. Karolian got his start in journalism as a stringer for C-SPAN during the 2008 presidential primaries in New Hampshire, where he documented everything from house parties to victory speeches.

He is studying the impending impact of artificial intelligence on how news is reported and consumed.
@mkarolian

Dan Cotter is a seasoned newspaper industry expert who advises publishers on contemporary approaches to community journalism and revenue generation. As part of this, he provides hands-on leadership in planning and executing strategic initiatives to attract, serve, and monetize their audiences. He also conducts professional research and ad sales training programs for newspapers. 

Since 2017, Cotter has been working closely with the Vermont Standard in Woodstock, VT to improve and expand its portfolio of news and marketing products and chart a path for long-term sustainability. In May of 2018, Cotter was appointed publisher.

From 2015 to 2017 Cotter was the Director of Sales Development and Training for GateHouse Media New England, which published 6 daily newspapers, 98 weekly community papers, and 168 local news websites. In addition to teaching the company’s sales force how to use GHMNE’s extensive portfolio of print and digital marketing services to help their clients’ businesses succeed, he also had responsibility for furthering GHMNE’s endeavors to generate revenue through community events, content marketing, digital media monetization and political advertising.

Prior to joining GateHouse, Cotter spent five years as Executive Director of the New England Newspaper & Press Association (NENPA), where, as operating head of the newly combined association (a result of the merger of NEPA and NENA), he charted a course for NENPA’s future and led the effort to establish many of the unique and valuable services the association provides to newspapers in the six-state region today. For nearly ten years before that, he was Chief Operating Officer of Urban & Associates, Inc., the highly regarded newspaper research and consulting firm, headquartered near Boston, that has helped hundreds of domestic and international news media companies compete for audience and advertising market share.

Before joining U&A in 2000, Cotter spent nearly twenty years working in a variety of leadership roles within the Pulitzer Publishing Company.  He held two major positions at the corporate level:  Director of Newspaper Strategic Planning (a role in which he was responsible for guiding the company’s publishers, editors, advertising and circulation directors in launching growth initiatives in markets around the country and for developing Pulitzer’s proprietary strategic model for evaluating acquisition opportunities) and Vice President of Marketing for its community newspaper division (with responsibility for improving circulation and advertising performance at all of the company’s properties).  During his career at Pulitzer, Cotter also served as Publisher of the Santa Maria (CA) Times, VP/Circulation Director for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, VP/Circulation and Marketing Director for the Chicago Daily Southtown, and both Marketing Manager and Research Manager for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  

In these roles, Cotter has conducted numerous in-depth research studies, content analyses, detailed market share measurements and operations audits. Often as a result of those studies, he’s led his own teams and leadership teams at newspapers throughout the industry in planning and executing new product launches, print and digital publication redesigns, business process reengineering, pricing and rate restructuring projects, special events, award-winning promotional marketing campaigns, innovative sales tool development, and powerful go-to-market strategies.

In addition, in 2006 Cotter founded Suburban Focus Group-Boston, a company that designed and/or coordinated market research studies for a wide variety of clients, including large CPG manufacturers, well-known retailers, market research firms, advertising agencies, print, broadcast and digital media companies, video game and computer software developers, restaurant chains, law firms, government agencies, high profile political campaigns, public utilities, residential housing developments, medical service providers, financial services, educational institutions, and many other types of companies and organizations (both domestic and international). As one of the leading research providers/facilities in the Boston area, SFG attracted a loyal following of blue-chip clients. SFG was acquired by GreatBlue Research in late 2013.

Cotter holds an MS degree in Communication from Illinois State University, and he has taught for many years as an adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis, MO and Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.  He and the teams he’s led have received a number of industry awards for their work in newspaper marketing, and he received the Newspaper Research Council’s highest honor in 1990, the Gerold Zarwell Award. Through the years, Cotter has been a featured speaker at a variety of newspaper industry conferences, workshops and corporate meetings.

Stefanie Murray is the Director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. A Michigan native, Stefanie previously worked in Michigan and Tennessee as a reporter, editor, digital media manager and news executive. Before joining Montclair State, she worked for Gannett Co. as vice president and executive editor of The Tennessean in Nashville, and was with the Detroit Free Press before that.

Her professional passions are collaborative journalism, local journalism, community engagement and audience analysis. She has a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in broadcasting and journalism from Central Michigan University.

Tom Kearney has been a Stowe Reporter since 2005; managing editor; also in charge of overhauling the news coverage and presentation of the weeklies the company acquired since 2015 — the News & Citizen of Morrisville, The Other Paper of South Burlington, Shelburne News, and The Citizen of Charlotte and Hinesburg. The Stowe Reporter has won best small weekly in New England twice in six years.

Kearney took an 18-month break to be senior manager for global editorial quality in a Yellowbook startup that launched 700 monthly community magazines in 15 months. It folded, everybody was laid off, and he got his Stowe Reporter job back.

Prior to the Stowe Reporter Kearney spent twenty years as executive editor of The Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire, a regional daily that was judged best small daily in New England.

He is past president, New England Society of News Editors; former board member of New England First Amendment Coalition, New England Newspaper and Press Association, New England Press Association, First Amendment Committee of Vermont Press Association, N.H. Committee on Judiciary and the Media.

Two-time juror for Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and delegate in New England exchanges with Russian journalists, and a short lived exchange with Iran journalists.

His awards inlcude: New England Newspaper Hall of Fame, Yankee Quill Award, N.H. First Amendment Award, various writing awards.

Kearney is married, has two children, two stepchildren and five grandchildren.

Dawn DeAngelis oversees the broadcast, online, educational outreach and communications efforts for New Hampshire’s PBS station, She is passionate about producing locally relevant content with impact long after broadcast.

She also acts as liaison for the station’s Community Advisory Board and cultivates and manages strategic partnerships and initiatives. She is a member of the Granite State News Collaborative’s Advisory Team.

She has been at NHPBS since 2000 when she launched the station’s new nightly public affairs program, NH Outlook. She and her excellent team of producers and videographers have won Tellys, regional Emmy awards and nominations, and more than a dozen local New Hampshire Association of Broadcasters awards for excellence.

Before joining NHPBS, DeAngelis worked in San Francisco producing television news programs for the ABC and CBS owned stations. Along with supervising the daily production of live newscasts, she produced special coverage for elections, earthquakes, wildfires and floods.

Kimberly Kirchner is Editor of The Herbalist, a quarterly magazine covering cannabis news and culture in Western Massachusetts published by New England Newspapers Inc. Between issues, she serves as Special Sections Editor for the company’s four newspapers, overseeing content creation, design and production of specialty publications distributed across Berkshire County and Southern Vermont. She lives in Dalton, Mass. with her partner, their cat and just enough lizards to keep things interesting.