Deadline Club Board of Governors for 2023
Prepared by the Nominations Committee:
Colin DeVries (chair), John C. Long, Steve Dunlop, and Peter Szekely (ex-officio)
Approved by board on Nov. 21, 2023
Approved by a membership vote on Dec. 5, 2023
Imad Khan, secretary, is a tech, AI and video game reporter who’s been covering these spaces since 2013. He joined the Deadline Club in 2016 and has been an active member, volunteering with events and other competitions. Imad currently covers Google and AI for CNET, and has bylines at the New York Times, the Washington Post, ESPN, Men’s Health Magazine, Wired, among others. Imad graduated from the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in 2017 and is a member of the Asian American Journalism Association, South Asian Journalism Association and the New York Video Game Critics Circle.
Executive Council
Victoria Bert, a media professional and accomplished news producer with over three decades of experience, has carved her career path at renowned media institutions such as CBS, MSNBC, WNYW, WPIX, News12, BBC Productions, Paramount Television, 20th Century Fox, Comedy Central, and King World. Presently, she is senior executive producer at NY1, where she oversees weekend programming. In addition to her distinguished career, she is an active member of esteemed organizations such as the Producers Guild of America, NYWIFT, Women in Media, NYWIFT: New York Women in Film and Television, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the NYABJ. Her professional commitment extends beyond the confines of the control room, as she harbors a deep passion for addressing critical issues such as food insecurity and homelessness in New York City. This commitment is exemplified by her dedicated involvement on the board of the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter.
Alessandra Freitas is a multiple-award winning multimedia journalist currently working as an Associate Producer at CNN. Alessandra has previously worked at Dow Jones, ProPublica and HuffPost. She started her career as a reporter in Brazil, and has since produced remarkable multimedia reporting, working in the intersectionality of journalism, innovation & technology and business. She is skilled in video & audio production, investigative reporting, data journalism, and has developed groundbreaking projects with emerging platforms, such as the first news briefings for voice platforms for Barron’s and HuffPost. She has also published investigative pieces with CNN and ProPublica. Most notably, she co-reported on ProPublica’s Pulitzer finalist maternal mortality project, which won the George Polk Award and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. The investigation also sparked debates at government and high institution levels, fueling policy changes around the issue. Alessandra came to the U.S. in 2016 after being awarded a scholarship for the Studio 20 Master’s program program at NYU, where she studied innovation in journalism and multimedia storytelling. As a graduate student, she was the project manager and video lead for an interactive mini-documentary series that won a New York Emmy in 2018.
Pamela Hamilton has turned to the executive council after being a member of the Professional Council since 2013 and a year on the executive council prior. As founder of PLH Media LLC, she serves as a producer, journalist and media consultant, shedding light on significant figures, events and issues in America. A seasoned television producer and on-air reporter, she earned her credentials at NBC News where she served on staff for nearly fifteen years and covered some of the world’s most notable news stories of the 21st Century, including 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, the war in Iraq, presidential elections, major natural disasters, and Hollywood Awards. She has produced stories on politics, the environment, health, women’s issues, and much more, and coordinated the entertainment unit of Weekend Today. As an on-air reporter, she has interviewed iconic figures in music, film, and business for NBC’s Today Show, Weekend, and WNBC’s Today in New York. Her film work includes producer of Grateful Dawg (Sony Classics), winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Newport International Film Festival, and The Empire State Building’s Return to Glory.
Frank Posillico is a New York City–based Emmy and Murrow award-winning producer, cinematographer, and editor. Currently he works as a senior producer at Cheddar News working on documentary video series. He was previously at Spectrum News and the New York Daily News, where he helped re-launch the newspaper’s video unit. He is a graduate of the Stony Brook University School of Journalism and serves on the alumni board.
Daniel Roberts is the Editor in Chief at Variant, a crypto investment firm. Prior to Variant, he was Editor in Chief at the financial news site Decrypt. Before that, he spent five years at Yahoo Finance and five years at Fortune. He’s also written for Sports Illustrated, WSJ, New York Daily News, New York Post, Vice, TIME, Salon, Deadspin, The Paris Review, The Daily Beast, and many more. He is the author of the 2013 business book “Zoom: Surprising Ways to Supercharge Your Career.” He’s been on the Deadline Club board since 2013 and also serves as a trustee of the Carnegie Fund for Authors.
Sheryl Huggins Salomon is a veteran journalist who is the advisory board chair for the politics news outlet City & State New York and the director of strategic communications at the NYU Silver School of Social Work. She is a former editorial leader of digital news outlets such as The Root, AOL Black Voices, NewsOne.com and FSB.com (Fortune Small Business), as well as a former contributing writer for Everyday Health and Livestrong.com.
Anamaria Silic is a journalist based in Brooklyn. She was a news editor for LinkedIn and covered tech and international politics for BBC News, The Intercept, and TechCrunch. Her expertise spans topics including artificial intelligence, corporate malpractice, and the ever-evolving complexities of climate change. Anamaria has reported from Palestine, Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and across the United States. She is fluent in German, Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian. In her spare time, she’s an avid chess player and a cyclist.
Isaac Taylor is a platform editor for WSJ Pro, The Wall Street Journal’s premium subscription service. His responsibilities have included monitoring engagement data and analytics, deploying newsletters, operating WSJ Pro social media accounts and writing for private equity, venture capital and the Central Banking Research section. In 2019, he became the youngest Black person to become an editor at The Wall Street Journal, one year after starting as a news assistant. He was a member of the Journal’s “The Tulsa Race Massacre | 100 Years Later” project, which was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. The project also won the Society for News Design’s Award of Excellence. Isaac previously was the communications coordinator at the headquarters for the Society of Professional Journalists. He has a proven history of curating high-level sources in the celebrity sphere including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Cameron Diaz, Bryan Cranston and Chris Paul.
Michelle Watson is a news editor for CNN’s New York Bureau. Prior to working for the New York Bureau, she worked for CNN’s National Assignment desk in Atlanta where she worked on stories all across the nation. Throughout her career she’s been deployed on two occasions, once for Hurricane Irma in 2017 and again for the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting Parkland, Florida. Prior to CNN, she worked for Legacy Worldwide, as a Television Program Copywriter and Social Media Engagement Specialist where she wrote scripts, produced for shows, and worked on branding the company. She has also been a copywriter for Gwinnett Magazine covering local businesses, education and trends for the second most populous county in Georgia. Her interests include hiking, drinking tea, toy poodles (primarily her own toy poodle, Jackson) and anything to do with macaroni and cheese. She was a 2021 IRE fellow and a 2022 Dori Maynard Diversity fellow for SPJ.
Professional Council
Betsy Ashton served as president in both 1994 and 2000, and was co-chair of the SPJ National Convention that the Deadline Club hosted in New York City in 2004. She was the first woman to serve as president of the Washington, D.C. chapter of SPJ in 1979. She also served as vice chairwoman of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, and won the 2007 Wells Memorial Key for outstanding service to the national society. Betsy was a radio and television news reporter and anchorwoman in Washington, D.C., for ten years before coming to New York as consumer reporter for WCBS-TV and the CBS Morning News in 1982. Betsy Ashton’s Guide to Living On Your Own, was published by Little, Brown in 1988. She has written for numerous publications but now works full time as a portrait artist, and serves on the board of directors of the Friends of Thirteen/WNET-TV, New York’s Public Television station. She is also a professional and highly successful portrait artist.
George Bodarky is the news and public affairs director at WFUV FM, an NPR affiliate station, based on the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University in the Bronx. Bodarky is a past president and current board member of Public Radio News Directors, Inc. and a past president and current board member of the New York State Associated Press Association. Bodarky is an award-winning journalist who trains undergraduate and graduate students at Fordham University in multiplatform journalism. He is also an adjunct professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is widely known for his vocal coaching and journalism training. Over the years his students have won countless awards and have secured employment as anchors, reporters, writers and producers in commercial and public television and radio outlets across the nation. Prior to working at WFUV, Bodarky spent many years as an anchor, reporter and news manager in commercial radio and television.
Allan Chernoff is CEO of Chernoff Communications, which provides writing, video production, media training and media strategy services. He is author of The Tailors of Tomaszow, a communal memoir and history of Holocaust survivors. For 11 years Allan Chernoff was a CNN senior correspondent, reporting for all CNN networks as well as writing for CNN.com and CNNMoney.com. Previously, he was senior correspondent for CNBC where he reported for both CNBC and NBC News for a decade. Allan’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. His honors include six Deadline Club Awards, two National Headliner Awards, three Peabody Awards, and a DuPont Award. Allan is a graduate of Brown University. He tweets from @allanchernoff.
Ivette Davila-Richards is a freelance national assignment editor at Fox News Channel, where she researches and approves stories of national interest from various social media, viewer tips, and headquarters’ affiliate stations nationwide. She fact-checks breaking news for accuracy on developing stories and monitors social media outlets such as Dataminr and Broadcastify for up-to-date information. Previously, she was an associate producer at CBS News. Davila-Richards is the current secretary-treasurer of the national Society of Professional Journalists, the second-ever Latina elected to this position. She is also the vice chair of SPJ’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee, is a past SPJ Dori Maynard Diversity Fellow, and currently serves on the Deadline Club chapter’s Executive Council. Her passions include mentoring and producing networking opportunities for friends, colleagues and students, many of whom attend CUNY’s Baruch College, where she received her BA in corporate communications.
Colin DeVries is assistant director of media relations at NYU Langone Health. Prior he worked over nine years as a newspaper editor and reporter for the New York Daily News, the News Corp-owned TimesLedger Newspapers group in Queens and daily and weekly papers in upstate New York. He has served on the board since 2012, first as assistant treasurer, then treasurer and various vice president positions. He was national chair of the SPJ Membership Committee from April 2019 to September 2020. He has a master’s degree in communication and media from Rutgers University, an advanced certificate in public health from CUNY School of Public Health, an advanced certificate in nonprofit management from NYU Wagner, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University at Albany, where his journalism career began writing for the Albany Student Press. He also teaches public relations at Hunter College.
Keith Kelly is editor-in-chief of the Straus Media newspaper group, including its four papers and websites covering Manhattan: Our Town, West Side Spirit, Chelsea News and Our Town Downtown. Prior to that, he was freelancing for a variety of publications including the New York Post, Crain’s New York Business, the Daily Mail and the Village Sun following a 23-year run as the “Media Ink” columnist for the New York Post (July 1998 to July 2021). Keith also served as media columnist at the New York Daily News under Pete Hamill from March 1997 to July 1998, senior editor at Advertising Age from 1994 to 1997, editor of Folio: First Day from 1992 to 1994 and editorial director of MagazineWeek from 1988 to 1992. Earlier, he worked at McGraw-Hill Publications, freelanced out of Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1980 and started his journalism career at the Smithtown News and the Northport Observer.
Christopher Maag is a columnist for USA Today and The Record newspaper in New Jersey. His stories combine investigative reporting, narrative writing, and characters who leap off the page. A graduate of Grinnell College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Maag’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Fortune, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, Mother Jones. He has worked as a staff writer at monthly magazines, daily newspapers and alternative news weeklies. A 2019 fellow in literary journalism at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, he is the 2021 Pulliam Foundation Editorial Fellow.
Katina Paron, MJE works at the intersection of teens and journalism. For 25+ years she’s helped create byline opportunities for young reporters and training to journalism teachers. She is the manager of Teach for Chicago Journalism at Medill (Northwestern University); editor of Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Dateline: CUNY and Ms. magazine’s The Future is Ms. teen-written column; and an adjunct associate professor at Hunter College. She was the senior project editor on The Trace’s award-winning national youth media gun violence reporting project, “Since Parkland” and founding editor of Teen Voices, a global girl news site at Women’s eNews. As the former managing director of the youth news agency, Children’s PressLine, she has worked with thousands of teens to develop professional quality media that has been published in the Daily News, Newsday, Metro, Ebony, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and ESPN.com, among other places. She’s written about youth journalism for The New York Times, The Daily News, WNYC SchoolBook and more. She is the author of the comic book-style high school textbook, “A NewsHound’s Guide to Student Journalism” (McFarland). You can find her on Twitter and Instagram.
Michael Rizzo is the director of the journalism program and an assistant professor at St. John’s University. He is the former general manager/executive director for news and sports at ABC News Radio and was a news writer, producer and manager at ABC-TV News. He was also a managing editor at Fios1 News and News12 and a senior producer at The Daily news app. He is also a freelance reporter for The Tablet newspaper. Michael became a Deadline Club member in 2014. He graduated from Fordham University with a B.A. in Communications and holds an M.B.A. from St. John’s University.
J. Alex Tarquinio is a Resident Correspondent at the United Nations headquarters in New York. She has covered politics, finance and culture on three continents. Her work can be found in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Politico, San Francisco Chronicle, and the late, great International Herald Tribune. She was the first Investing Editor at Forbes.com, the Regional Special Sections Editor at The Real Deal, and a Staff Writer at Smart Money Magazine and at American Banker. Her profile of Josephine Baker was honored in the annual excellence in journalism awards of the Silurians Press Club. Ms. Tarquinio received a German Marshall Fund journalism fellowship for coverage of the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus. She is a past national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in the United States and a past president of the Deadline Club in New York City.
Advisory Council (Past presidents)
Steve Dunlop serves on the advisory council and served as president in 1992. He was morning news editor and writer for WOR Radio in the late 1970’s, a street reporter and anchor for New York’s Ten O’Clock News (WNYW-TV) in the 1980’s, as well as field correspondent for WNBC-TV’s Today in New York in the mid-1990’s. In 1999, following reporting stints at Fox and Reuters, Dunlop was named a correspondent for CBS News, where he was assigned to the network’s Bulletin Center. He was responsible for special reports as well as breaking news updates to the CBS Evening News. Currently, he is the president of Dunlop Media, Inc., a New York-based communications training firm.
John C. Long is a 49-year SPJ member; a former Louisville, Kentucky, chapter president; and currently also a member of the Columbus-based Central Ohio Pro chapter, for which he hosts an annual First Amendment program. He was a writer, editor and executive at The Courier-Journal in Louisville for 30 years and an editor at The Wall Street Journal for 10, sharing in a staff Pulitzer at each paper. He teaches journalism at St. John’s and Hofstra universities; is a founder and the director of the Main Street Free Press Museum, a First Amendment center in Fredericktown, Ohio; and in 1961-66 served on the founding staff of the Peace Corps.
Claire Regan has been an active member of the club’s executive council for more than 20 years, most recently as president. She is an assistant professor of journalism and faculty adviser to the student newspaper at Wagner College on Staten Island. She completed a year-long fellowship in journalism ethics and has been a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. Her editing and design work for the Staten Island Advance has been honored by the Associated Press, the New York Press Club and the Society for News Design. Three Rubes she earned from the Deadline Club for spot news presentation are prominently displayed in her office. In 2014, Regan received the Charles O’Malley Award for Teaching Excellence from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. She is a board member and past president of the New York State Associated Press Association, a judging facilitator for the Society for News Design and a frequent presenter at conferences for journalism students.
