Managing the Community

PANELIST BIOS
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Jan Schaffer, J-Lab’s Executive Director, left daily journalism to lead pioneering journalism reform initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive journalism and participatory journalism.

She launched J-Lab in 2002 to spotlight new forms of digital storytelling that engage citizens. J-Lab (www.J-Lab.org) rewards novel ideas through the $15,000 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. It funds cutting-edge citizens media ventures through its New Voices (www.J-NewVoices.org) project and it provides technical support for community news projects through www.J-Learning.org.

Schaffer previously directed the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million, 10-year initiative that funded more than 120 pilot news projects that engaged people better in public life and provided training workshops and resources for newsrooms and classrooms.

A former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, she brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to her work. As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of six Philadelphia homicide detectives and won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. Also while covering federal courts, she broke the Philadelphia Abscam story about the FBI sting operation that used agents posing as Arab sheiks. She was sentenced to jail for six months for refusing to reveal her sources; the sentence was stayed on appeal. She also held a range of reporting and editing positions on the city desk, the national desk and the business news department.

She earned both her bachelors and masters degrees from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

Mary Lou Fulton is vice president of audience development for The Bakersfield Californian and founder of The Northwest Voice and its online companion, NorthwestVoice.com, pioneering citizen journalism efforts building on contributions from community residents.

Fulton has worked for both The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times, where she was a community news reporter and editor for six years. While in Los Angeles, she also served as the founding editor of City Times, the community news section created to improve coverage of central Los Angeles after the 1992 riots. She later served as managing editor of washingtonpost.com.

She had held senior management positions at a number of online companies including AOL, GeoCities and HomePage.com before returning to journalism in 2003 with The Bakersfield Californian.

Fulton holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Arizona State University and a Master of Public Administration degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Chris Muldrow is content director for Internet operations at Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., in Birmingham, AL, which owns 130 papers nationwide.

He was formerly editor of Fredericksburg.com, the online publication of The Fredericksburg (VA) Free Lance-Star and kept the newspaper on the leading edge of technology. As The Free Lance-Star’s Director of Internet, Muldrow oversaw the FredTalk discussion board, which now boasts more than 7,000 users. It provides a forum for area residents and a source for news leads for the newspaper’s reporters.

He gave Fredericksburg.com the distinction of being one of the first newspaper sites in the country to display – direct from a Multiple Listing Service – 100 percent of area real estate listings.

The newspaper also produced a wireless edition in 2001 as part of the NAA Wireless Pilot Project, where Muldrow helped to create a Local News Gateway that allowed users to find wireless editions of their local newspapers.

Muldrow has also served as a consultant to the new media team at Cox Interactive when it wanted to develop a real estate Web site.

He received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of South Carolina Honors College in Columbia, SC. Muldrow had previously worked as a copy editor and page designer at The State in Columbia and as an editor for the South Carolina Press Association.

Hillary Rhodes has just joined The Associated Press’ asap team, a new service designed to attract 18-to-34-year old readers with multimedia and other cutting-edge content."

Previously, she was editor of the teen publications Your Mom and YourMomOnline.com, a division of The Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, that were launched in 2004. The Your Mom project originated in the Medill School of Journalism‘s graduate Media Management Project class, and Rhodes and her fellow students were able to successfully pitch the idea of a teen-driven publication to executives at Lee Enterprises, which owns The Times.

The Medill team acknowledged to Editor & Publisher that the name Your Mom was peculiar: “The name conjures up memories of jokes we don’t like to admit we find funny, but Northwestern University’s Media Management Center also reports that today’s teens are very close with their parents, so the name works on two levels.”

Rhodes previously produced The Writers Almanac and did research for National Public Radio personality Garrison Keillor on his show, Prairie Home Companion. She received her master’s degree from Medill at Northwestern University.

J-Lab is a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism. It is a spin-off of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism (www.pewcenter.org). © 2004 University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism