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Linda Petersen is the managing editor of The Valley Journals, a group of 15 free, total market coverage, monthly community papers in the Salt Lake Valley, Utah.
As projects editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, Sonny Albarado supervises reporters on investigative and explanatory journalism assignments. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, La.
Carolyn S. Carlson is co-chairman of the SPJ FOI Committee’s Subcommittee On Campus Crime. For the past decade, she has been a leader in the effort to improve public access to records involving student discipline and crime on the nation’s college campuses. She founded the multi-organizational Campus Courts Task Force, which received an SPJ Freedom of Information Award in 1998 for its success in changing federal law to increase public access to college disciplinary records involving serious crime. Carlson has a doctorate from Georgia State University. She is an assistant professor of journalism and citizen media at Kennesaw State University. She is a former political press secretary and a longtime reporter and editor for The Associated Press. She was national president of SPJ in 1989-1990, chaired the SPJ Ethics Committee in 1993-94, received SPJ’s Wells Key in 1994, and was named to Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers in 2002, 2005 and 2006.
The humor and commentary of David Chartrand have appeared in publications throughout North America. His essays on families, children, education, and health issues are distributed to daily newspapers by Universal Press Syndicate as well as by his own distribution company.
Jodi Cleesattle is a deputy attorney general for the California Department of Justice, where she works in the Civil Division in San Diego. Prior to joining the Attorney General’s Office, she was a partner at Ross, Dixon & Bell, LLP, in San Diego, where she handled media law cases and other commercial litigation. Jodi previously worked as a daily news reporter for The Lancaster (Ohio) Eagle-Gazette, covering politics and legal issues, and was founding editor of The National Jurist, a national magazine for law students. Jodi serves on SPJ's national board as Region 11 director and on SPJ’s national FOI Committee and Legal Defense Fund Committee. She is SPJ Project Sunshine Chair for Southern California and a board member of the SPJ San Diego Pro Chapter and was president of the San Diego Pro Chapter from 2007-09. She also serves as editor of Lawyers Club News, the monthly newsletter of Lawyers Club of San Diego, a bar association dedicated to the advancement of women in the law and society, and she freelances for San Diego Lawyer magazine.
Carol Cole-Frowe is a veteran journalist and full-time freelancer, writing for daily newspapers, Web sites and regional and national magazines. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma. 
David Cuillier, a former newspaper reporter and editor, is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism at the University of Arizona. He researches public attitudes toward freedom of information and is one of the SPJ newsroom trainers for acquiring government documents.
Charles N. Davis is executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Mike Farrell serves as director of the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center at the University of Kentucky and as an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications. He began teaching as an adjunct in 1980 at Northern Kentucky University, continued as a graduate teaching assistant at UK in 1996, and has been a full-time faculty member there since 2000. He won the college teaching award in 2006.
Ana-Klara H. Anderson is a litigation associate with the law firm of Thomas & LoCicero PL in Tampa, FL. She represents both English and Spanish-language media clients in the areas of First Amendment law, contests and sweepstakes, commercial litigation and arts & entertainment. In her media/First Amendment practices, Ana-Klara provides pre-broadcast and pre-publication review and newsgathering advice and counsels media clients concerning Internet content and publication practices. She also defends against subpoenas to reporters, defamation, and privacy claims, and prosecutes actions concerning access to government records and proceedings.
Robert Leger is opinions editor at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, responsible for the editorial and op-ed pages of the main paper and its community sections. He was president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2002-03 and has served on the SDX board since 2000. He won the Wells Memorial Key, the Society's highest honor, in 2012.
Christina Locke is a University of Florida doctoral student studying media law and policy. Locke has worked as a reporter for the Okeechobee News and a copy editor for the Gainesville Sun. A graduate of the University of Florida Levin College of Law, Locke practiced as a civil litigator in Atlanta, Georgia prior to returning to UF to pursue her Ph.D. She has published several scholarly articles on freedom of information and media law issues.
Donald W. Meyers has been at a reporter at The Salt Lake Tribune since July 2007. Prior to that, he was the editorial page editor of the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah for more than eight years, as well as having been a reporter at daily and weekly newspapers in Utah and New Jersey. He majored in Journalism at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey and Brigham Young University. He is a past-president of the Utah Headliners Chapter, Society of Professional Journalists and is a member of the Utah Foundation for Open Government.
Hoa Quach is a local editor for AOL Patch.com, covering Poway, Calif. She is also an English editor for Global Voices Online.
Joey Senat, an associate journalism professor at Oklahoma State University, writes a blog, foioklahoma.blogspot.com, for FOI Oklahoma Inc., a nonprofit representing a statewide coalition of open government advocates.
Andy Thibault is author of Law & Justice In Everyday Life and blogs at The Cool Justice report. Cool Justice was inspired by "justice stories" in The NY Daily News and the work of writers including Breslin, Buchanan, Ellroy, Hammett, Zinn and Chandler. The column by that name ran in The Connecticut Law Tribune from 2000 - 2006. Thibault, semi-retired, is a cancer survivor. He served as a writing professor and a mentor in the MFA program at Western CT State University and also taught at Northwestern CT Community College and the University of Hartford. He works occasionally as a private investigator and writes a feature story or column now and then. Thibault delivered the 2004 Pew Memorial Lecture In Journalism at Widener University, Chester, Pa. He chairs a fund that has awarded nearly $200k to young writers, the CT Young Writers Trust, now in its 14th year. In 2011 he taught a 5-session seminar on state & federal FOI laws for the RCNewsroomCafe. Thibault served as a commissioner with Connecticut’s FOI Commission from 1995-96.
Host your own First Amendment Free Food Festival, and let SPJ pitch in!
For more than a century, SPJ has been fighting for a free press and teaching students about the First Amendment. Now SPJ is offering $250 grants to student chapters willing to host a unique educational event that’s literally a food fight.
The First Amendment Free Food Festival (FAFFF) is an award-winning event recently featured on national television. Here’s how it works...
Students symbolically sign away their First Amendment rights in exchange for a free lunch. While they wait their food, a “goon squad” bans all talking in line (because there’s no freedom of speech).
Once students get their food, they can’t sit together (no right to peaceably assemble). And if they don’t like their food, goons point them to an empty complaint table (no right to petition for the redress of grievances).
All the while, the goon squad is rousting student prayer circles (no freedom of religion) and even reporters trying to cover the event (no freedom of the press).
Since it was created in 2006, more than 20 FAFFFs have been hosted around the country — the majority by SPJ chapters. That includes the 2009 Student Chapter of the Year at the University of Florida, which has made the FAFFF an annual event.
SPJ will award $250 grants to 10 chapters who want to host an FAFFF on their own campuses. While there’s no deadline to apply, you must host your FAFFF by May 31, 2011. Once all the grant money has been awarded, we will stop taking applications. Chapters will submit their receipts and be reimbursed after the program. Along with the receipts, each grant-awarded chapter will submit a one-page recap following the program.
The money can be used as reimbursement for food, props, and promotions — although SPJ can give you oodles of good advice on how to raise more money from other places and how to save money in some novel ways.
FAFFF creators Michael Koretzky and Michele Boyet, from SPJ’s South Florida Pro Chapter, provide more details at koretzky.com/free. If you have questions, email Koretzky at michael@koretzky.com.
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