SABEW Board of Governors 2008: Biographies

Executive Officers | Members | Ex-Officio

Executive Officers

Bernie Kohn, President
Kohn recently joined the Baltimore Sun as Assistant Managing Editor-Business. Previously he was with The Washington Post as night business editor. Before that he spent three years as business editor at the Tampa Tribune. His Tampa staff received honors in the SABEW Best in Business contest each year. Before moving to Tampa, Kohn was a business reporter at the Charlotte Observer and The Pittsburgh Press for 10 years, primarily covering the airline industry. He was also a night metro editor in Charlotte. He has won numerous regional and state business writing awards and was a Gerald Loeb Awards finalist in 1991 for a story showing how the owner of a former asbestos manufacturer had stripped the company's assets before putting it into bankruptcy. The move left little or nothing for asbestos claimants. Kohn is a graduate of Ball State University, where he was one of the original founders of an annual scholarship for students intending to go into print reporting. He is married and has two sons—Joshua and Jacob.

Greg McCune, Vice President
Greg has been a SABEW board member for three years and served as its Best in Business contest co-chair. During his tenure as co-chair the contest has grown significantly, added a columnist category, and moved to online registration. He has 29 years of business journalism experience including 21 with Thomson Reuters. He has written and edited business news in five countries -- the United States, Canada, Britain, Belgium and Australia. He was Reuters’ chief correspondent in Canada (1992-1996), Washington bureau chief (1996-2000) and Chicago bureau chief (2000-2004). He was appointed Training Editor in 2004, with a key responsibility for career development and training for some 600 Reuters editorial staff in the Americas. He also serves as Thomson Reuters coordinator for efforts to improve newsroom diversity. McCune would like to see SABEW boost its business journalism education efforts to reach more members, expand its membership to new media and broadcast, and intensify efforts to promote diversity in newsrooms.

Rob Reuteman, Treasurer
Reuteman has been business editor at the Rocky Mountain News since May 1997. He has been an editor at the News since 1983, working as state/regional editor, city editor and national editor. Prior to joining the News, he spent three years as city editor at the Longmont (Colo.) Daily Times-Call and two years as a reporter and city editor at the now-defunct Golden (Colo.) Daily Transcript. Reuteman is a native of Milwaukee, but has lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1973. He has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he has also worked as an instructor. Reuteman’s staff has won a variety of Best in Business awards in the section and writing categories.

Kevin Noblet, Secretary
Noblet oversaw the business and financial news operation of Associated Press until March 2008, when he left to pursue a freelance career. Previously, he was AP’s deputy business editor and before that, deputy international editor, helping direct coverage that won two Pulitzer Prizes. A native of Stamford, Conn., he has been a journalist for 30 years, working first for newspapers in Connecticut and then as a foreign correspondent for AP in South America and the Caribbean. He is a graduate of Concordia College in Bronxville and was a 1990-91 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he studied global economics and religion. He also was the Scripps-Howard Visiting Professional at Ohio University’s School of Journalism for 1999-2000. He and his wife, who is a first-grade teacher, have two children: a daughter born in Argentina who is studying economics and political science; and a son born in Chile who is practicing to be Che Guevara.

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Board Members

Term Ending 2009

John T. Corrigan Corrigan is deputy business editor for the Los Angeles Times. He leads a team of six reporters in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., who cover Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission, corporate crime and personal finance. He was project editor for “The Wal-Mart Effect,” the Times’ series that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2004. He has worked at the Times since 1999, where he has overseen stories including Enron, the supermarket strike and the labor crisis at West Coast ports. More recently, he has overseen the paper’s coverage of alleged predatory lending tactics by Orange County-based Ameriquest Mortgage Co. Before joining the Times, Corrigan was an editor in the Business section at the Orange County Register. Previous positions include managing editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal and city editor of the Los Angeles Daily News. Corrigan believes business journalism is becoming increasingly vital and urgent. Coverage of government and politics has dominated the news media for decades, but that is changing rapidly as Americans see more of their lives impacted by commerce and corporations than by government bureaucracies. “I see SABEW as means for business reporters and editors to take their game up a notch. Through the sharing of work and ideas, we can all get better — and ultimately getting better will help convince our publications to devote more and better resources to business coverage. “For most of my career, I’ve been too busy just getting stories in the paper to participate in any professional groups. Now, I’ve been urged to take a shot at the SABEW board, and I figure it’s time to get involved." Corrigan received a bachelor’s degree in Communications Arts and Political Science from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and a second bachelor’s degree in Journalism from California State University Northridge.

Andre Jackson Jackson is an editorial writer with the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Until March 2008, he was business editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Jackson joined the Post-Dispatch in 1987 as a general assignment reporter, covering events ranging from presidential campaigns to a Ku Klux Klan rally. He also worked on special projects, including series on race relations and minority construction contractors. Before becoming AME for business, he was a team leader in business and an editor on the city desk. Jackson holds an MBA degree from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree from Southern Illinois University.

Josh Mills Mills is professor of journalism at Baruch College/CUNY. He has worked as a business journalist for more than 20 years, half of that time at The New York Times as an editor and reporter. Previously, Mills was a reporter at The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.; a reporter and editor at The Associated Press; a rewrite man at the New York Post; a copy editor at Newsday; and a columnist at the Daily News in New York and Bloomberg News. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and other colleges. He continues to work as an editor, concentrating mostly on book projects, and runs workshops around the country for SABEW, the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism and other organizations.

Chris Roush Chris Roush is founding director of the Carolina Business News Initiative, which provides training for professional journalists and students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the author of two books about business journalism – Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication (2004) and Profits and Losses: Business Journalism and its Role in Society (2006) – as well as author or co-author of books about Home Depot (1999), Pacific Coast Feather Co. (2006) and Alex Lee Inc. (2006) He has also taught business journalism at Washington & Lee University and the University of Richmond. After his first job covering cops and courts for the St. Petersburg Times, Roush covered various business beats for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Tampa Tribune, BusinessWeek, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Bloomberg News. He also was editor in chief of SNL Financial, which publishes newsletters and magazines for investors, and started a monthly magazine there called Insurance Investor, now defunct. He has been a contributing editor to Business North Carolina magazine since 2004. Roush has been quoted about business journalism in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and American Journalism Review and has written about business journalism education in Journalism and Mass Communication Educator and The Business Journalist, the publication of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. He also is managing editor of the SABEW web site, blogs about business journalism at www.talkingbiznews.com and writes a twice-monthly blog called “The Roush Rant” for the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, where he is a lead instructor. He has also created a web site on the history of business journalism.

Susan Tompor Tompor has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years. She launched a personal finance column for the Detroit News in 1992 and later moved to the Detroit Free Press. She was named best financial columnist in the Midwest three times by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Tompor’s columns were part of the Detroit Free Press’ winning section entry in SABEW’s 2005 Best in Business competition. Tompor began her journalism career as a labor writer at the former Louisville Times and later worked at the Courier-Journal. She was a college intern at the Chicago-bureau of the Wall Street Journal. And she worked on loan at USA Today during the stock market meltdown in 1987. She has participated at SABEW personal finance conferences regularly since 1996 – and has greatly enjoyed sharing writing and reporting tips, as well as getting more insight on trends facing the industry. She’s very interested in helping the organization encourage strong reporting, lively writing and solid ethics in journalism. She is a 1981 graduate of Michigan State University’s journalism school. She earned an MBA in 1986 from Bellarmine College in Louisville. She has an 8-year-old son, who enjoys playing chess and talking his mother into buying him Transformers, and is married to Richard Burr, associate editor of the editorial page for the Detroit News.

David Wilson Wilson has been with Bloomberg News since 1990, the news service's first year. He works as a stock-market columnist and editor and appears daily on Bloomberg Radio. Wilson previously was managing editor for global stock markets, global training editor, bureau chief in New York and Princeton, and a stock reporter. He co-authored "The Bloomberg Way," an in-house guide to business and financial journalism. Before joining Bloomberg, Wilson worked for eight years at Dow Jones. He started at the News/Retrieval interactive service and spent the last three years as the Dow Jones News Service's stock reporter. Wilson received a bachelor's degree from Monmouth University, where he now serves on the Communication Council, and an MBA degree from Rider University. His wife, Sandy Gonzalez, is an editor at Bloomberg and a former SABEW governor.

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Term Ending 2010

Becky Bisbee Bisbee has been active in SABEW for 11 years, beginning when she was the business editor at The Modesto (Calif.) Bee. She is currently the editor of TBJ. Her day job is business editor at the Seattle Times. She has served as a regional representative and as a judge in the Best in Business contest. As the business editor at the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, she organized the Second Annual Technology Conference in 1998. She is a 1979 graduate of the journalism school at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Bill Choyke Choyke has worked in various capacities in journalism since 1972. Choyke began his professional career at his hometown newspaper in Waukegan, Ill., after graduating from Ohio University in Athens. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1975, and provided coverage in the nation's capital for a number of Texas newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News from 1981 to 1989. Awarded a Batten Fellowship at The Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, he received his MBA in 1991. Choyke joined Gannett Co. in 1993 as marketing director for its newspaper in Iowa City, Iowa, and moved back to the newsroom in 1995, serving primarily in Nashville as an editor, including assistant managing editor for business. He assumed his current duties as Director of Community News of The Virginian-Pilot in June 2008.

Lisa Gibbs Gibbs joined the Miami Herald in 2004, after five years with Money magazine writing about personal finance and investing. Before that, she worked for a variety of South Florida business publications, including Florida Trend magazine and the Daily Business Review (favorite beat: bankruptcy court). She is a graduate of the University of Miami, with a bachelor's degree in economics and journalism.

Diana B. Henriques Henriques joined The New York Times in 1989 as a financial reporter after having been a writer for Barron's for three years. Since joining The Times, she has specialized in reporting on financial fraud, white-collar crime and corporate governance issues. From 1982-86, Henriques was a business writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. From 1976-1981, Henriques worked for The Trenton (N.J.) Times. From 1974-76, she worked as a copy editor for the Palo Alto (Calif.) Times, and from 1971-74 as a government reporter for the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press. Henriques is a graduate of the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University and is the author of three books on business history, including Fidelity's World: The Secret Life and Public Power of the Mutual Fund Giant. She is a frequent lecturer for the American Press Institute in Reston, Va., and the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, and is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors. She is married and lives in Hoboken, N.J.

Jill Jorden Spitz Jorden Spitz is assistant managing editor at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, where she oversees news sections — including Business — and runs the paper’s training program. She was elected to the SABEW board in 2004 and is proud to serve as a voice for small papers. She has been Best in Business contest committee co-chair for the past two years and is on the training committee. Back home, she chairs the Arizona Press Club contest, opened a library for kids reading below grade level through the Rotary Club of Tucson and is treasurer of the First Amendment Coalition of Arizona.

Pamela Yip Yip is the personal finance reporter and columnist for the Dallas Morning News. She joined the Morning News in 1999 from the Houston Chronicle, where she was the personal finance writer and columnist for nine years. At the Morning News, Ms. Yip writes the Monday personal finance centerpiece story and the Money Talk column that appear each Monday in the newspaper. She helps develop training programs and seminars for The Morning News' business news staff, and was a team leader in 2006 for the newspaper's newsroom-wide reporting and writing training program for reporters and editors. Ms. Yip has a bachelor's degree from California State University in Sacramento, where she majored in journalism, with a concentration in economics. She attended the Wharton School of Business' program for financial reporters at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Stockton, Calif., Record. She also worked on loan to USA Today as a business reporter. She has served as a judge for the Gerald Loeb Awards. Ms. Yip started her journalism career in 1979 with United Press International in Los Angeles, covering general news. Before that, she was an intern covering politics at United Press' bureau in Sacramento, Calif. While at the Houston Chronicle, she covered the historic handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 by Great Britain. Ms. Yip has won several reporting awards, including one for best business reporting from the Los Angeles Press Club, as well as business reporting awards from the Houston Press Club and the Hearst Corp., the parent company of the Houston Chronicle. She also won an award for public affairs reporting from the Associated Press Managing Editors Council in California. Yip is a graduate of the University of Houston's financial planner training program.

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Term Ending 2011

Clifford G. Cumber Originally from England, Cliff Cumber is now business editor for The Frederick News-Post, a 45,000 circulation, family-owned Maryland daily like the thousands of truly small U.S. papers he seeks to represent on the SABEW board. He was The FNP’s first webcaster and initiated the paper’s first blog, about business. Under his leadership the Business section has transformed into a dynamic consumer advocate, emphasizing multimedia. Cumber believes in the value of local coverage, the province of small media outlets. SABEW’s future growth will rely strongly on these small operations, both in the U.S. and abroad. The success of a grassroots focus is reflected in The FNP’s own success, growing circulation in a declining market and this year moving to a new, $44-million building constructed to house a $12-million press. Along with his support for local journalism, Cumber hopes SABEW will become an international organization.

Raymond Hennessey Ray Hennessey is director of business news for FOX Business Network, where he manages the day-to-day editorial content for the business channel and FOXBusiness.com. He joined FOX in July 1997 as managing editor of the Web site. Prior to joining FOX, Hennessey spent nearly a decade at Dow Jones & Co., serving for two years as editor of SmartMoney.com. Before that, he was news editor at Dow Jones Newswires, managing the wire’s personal finance and fund industry coverage. He appeared daily on CNBC’s Power Lunch as co-presenter of the CNBC/Dow Jones Halftime Report. He was also the regular guest host of CNBC’s Wake Up Call morning program. Hennessey wrote the IPO Outlook column for The Wall Street Journal from 1999 through 2004, and was a regular contributor to several other business publications. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Trenton State College.

Beth Hunt Beth Hunt was named manager of editorial operations for ACBJ in fall 2006, after 17 years as a reporter and editor for three business journals. Hunt started with ACBJ as a reporter in Orlando, Fla., where she covered tourism. She also wrote an investigative series which tied The Orlando Sentinel to a huge plume of contaminated groundwater in downtown Orlando. In 1994, she was named editor of the Austin Business Journal, as part of a team brought in to revitalize the paper. After five years, Hunt was promoted to editor of Washington Business Journal, where she managed one of the company’s largest newsrooms. In her seven years in D.C., WBJ won three Best in Business awards. As manager of editorial operations for ACBJ, Hunt provides support to its 41 editors — helping with training, recruiting, staff development and idea sharing. She is a graduate of the University of Florida. She and her family live in Charlotte, N.C.

Gail MarksJarvis Gail MarksJarvis is a personal finance columnist for the Chicago Tribune and author of “Saving for Retirement (Without Living Like a Pauper or Winning the Lottery).” Her column runs in newspapers throughout the country. She is a regular commentator for PBS’s Nightly Business Report and CLTV in Chicago. Prior to joining the Tribune in 2005, she was a columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press — covering deal making in the mid 1990s, and later personal finance strategies. She has been named “Best Financial Columnist” by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and has won numerous national and state awards, including the Aviation/Space Writers Association Award for Excellence for her Northwest Airlines coverage in the early 1990s, and a National Clarion Award for human rights reporting on Native American issues. Besides reporting for USA Today, public radio’s Marketplace, and the Wilmington, Del., News Journal, she helped create Minneapolis/St. Paul CityBusiness and was the newspaper’s managing editor. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota, has served on the journalism school’s advisory board and coordinated the school’s mentorship program for students and professional journalists.

David J. Morrow David Morrow became the editor in chief of TheStreet.com in July 2001. In this role, he directs the editorial coverage of the company’s four Web sites: TheStreet.com, RealMoney.com, RealMoney Silver and Mainstreet.com, as well as the company’s 13 newsletters. His staff totals some 50 journalists and more than 60 outside contributors, many of whom are some of the country’s most noted money managers and analysts. Under Morrow’s direction, TheStreet.com won the 2005 Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honor in business journalism, for commentary. TheStreet.com has also won three SABEW awards, and two Best of the Web awards from min, The Media Industry Newsletter. Morrow was selected by min as the best editor of a Web site for 2007. Morrow graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of South Carolina in 1983.

Dawn Wotapka Dawn Wotapka covers public home builders for Dow Jones Newswires. Previously, she covered commercial real estate for the Long Island Business News. She also has worked and interned at several daily newspapers, including The News & Observer, Los Angeles Times and The Dallas Morning News, and SmartMoney magazine. Since being elected to the board last year, she has worked on SABEW’s development, training and college visitation committees. She also helped organize the retail conference call in the fall. If re-elected, she’ll continue reaching out to and representing a wide group of journalists, including the smaller-market and niche publication crowd that might not know about SABEW. She’ll also continue to mentor young journalists, assuring them business remains a specialty with a promising future.

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Ex-Officio

Gail DeGeorge DeGeorge has been a South Florida-based business journalist for more than 20 years, working for regional and national publications. As a reporter, she covered a broad range of stories, from the bankruptcy of Eastern Air Lines to the savings and loan crisis; white collar crimes to the nascent capitalistic endeavors in Cuba. DeGeorge was named Sunday/Enterprise editor at the South-Florida SunSentinel in May, 2007 after serving as Business Editor at the paper since May 1998. The SunSentinel's business coverage has won many state and national awards, including SABEW's "Best in Business" contest. DeGeorge formerly served as the bureau chief for BusinessWeek magazine's Miami office, responsible for covering Florida, the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. She is a native of Detroit, Mich., and holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. She is also the author of The Making of a Blockbuster: How H. Wayne Huizenga Built a Sports and Entertainment Empire from Trash, Grit and Videotape, published in 1996 by John Wiley & Sons.

Dave Kansas Kansas is president of DJ/IAC Ventures LLC, a startup online service that's a partnership of Dow Jones and IAC. Previously, he was editor of The Wall Street Journal's Money & Investing section, editor in chief of TheStreet.com and deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com. Mr. Kansas began his journalism career in 1987 as an engineer and a reporter at the NBC Radio Network. He later worked for New York Newsday as a reporter. He originally joined the Wall Street Journal in 1991 after completing a summer internship on the monitor desk. He was editor in chief of TheStreet.com and then rejoined the Journal in Dec. 2001 as deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com. In January 200l, Mr. Kansas's book "TheStreet.com Guide to Investing in the Internet Era," was published by Doubleday and was an Amazon No. 1 seller.

Jon Lansner Lansner was president of SABEW in 2005-06. He is the Orange County Register's business columnist. Lansner has been a business journalist since 1983. He has been with the Register for 18 years as a writer and editor in the business section. Before coming to Orange County, Lansner spent seven years at the Pittsburgh Press, working in the sports and business departments. He's a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and written three books on investing.

Marty Steffens As SABEW chair, Martha Steffens teaches business and financial journalism, as well as organizing seminars for business journalism professionals. Steffens has taught more than 450 professional in business workshops sponsored the Southern Newspaper Publishers Assn. and SABEW. She assumed the chair in 2002, after a 30-year career in newspapers, including executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner, and earlier the Press & Sun Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y. Steffens' two-year economic project in Binghamton, which inspired citizens to take a proactive role in planning the community's economic future, has been studied by academics around the world. She was an editor at the Los Angeles Times business desk. She held other editing and reporting roles at the Minneapolis Star, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Orange County Register, Dayton Daily News and Evansville (Ind.) Courier. Steffens is a frequent lecturer at conferences across the United States, and has lectured in Norway, Jamaica, Italy and the Czech Republic. For four years, she worked with Colombian journalists, helping them plan community-based projects. In summer 2002, she was professional in residence at the Moscow Press Development Institute, training Russian journalists in newspaper management. She was part of a U.S. delegation to address the need for aggressive business reporting in China. Steffens is a graduate of Indiana University, and is a past officer of the New York State Associated Press Association. She has served on the boards of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and CBS Marketwatch.

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