Ballots will be cast during SABEW19 for six open SABEW Board of Governors seats with three-year terms ending in 2022. If you are interested in running send your statement of intent, bio and photo to Aimee O’Grady at aogrady@sabew.org by next Tuesday May 7.
Voting members will receive their ballot information directly from online voting service provider Opavote.org.
Board Candidates as of 4/30/19 (listed in alphabetical order)
Megan Davies
Editor/reporter, Thomson Reuters
I’d be honored to serve a term as a SABEW board member. I’m passionate about journalism and dedicated to the field of business reporting. I’ve held various leadership roles within Reuters in the United States and Russia and reported on a wide variety of business topics. I’m particularly passionate about enterprise reporting. I’d be keen to be involved in SABEW to further high standards of business journalism and try and encourage the next generation of reporters.
Alan Deutschman
Professor and Reynolds Endowed Chair of Business Journalism
University of Nevada, Reno
I have enjoyed chairing committees as a judge for the Best in Business Awards, and I would like to get more involved with SABEW by serving on the board. For the past eight years I’ve been a professor of business journalism, and I would like to help expand SABEW’s outreach efforts to students and faculty on college campuses. We’ve seen rising interest in business journalism at universities, and I think that SABEW is the perfect organization for bringing together practitioners and professors. We can do a lot more to attract talented newcomers into our field and to provide valuable training and resources for teachers at j-schools and liberal-arts programs. We can also help to lead the public conversations on campuses about many issues.
Before joining the faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno, I spent 22 years working as a business journalist in New York and San Francisco. I covered Silicon Valley for Fortune and Fast Company, wrote the “Profit Motive” column for GQ, and contributed to Vanity Fair and New York Magazine. I’m also the author of four books including The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. In my current position as a business journalism professor, I can spend as much as 20% of my time on service to my field. It would be an honor to devote that time and energy to serving on the SABEW board.
Desiree Hanford
Lecturer, Medill/Northwestern University
I would like to be a member of SABEW’s board because I have a great amount of respect for SABEW’s mission and my fellow members, and I would like to collaborate with fellow board members to further the organization’s mission. I think it’s important to cultivate and nurture the next generation of business reporters – those who are in college and just beginning their careers – in addition to supporting veteran business reporters and editors.
I’ve been involved in SABEW for a few years, helping to run the student newsroom during past spring conferences and judging the Best in Business Awards. I recently joined the Training Committee and look forward to contributing to its work. I can also contribute through member recruitment, conference and workshop planning and more. I am happy to lend a hand wherever it is needed.
I teach a number of undergraduate and graduate courses at Medill, including business and money reporting, and I was a business reporter at Dow Jones Newswires before joining Medill’s faculty. In addition to Chicago and Evanston, Medill has a presence in Washington, San Francisco and Qatar.
I’ve been fortunate to bring Medill students to SABEW’s fall and spring conferences, and each time the students have been grateful for the connections they’ve made and inspired by the work of fellow SABEW members. They’ve left the conferences excited about their futures in business reporting, and I’ve left invigorated by their enthusiasm and humbled to spend time with the best in the industry.
I would be honored to serve as a SABEW board member. Thank you for considering me in the upcoming election.
James Madore
Economics writer, Newsday
I’m seeking re-election to the SABEW Board of Governors to continue my work on the group’s finances and advocacy of the First Amendment.
I have had the privilege these past three years to chair the Finance Committee and to serve on the Executive Committee.
The Finance Committee, which includes rank-and-file members and board governors, meets monthly with the executive director and bookkeeper to review income and expense reports. The committee also reviews the proposed budget and audit every year.
Thanks to the fine work of many, I can report that SABEW’s finances are strong and our reporting is transparent. The Finance Committee provides advice and oversight to the executive director on all financial matters.
I have found my work as vice chairman of the First Amendment Committee to be very rewarding, particularly SABEW’s support for the independence of federal statistical agencies.
I hope to continue this important work should I be fortunate enough to win re-election.
In addition, I hope to work with other governors to increase the involvement of rank-and-file members in SABEW activities. The organization’s greatest strength is its membership, which on a daily basis provides news that’s essential to the financial lives of millions of people in the United States and Canada.
Thank you for your consideration.
Jenny Paurys
Managing editor, S&P Global Market Intelligence
When I became a business journalist in 2005, I discovered a profession that prized curiosity, analytical thinking and explanatory prose. I feel these remain the central attributes of business journalism, but the importance of the craft has grown considerably in the intervening years. Globalization, driven by the information age, is now the shaping force of the world economy; markets, investors and business owners depend more than ever on finding trusted sources of information to help them navigate this increasingly complex ecosystem.
I still work for the newsroom I joined in 2005, though it has more than quadrupled in size since then. Our news organization is fortunate to be expanding while others are contracting, based in part on our dedicated audience, sector-focused approach to journalism and the longtime practice of integrating data into our reporting. I feel these attributes of our newsroom provide me with a unique perspective that I can bring to my role at SABEW.
Further, my position as managing editor provides me with the opportunity to travel widely and utilize that travel to help SABEW continue to build its membership, especially outside of the U.S. I would like to use my base in Arlington, Va., to help build participation by D.C.-area journalists. Finally, I would like to support SABEW’s ongoing work to modernize its website and collateral to help attract new business media to our ranks.
My initial half-year on the SABEW board offered me a set of peers I had not found before: a group of professionals from competing newsrooms who volunteer their time and resources to collaborate for the singular purpose of elevating business journalism. These initial months have so inspired me that I am seeking your support for election to the board, in the hopes that I can work with you to move SABEW forward into its next chapter.
Scott Wenger
Group Editorial Director, SourceMedia
I look forward to helping my fellow business journalists bolster and develop new skills and connections to make the work we do even more relevant and valuable to our readers.
I am eager to help build on what I see as SABEW’s core competencies: training, networking, inspiring and recruiting. And, most crucially, developing practical ideas to share so we can best engage and grow our readerships. I also look forward to helping SABEW advance its mission of global expansion.
A core goal of mine will be to strengthen SABEW at a time of revolutionary and exciting changes in our field, which have seen the creation of small organizations that have proved so potent, digital journalism powerhouses and industry-specific content organizations like my own that aspire to deliver savvy analysis, thoughtful enterprise and deeply reported multimedia investigative projects.
Over the years — from my current role as a group editorial director at SourceMedia, where I manage Financial Planning, Employee Benefit News and four additional brands, to earlier years at The Wall Street Journal, The Hartford Courant, CNBC, CNN, the New York Daily News and as a health care analyst at Alex. Brown & Sons — I’ve seen just how impactful business journalism can be, and needs to be.
