Join the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona for an informative webinar about the importance and impact of supporting local news and information. It will feature insights and perspectives from three national experts: Dean Baquet with The New York Times, Teresa Gorman with Democracy Fund, and Christina Shih with Press Forward.
This webinar will also highlight work being done in Southern Arizona, including recent grantmaking efforts by the Local News Initiative of Southern Arizona and the exciting introduction of Press Forward Southern Arizona as one of the newest additions to Press Forward Locals, a network of chapters working to expand resources for local news across the country.
About Our Presenters
Dean Baquet leads a local investigative Times fellowship. He served as executive editor of The New York Times from May 2014 until June 2022. Mr. Baquet served in the highest-ranked position in The Times’s newsroom and oversaw The New York Times news report in all its various forms.
Before being named executive editor, Mr. Baquet was managing editor of The Times. He previously served as Washington bureau chief for the paper from March 2007 to September 2011. Mr. Baquet rejoined The Times after several years at the Los Angeles Times, where he was editor of the newspaper since 2005, after serving as managing editor since 2000.
Previously, Mr. Baquet had been National editor of The New York Times since July 1995, after having served as deputy Metro editor since May 1995.
Mr. Baquet joined The Times in April 1990 as a Metro reporter. In May 1992, he became special projects editor for the business desk, and in January 1994, he held the same title, but operated out of the executive editor’s office.
Before joining The Times, he reported for the Chicago Tribune from December 1984 to March 1990, and before that, for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans for nearly seven years.
While at the Chicago Tribune, Mr. Baquet served as associate Metro editor for investigations and was chief investigative reporter, covering corruption in politics and the garbage-hauling industry.
He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in March 1988 when he led a team of three in documenting corruption in the Chicago City Council, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 in the investigative reporting category. Mr. Baquet has also received numerous local and regional awards.
Mr. Baquet majored in English at Columbia University from 1974 to 1978.
Teresa Gorman is Associate Director for the Public Square program at Democracy Fund. Teresa leads the Public Square’s Equitable Journalism portfolio, which seeks to ensure all communities see their needs, concerns, and dreams reflected in the public square. She serves on the advisory boards of the NC Local News Lab Fund and Colorado Media Project, and the board of the American Journalism Project. She also serves as co-chair of the Press Forward Local working group. Teresa joined Democracy Fund in 2016.
Previously, Teresa spent her career working at the intersection of local-national collaboration and transformation in journalism. Highlights included time at the Association of Independentsin Radio, a network that supports a global community of audio freelancers, at NPR on their first editorial training team dedicated to local member stations, and as one of PBS NewsHour’s first ever social media editors.
Teresa got her first entry into journalism as a newspaper delivery girl when she was ten, followed by a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University.
Christina Shih is the associate director of Press Forward. Previously, Shih served as the senior vice president of revenue at the News Revenue Hub, where she was instrumental in helping the organization grow from a pilot project into a multimillion-dollar mission-driven operation that has helped newsrooms across the country launch membership programs. From 2017 to 2022, she served as a lead partner on NewsMatch by helping to develop trainings, campaign toolkits and coach individual newsrooms on fundraising strategies.
Prior to launching the News Revenue Hub, Shih oversaw the membership and events program at Voice of San Diego. She helped implement digital marketing strategies that increased the member base, deepened relationships with readers, and established VOSD as a model for other newsrooms across the country. In collaboration with the newsroom and community partners, she helped plan events and developed products that augmented editorial coverage including the Politifest public affairs conference and A Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools.
Shih is a San Diego native and holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Washington and an executive M.B.A. from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego. She is a member of the Asian American Journalism Association and a graduate of its Executive Leadership Program.