Ali Sumner
Western Kentucky University
Staff
Ali Sumner is a senior at Western Kentucky University, majoring in news/editorial journalism. This is her first year as the Moutain Workshops Assistant and she also spends her time as the Writing Editor for the Talisman, Western’s award-winning yearbook. Although she enjoyed her short-lived stint in photojournalism at the encouragement of Ms. A, she decided to pursue her passion for writing. She will graduate in May and return to Lexington, Ky. where she was born and raised. She hopes to pursue a Master’s degree at University of Kentucky in mass communication or secondary education, or find a job in public relations.
Joe Weiss
Soundslides
Staff
Joe Weiss has worked as a photojournalist, multimedia reporter, designer, programmer, producer and editor in print and online media since 1996. He is currently a freelance interactive producer and the developer of Soundslides, a multimedia authoring application for journalists. Previously he was an interactive producer at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., the Director of Photography at The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C., and worked for MSNBC.com as a multimedia producer in Redmond, Wash. His multimedia reports have garnered national and international recognition including the Online Journalism Award for Creative Use of the Medium from the Online News Association and two Digital Edge awards from the NAA. His work has also received a Gold medal in the Society for News Design's Interactive Design competition. For his development of Soundslides, he was awarded the 2007 J. Winton Lemen Award from the National Press Photographers Association. He has judged several awards including Pictures of the Year International (2004), Society for News Design's Interactive Design Awards (2002, 2006, 2007), College Photographer of the Year (2006), and the Online News Association's Online Journalism Awards (2002). Weiss frequently speaks at seminars and workshops concerning the integration of photojournalism, audio reportage and multimedia technology, and has taught photojournalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He started as a photojournalist at The Herald-Sun after attending the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and Randolph Community College. He was North Carolina Photographer of the Year in 1996.
Jonathan Woods
MSNBC.com
Staff
Jonathan Woods is a Minneapolis native who frustrated his parents endlessly as a child. As a result, he was shipped to an all-boys military boarding school, where he learned the value of respect and discipline. He also developed a knack for shining shoes, ironing shirts and starting trouble in a more clandestine fashion. It was in boarding school where Woods acquired his love for photojournalism. He rose through the ranks to take over the school newspaper. After graduating he went to Marquette University, but when he realized they didn’t have any photo classes, he quickly transferred to Western Kentucky. Although he was intimidated by crossing the Mason-Dixon line, the Yankee adapted well to life in the south. One day, after photographing a barn fire, a fire chief got him interested in the fire department. Thenceforth, Woods served as a firefighter EMT for the rest of his time in Kentucky. In addition to earning a Bachelor’s degree in photojournalism in 2007, Woods earned a respectable amount of awards, including third place overall at the Hearst Photojournalism Championships in San Francisco. He also held internships in Wisconsin, at The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, IA, in Nashville at The Tennessean, and at the Rocky Mountain News. He left the mile high city, returning to the fields of opportunities in Iowa for a staff job at The Gazette. He helped pioneer and develop their multimedia department, but still found time for good daily storytelling photojournalism, taking home a couple dozen monthly awards in NPPA’s monthly clip contest. After two years, Woods was drafted by msnbc.com as a multimedia producer. He now lives in Manhattan where he enjoys small spaces, public transportation, cycling, cooking and adding high-tech gadgets to his already over-complicated truck.
Josh Meltzer
Western Kentucky University
Staff
Josh Meltzer joined the faculty at Western Kentucky University this August to work and teach as a photojournalist-in-residence. He is and will be teaching photojournalism and multimedia storytelling. In 2008, after 9 years as a staff photographer and multimedia journalist at The Roanoke Times in Roanoke, Virginia, Josh Meltzer accepted a Fulbright Scholarship to work and teach in Mexico where he worked to create a multimedia project about the migration of indigenous families within Mexico. In addition to his own work, he taught photography to a group of 11- to 16-year-olds through a program called Listen to My Pictures, which culminated with a show at a large regional museum in Guadalajara in June, 2009. While at The Roanoke Times, Josh created his first audio slideshow in 1999, and over the next decade created more than 100 audio slideshows, both on daily deadline, and for long-term projects. A few years later he began using video in his reporting, and now uses a mix to create stories through the voices of his subjects and natural sound. This year, a long-term multimedia project from 2008 on those who provide care for the elderly, called Age of Uncertainty, won the First Place Best Documentary Prize from the POYi, the community service award from the Virginia Press Association, the 1st place convergence award from the APME and the Casey Medals the multimedia prize . The project, shot over 9 months was made up of 8 multimedia stories. His still and multimedia work has been recognized by the NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism competition where he was the 2006 Photojournalist of the Year for markets less than 115,000 circulation. His audio slideshows, video stories and portfolios have been recognized by the Atlanta Photojournalism Competition, Northern and Southern Short Course and the Society of Newspaper Design.
Kathleen Flynn
St. Petersburg Times
Staff
Kathleen Flynn has been a photojournalist at the St. Petersburg Times since December 2002 covering local, national and world news. After graduating from Western Kentucky University, Kathleen worked in New Orleans then studied Spanish in Costa Rica while documenting a ministry that helps street children and the homeless in San Jose. In addition to her dedication to community journalism in Florida, she has covered the tsunami in Thailand, immigration in Mexico, post-conflict Liberia, India’s booming pharmaceutical industry and Haiti. Flynn was named the National Press Photographers Association Region 6 photographer of the year, 2004. Thanks to a grant from the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Democracy, Flynn visited Liberia in 2008 and 2009 to help train and equip the country’s journalists there to better cover the issues affecting their government and people. She believes that a healthy media base is one way to help increase the country’s chances of maintaining peace.
Mac McKerral
Faculty
Mac McKerral attended the University of Illinois to get a master’s degree in journalism for the sole purpose of writing for The Daily Racing Form and then The Blood-Horse magazine. He never did either. A life of drinking and gambling led him astray. Well, the truth be told, it was the life of drinking and gambling that led him to aspire to write for The Daily Racing Form and The Blood-Horse. But he never did. Instead, he spent his career as a reporter and editor at a variety of newspapers in four states, including a community weekly he started with two FORMER friends and finally as the editor of a business weekly in Tampa, Fla. He started as a feature writer/photographer, the best job he ever had. He’s taught college in Alabama and Florida, and now teaches at Western Kentucky University, where he serves as the news-editorial coordinator in the School of Journalism & Broadcasting. Despite his penchant for Kentucky thoroughbreds and racetracks (or thoroughbreds and racetracks anywhere) and Kentucky bourbon (or bourbon from anywhere), he managed to cobble together a reasonably successful career. He has been a Society of Professional Journalists’ member since 1986 and serves as co-adviser to the WKU chapter of SPJ. He served on the SPJ national board for 11 years, including as national president. He is in his third consecutive term on the board of directors of Sigma Delta Chi, SPJ’s supporting foundation. McKerral is the 2005 recipient of SPJ’s Wells Key, the society’s highest honor for service to SPJ and journalism, and in 1998 received SPJ’s National First Amendment Award for work on public access to campus crime reports. He was awarded the Florida Press Association’s highest honor two consecutive years for writing in defense of the First Amendment, the Jon A. Roosenrad Award. His undergraduate degree is in education from Arizona State University, and he taught history and coached basketball and volleyball at the junior-high level for three years. Sources close to McKerral say that he would trade it all for a position with The Daily Racing Form or The Blood-Horse — or a jug of bourbon.
Derek Poore
The Courier-Journal
Faculty
Derek Poore, a native of Russellville, Ky., has spent the last three years as a reporter at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, covering amateur, prep and outdoor sports. Derek believes strong audio-visual elements are a necessity in modern journalism and at the C-J he regularly produces videos and multimedia slide shows as companion pieces to his stories. Derek is a 2005 graduate of the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism. He was a reporting intern at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Cincinnati Post and The Paducah Sun.
Bob Sacha
MediaStorm
Faculty
Bob Sacha believes in evolution: He started as a newspaper photographer, built a hugely successful career as a freelance magazine photojournalist and, after winning a Knight Fellowship to study multimedia at Ohio University, is now a digital documentary producer with Mediastorm.org, where “Bearing Witness” (iraq.reuters.com), hIs first multimedia project at MediaStorm, won best Multimedia Feature in the 2008 Online News Association competition and was nominated for a National Emmy Award for New Directions in Documentary Storytelling. His career has been built on the cultivation of stories from the static of everyday life. Bob was born in Buffalo and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magnum cum laude, from Syracuse University with a dual degree in psychology and photojournalism. After graduation he worked for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1982, Bob moved to New York City and ABC News but soon made the transition to Bob Sacha Photography, with clients including Time, Life, National Geographic, Fortune and many other magazines in the United States and Europe as well as Fortune 500 companies. For his magazine work, Bob has won numerous awards, including Comunication Arts, Picture of the Year, Alfred Eisentaedt Award for Magazine Photography and the Kodak Award of Excellence. He still finds time to teach master classes at the Maine Media Workshops, the Santa Fe Photo Photography Workshops and the Toscana Photo Workshops in Italy and is a regular Instructor in the photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography in New York City and in the interactive journalism program at the Graduate School of Journalism, City University of New York. His work can be viewed on the web at www.BobSacha.com and you can reach him at facebook.com/bob.sacha or twitter.com/bobsacha
Greg Lovett
The Palm Beach Post
Faculty
Born and raised in Van Buren, Ark., Greg Lovett grew up working in the family restaurant. He became interested in photography in high school where he worked for the yearbook and newspaper. He received his bachelor’s degree in photojournalism from Western Kentucky University. As a student, Lovett was a recipient of the Joseph Ehrenreich Scholarship in 1985 and won the William Randolph Hearst Photojournalism Championship in 1987. Greg interned at the Tennessean, The Providence Journal, The Courier-Journal and The Miami Herald. He joined the Miami News as a staff photographer in 1987. In 1989, he joined the Palm Beach Post and the same year became Cox Photographer of the Year – an award he landed again in 2001, 2004 and 2005. His achievements include Southern Short Course Photographer of the Year in 1991, National Press Photographer’s Press Association’s Region 6 Photographer of the Year in 1993, and Region POY runner-up in 1991, 1994 and 2000. He is a two time finalist for The Pulitzer Prize. Breaking news photography for staff coverage of the Florida hurricanes, 2005, and breaking news photography for staff coverage of Hurricane Andrew, 1993. Greg has been a picture editor at the newspaper since 2006, and was recently appointed Assistant Multi-Media Editor. Lovett is married to Sonja Isger and has a nine-year-old son Riley.
Scott Mc Kiernan
ZUMA
Faculty
Scott Mc Kiernan’s dynamic leadership and decades of wide-ranging experience in photojournalism as an award-winning photographer, agent, designer, editor, educator (UCLA) and now publisher: DOUBLEtruck Magazine, zReportage.com + Bearing Witness Books have proven to be instrumental in establishing one of the largest editorial photo agencies in the world and the first digital age picture agency: ZUMA Press. Mc Kiernan is a Web pioneer, launching the net’s first database for editorial pictures. Today his agency is the agent to some of the world’s most respected photojournalists (3,000+), newspapers (100+), agencies (66+) and wire services (9). Running a global staff of 50. Mc Kiernan remains an active shooter today, living for finding and making that one image that can make a difference. His sidekick KONA, an amazing black lab helps him edit DOUBLEtruck and nothing Scott does would happen without his great staff. For more on Scott and ZUMA go to ZUMApress.com and zReportage go to zReportage.com and DOUBLEtruck Magazine go to DTzine.com. Or check out his most recent ventures: ThePicturesofTheDay.com and the creation of the first pure Photojournalism gallery: TheKONAGallery.com