Team

David Bornstein has been a journalist, focusing primarily on social innovation, for over 30 years. He began his career reporting on metro issues for New York Newsday, then shifted to international reporting, contributing to numerous publications. From 2010-21, he co-authored the “Fixes” column in The New York Times, which examined efforts to solve social and environmental problems. He is the author of: How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, which has been published in 25 languages, The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank, and Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know. 

Tina Rosenberg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. She is a longtime New York Times writer, at the editorial page, the Sunday magazine, and most recently as co-author of the Fixes. column. As a freelance, she has written for dozens of magazines, including the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. Her books include "Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America," "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism" and "Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World." "The Haunted Land" won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. 

Courtney E. Martin is an author and entrepreneur, and a co-founder of The Solutions Journalism Network. Her latest book is Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from my Daughter’s School. Courtney consults with a wide range of institutions, including TED, The Obama Foundation, The Aspen Institute, and IDEO. She is also the co-founder of FRESH Speakers Bureau. Courtney has authored/edited six books, including Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists, and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women. Courtney has a popular Substack newsletter, called Examined Family, and speaks widely at conferences and colleges. She is the recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre, and an honorary Ph.d. from Art Center of Design. She lives with her family in a co-housing community called Temescal Commons in Oakland, and is currently the storyteller-in-residence at The Holding Co, a lab for redesigning care for the 21stcentury. Read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.

Allen Arthur is SJN’s online engagement manager. He leads SJN’s social media and newsletters, ensuring they’re relevant and responsive to the network. You can find him hosting Twitter Spaces events, leading solutions journalism webinars, facilitating conversation in the SJN Facebook group, and lots more. In 2016, he got his Master’s degree in engagement journalism from the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. When he’s not talking about solutions journalism, he’s doing it, with stories for The Marshall Project/USA Today, Documented, YES! Magazine, Reasons to Be Cheerful, Queens Daily Eagle, and more. 

Saira is a marketing and communications professional with a background in writing and editing. She has a passion for learning about the field of economic justice and wants to amplify journalism that offers solutions for systemic inequalities. She has an undergraduate degree in journalism and political science, and a master's degree in media management. She lives in Philadelphia but will always be a New Yorker at heart. In her spare time, which she has very little of after keeping up with two preschoolers, she enjoys re-watching The Office, reading, and napping.

Eva Blanc (she/her) is SJN’s People & Culture Manager: she implements and monitors People and Culture goals, objectives, and systems. Thinking in terms of systems and user journeys she considers how experience, data, and people, flow through the employee life cycle. Eva holds a B.A. in Global Studies from Long Island University - Global College. Over the course of her education, she spent four years traveling across five continents, cultivating an intellectually open disposition towards the culturally and academically unique perspectives she encountered.

Delaney Butler (she/her) is the program coordinator for the Local Media Project: she manages the full lifecycle of collaborative projects, facilitates communications with and among collaborative partners, and provides support to team members. Delaney joined SJN in March 2018 as the operations associate for the (formerly known as) Newsroom Practice Change team. Previously, she worked at Prudential Financial's Office of Corporate Social Responsibility where she held coordination and support roles in the Spirit of Community Awards program and the Prudential Foundation. She graduated with a degree in English and American Literature from New York University's College of Arts and Sciences. 

Melissa Cassutt is the Mountain/Northwest Region Manager: she works with journalists and newsrooms in the Mountain West (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming) and the Pacific Northwest (Alaska, Oregon and Washington). She joined SJN in 2021 after working as a journalist and editor at publications across the Mountain West, most recently in Jackson, Wyoming, where she is based. She was named the 2016 Wyoming Press Association’s Young Journalist of the Year and received the Wyoming Woman of Influence Award in Media and Communications in 2019. She currently serves as President of the Wyoming Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, which she helped relaunch in 2019.

Sara Catania (she/her) is SJN’s Vice President of Network Strategy. She leads the strategy to accelerate rigorous reporting on promising responses to society’s most difficult problems and expand access to those stories, wherever people get their news. She launched the HBCU and HSI Educator Academies and serves on the program committee for the JSK Fellowship at Stanford, addressing information gaps in communities of color. Her experience includes years as a reporter, editor and newsroom leader at NBC, Reuters, Global Press Journal, Zócalo Public Square, Mother Jones, LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times.

Catherine Cheney (she/her) supports SJN’s work to build relationships with people inside and outside of journalism who share a passion for transforming the field. She is also a senior reporter at Devex, the media platform for the global development community, where she covers the role of technology and innovation in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Catherine earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University, has reported for outlets including The Atlantic, POLITICO, where she also worked as a web producer, and The New York Times, and also helped to launch the solutions focused media company NationSwell. 

Email me about your vision for the future of journalism, or opportunities for collaboration with SJN. 

Jefferson comes to SJN from the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a large non-profit in the Human Services sector where he was responsible for General Ledger Maintenance in relation to Government grants. He graduated from CUNY Queens College with a Bachelor’s in Accounting. Hobbies include watching a good baseball game, or catching a good movie at the cinema.

Cheryl Dahle is SJN’s Climate Initiative Manager. She oversees the organization’s strategy and projects to help journalists cover climate change more constructively, more skillfully, and with greater impact. She has a BSJ from The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and founded Future of Fish, a conservation nonprofit that was a finalist for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge in 2013. She is an adjunct professor at Institute of Design at IIT in Chicago, where she teaches design for systems change.

Michael Davis is SJN’s manager for a 12-state southern region that stretches from the Carolinas to the Texas border. He leverages lessons learned from six decades in journalism, as a newsroom executive, reporter, columnist, editorial writer, author and executive producer. He received a master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, where he later taught. He spent the 1986-87 academic year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Davis describes himself as a storyteller whose mission is to assist and support other storytellers.

Angela K. Evans manages SJN’s Labor Cohort and works with journalists across the U.S. that are using solutions journalism to report on workers. She’s a journalist exploring the intersection of systems, people and culture through the art of long-form storytelling. Throughout her career, she's covered an array of topics from immigration, to public health, education, music and the environment. Her recent work has focused on homelessness and housing solutions, producing two seasons of the Unhoused podcast with Boulder Weekly and KGNU. In her free time, she's a yoga instructor, avid mountain biker and snowboarder, and loves traveling to see friends and family across the globe. She’s based in Denver, Colorado.

Nina’s first career was in humanitarian work, as a trainer and manager. She has 10 years of experience in journalism, first as an editor in Russia, and in France as a freelance journalist and author. She has been managing SJN’s work in Europe since 2016, training journalists and newsrooms across countries. She is also coordinating all international projects at SJN.

Liza Gross is a journalist and media leader with over three decades of experience working in executive positions at news organizations and media nonprofits. She specializes in the exploration of transformational models for media organizations focused on sustainability and collaboration. She was Managing Editor of The Miami Herald, Executive Editor of El Nuevo Día in Puerto Rico, and Publisher of Exito!, the Spanish language publication of the Chicago Tribune. As Executive Director of the International Women’s Media Foundation, she worked to support the professional advancement of women in media. She is a member of the Advisory Board of Report for America and a past board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She lectures widely and conducts frequent media trainings in the United States, Latin America and Europe.

Sarah Gustavus Lim is SJN’s Director of Initiatives and supports a team of initiative managers who work with journalists on projects that serve as beacon examples for the network. Before joining SJN, she worked in public radio and television in New Mexico and Washington State and for Koahnic Broadcast Corporation, which produces Native America Calling and National Native News. Sarah is also the founder of the New Mexico Local News Fund, an innovative organization that brings together journalists and community partners around the goal of strengthening the local news ecosystem. 

Keith Hammonds is an initiative manager working to engage conservative and faith-based news organizations. As president of SJN, he helped build the organization and steward its strategy since its inception. He wrote his first newspaper story in seventh grade, and has been executive editor at Fast Company Magazine; a bureau chief and editor for BusinessWeek; and a writer for The New York Times in London and Johannesburg. He also owns and publishes The Boulder Monitor, a weekly paper in western Montana.

Julia Hotz is SJN’s Fellowships Manager: she created and leads SJN’s LEDE fellowship, is creating and will manage the organization’s first CTN fellowship, and is developing a larger fellowship strategy for the organization that can be replicated both internally and externally in service of the network strategy. She’s also a journalist reporting on systemic solutions to loneliness, anxiety, and depression, with bylines in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, WIRED, Scientific American, Bloomberg, TIME, and more. 

Francine Huff is the Director of Journalism School Partnerships for the Solutions Journalism Network. Previously she was the Knight Chair for Student Achievement at Florida A&M University and director of the Dow Jones News Fund HBCU Digital Media Institute. She was a 2021 HBCU Solutions Journalism Educator Academy Fellow and has been a Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute Fellow. Prior to academia she worked at The Wall Street Journal as spot news bureau chief, a news editor and a copy editor, and at the Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Press and Valley News Dispatch. She was founder and editorial director of Super Savvy Publishing and is the author of “The 25-Day Money Makeover for Women.” She has a master’s degree in communication from Rutgers University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Ja'Nel Johnson is SJN’s Western Region Manager: she works with journalists and newsrooms in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada and New Mexico. Ja’Nel is an accomplished journalist who has created a wide range of stories for radio, television and digital platforms. She has long had a passion for reporting on the Black experience and elevating the voices of underrepresented communities. Ja’Nel is a graduate of Claflin University and Northwestern University. She joined SJN in 2021.

Maurisse Johnson is SJN’s Chief Financial Officer; he leads SJN’s finance, accounting and audit groups. Before joining SJN, he worked for Credit Suisse, Ogilvy & Mather, Burson Marsteller, Parsons Brickerhoff, J. Crew and NYCHA. He is a Air Force Veteran and is an avid Photographer.

Kyuwon Lee is SJN’s International Associate: he stewards the organization's global presence and opportunities and manages the community of network's key players outside of the U.S. He is a journalist and ethnographer from Seoul whose coverage includes issues of two Koreas, East Asia and cultural transformation in between. His past projects varied from an anthropological study on Mexico's K-pop audience to interviewing 26 North Korean defectors who had been formerly incarcerated in North Korea's prison. He is a former Air Force Sergeant, graduate of Yonsei University and was a Fulbright scholar at New York University.

Amy Maestas is a regional collaborative manager: She supports collaboratives that are part of SJN’s Local Media Project, which seeks to strengthen and reinvigorate local media ecosystems. She worked for 24 years as a reporter and executive editor at The Durango Herald in Colorado and has previously worked with newspapers in Salt Lake City, including The Salt Lake Tribune. Amy is a Knight-Wallace Fellow Class of '17 at the University of Michigan. 

Karen Magnuson is a project director supporting solutions journalism collaboratives in New York and Michigan. She is a veteran newspaper editor who most recently served as editor of the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y. and a regional editor for the USA TODAY Network. She has been a relentless champion of the news industry through her leadership as president of Associated Press Media Editors, board member of American Society of News Editors and Diversity Committee member of the News Leaders Association. She is a graduate of Alma College, where she serves on the Board of Trustees.

Samantha McCann (she/her) is SJN’s Chief Operating Officer. She leads SJN’s efforts to align organizational operations with our burgeoning network strategy, designs and leads the annual Solutions Journalism Summit, and supports key areas across the organization including the people and culture and systems teams. Before coming to SJN in 2013, Samantha worked in environmental and fiscal policy research at Seattle University. She holds an M.P.A. from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a B.A. in political science from Seattle University. 

Kristen Merritt is the Salesforce Database Assistant, tasked with managing the hygiene of SJN's CRM. Her previous work was in Operations/Database Management at the College of William and Mary, and Project Management at Covenant House International (meaning she has never met a spreadsheet/CRM she didn’t like). She has a strong penchant for data governance, recognizing the necessity of reliable, integrity-focused, relevant data, and takes great care in this work. Outside of her SJN work, she is a neo-soul singer and guitarist.

A print and broadcast journalist, media trainer, and consultant, Ruona's work has been featured on several outlets including the BBC, the Financial Times, Reuters, and Deutsche Welle. She was named Nigeria’s Investigative Journalist of the Year in 2013, and was Nigeria’s first Emmy Award nominee for her work on “Sweet, Sweet Codeine,” a 2018 documentary on drug abuse in Nigeria for BBC Africa Eye. Ruona is also a PhD scholar researching African-Diaspora investigative journalism networks.

Katherine Noble-Goodman (she/her) is SJN’s Partnerships Manager; she supports nonprofit organizations in using solutions journalism stories to inform and inspire their constituents, and newsrooms in engaging their communities in problem-solving forums informed by solutions reporting. She earned her undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, and graduate degrees in history, business and law from Duke University, University of Redlands and Lewis and Clark School of Law.

Sonja Petrovic (she/they) is SJN's Development Operations Manager. They support SJN’s development function by designing and co-creating systems for tracking information related to grants, working across the organization to support individuals and teams leading grant-funded projects, and ensuring that proposals, reports and other communications related to fundraising are completed and shared in a timely and efficient way. They hold a Master's in English from Brooklyn College.

Alane (Lanie) Presswood (she/her) is SJN’s Higher Education Program Specialist; she collaborates with universities, newsrooms, nonprofits, and community organizations to create a news-literate society that is engaged in and enthusiastic about effective social change. She earned her PhD in rhetoric and public culture from Ohio University. Her first book (Food Blogs, Postfeminism, and the Communication of Expertise) was published with Lexington Books in 2019.

Alice Quinn (she/her) is SJN’s Director of People & Culture. She leads the HR work at SJN with a people-centered focus and strives to create a culture of belonging for everyone on the team. She's organized national grassroots screenings of the Emmy-winning / Oscar-Nominated documentary film GASLAND, and worked on the production of the film, GASLAND II. From there, Alice has worked on social issue documentaries and fiction projects alike and is passionate about storytelling, social and environmental justice, sustainability, and community building. 

Carolyn Robinson is SJN’s Director of Broadcast Partnerships, leading projects with large TV ownership groups, including Nexstar, Gray, Scripps, Univision, Graham and many others. As a journalist, she’s produced hundreds of live TV newscasts, the weekend medical show and health specials at CNN; in Hong Kong, she reported and produced daily live shows at CNN’s affiliate station; in East Timor, she ran the local TV station for the United Nations; in Doha and DC, she produced global talk shows and documentary features for Al Jazeera English. She’s trained a couple thousand journalists in 25+ countries, led a few dozen international media projects, and received multiple journalism awards and fellowships for her work.

Jenn Rosen is SJN's Database Educator & Trainer: she ensures that the Solutions Story Tracker is staffed to run at optimal levels so that it effectively highlights high quality and equitable content. She develops training materials and manages the quality assurance of our database systems. She has a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and has been teaching and researching at the intersection of democracy, gender, sexuality, and the power of social movements to bring about social change.

Alec Saelens is SJN’s Revenue Project manager. He is passionate about helping newsrooms align editorial and business objectives to serve their communities in a sustainable way. He researches and supports newsrooms leveraging solutions journalism to generate revenue. Before coming to SJN, he worked as a researcher and coach for the Membership Puzzle Project. He is a co-founder of The Bristol Cable, the UK’s pioneering local media cooperative launched in 2014, where he worked as a journalist and operations coordinator until 2018. He also worked as an analyst for NewsGuard, a company reviewing information websites based on their reliability and transparency.

Ambika Samarthya-Howard is SJN’s Director of Communications: she leads on innovation and technology, leverages communication platforms for the network strategy, and creates cool content. She has a MFA from Columbia’s Film School and has been creating, teaching and writing at the intersection of storytelling and social good for two decades. She has produced content for Current TV, UNICEF, Havas, Praekelt.org, UNICEF, UNFPA, Save the Children, FCDO, Global Integrity, and PRISM.

Elizabeth Share (she/her) is SJN’s Vice President of Strategic Relations: she helps shape SJN’s strategic priorities and leads the work to secure the philanthropic revenue that enables us to meet our aims. She’s the founder of the consulting practice Wise Giving and previously was Chief Development Officer for The Center for Investigative Reporting. Elizabeth is a graduate of UC Berkeley, holds a certificate in nonprofit administration from the Harvard Kennedy School and is a master coach for the Course in Exponential Fundraising.

Linda Shaw is SJN’s Editorial Director; she leads efforts to bring solutions journalism into newsrooms’ regular coverage in ways that drive impact, equity and revenue. Her work at SJN has also included managing the organization’s Renewing Democracy initiative, and launching the Democracy SOS Fellowship, which is helping newsrooms reinvent the way they cover politics and elections. Before SJN, she worked as a reporter and editor, mostly at The Seattle Times, where she most recently led Education Lab, an award-winning solutions-focused effort that since has been replicated by four other news organizations.

Mikhael Simmonds is SJN’s Director of Regions: he is a multimedia journalist who specializes in international reporting. He is also the co-founder of Harlem Focus, a multimedia blog/media lab used as a learning tool at the City College of New York, where he taught reporting classes. Over the years, Simmonds has worked with Democracy Now!, Seeds of Africa, the YMCA International, and the UN Department of Public Information and NGO Relations. He has also worked closely with the New York Amsterdam News.

Lita Tirak (she/her) is SJN’s Database Manager of the Solutions Story Tracker, who oversees strategy and development of the organization’s core product that teaches solutions journalism. In 2016, she was one of the first curators to build the database’s story selection. Since then, she has cultivated cohorts of Story Fellows and Solutions Specialists who have curated the Story Tracker to reach over 10,000 stories from around the globe. Lita received her Ph.D. in American Studies from The College of William and Mary.

Leah Todd Lin is a regional collaborative manager: she supports collaboratives that are part of SJN’s Local Media Project. Previously, Leah covered the education beat for The Seattle Times and Casper Star-Tribune, and her freelance reporting has appeared in High Country News and Runner's World magazine. She holds a degree in journalism and philosophy from Marquette University. In addition to her work with SJN, Leah is currently a Master’s student in Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications. 

Alejandra Venancio (she/her) is SJN’s Operations Manager. She helps design and refine organizational processes and systems by working closely with the full team to understand their needs and goals. She is also a theatre-maker with an MA from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s Theatre Lab.

Marie von Hafften (she/her) is SJN’s Data and Learning Manager. She works across the team to identify and track metrics to understand, celebrate, and support the spread of solutions journalism. She also works to build data literacy, habits, and tools within SJN to regularly evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the organization’s work. She holds a Master of International Affairs with a specialization in technology, media, and communications from Columbia University.

Fara Warner is SJN’s Vice President of Practice Change. She works with a 24-person team focused on supporting newsrooms and journalists around the world as they deepen their practice of solutions journalism through training, coaching, grant-funded initiatives and our Solutions Story Tracker. The work of the practice change team is centered in equity and focused on impact both inside newsrooms and in the communities they serve and cover. Fara has worked in journalism for more than 30 years. 

Holly Wise (she/her) is SJN’s Network Strategy Manager and she’s helping steward SJN through a strategic pivot, equipping our almost 50-person team with the knowledge, resources and connections needed to become a field catalyst that will transform journalism. Holly is a former journalist in Texas and New Mexico and later taught journalism at Texas State University. She was a 2018-2019 Fulbright teaching scholar, in which she spent a year teaching solutions journalism in Bangalore, India.