Twenty years as the administrative coordinator for The San Diego Union-Tribune business department trained Sandra Young to follow the money, question authority and keep a watchful eye on motive.

She provided a layer of filters and structure that was dependable and forward thinking—in the end, helping to create a highly functioning team.

Five years in the bankruptcy legal community have verified everything she learned in the newsroom.

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Eileen Truax is a journalist and writer. She was born in Mexico City, where she was a political reporter and a Congress correspondent for five years. In 2004 she moved to Los Angeles and for seven years worked for La Opinión, the largest Spanish-Language newspaper in the United States, covering immigration, politics and Mexico-U.S. relationships. She contributes to several Spanish-language publications in Mexico and the U.S., including Hoy Los Angeles and El Universal newspapers, and Proceso, Gatopardo and Newsweek en Español magazines. She also co-founded Malaespina Producciones, a documentary and short films video production company based in Los Angeles.

Eileen holds degrees in Social Communication and Communication and Politics and has been a fellow with the Scripps Howard Immigration Program (ICFJ), the Immigration in the Heartland program (Institute for Justice and Journalism), and the Inter-American Development Bank training program for Latin-American journalists (FNPI). She was an English-Spanish translator of the Latino Immigrant Civic Engagement report series for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. She has twice received the José Martí Publishing Award from the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP), and in 2010 she received the Media Woman of the Year Award from the California State Legislature. Currently, she is a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ). She is also the founder of Cuadernos Colectivo de Cronistas Latinoamericanos, a journalist network with members in eight countries.

Eileen is the author of “Dreamers, an Immigrant Generation’s fight for their American Dream” (Océano, 2013; Beacon Press, 2015), which sheds light on the complex situation of undocumented students in the U.S. She is co-author of “72 Migrantes,” a book with stories about Central American immigrants murdered in northern Mexico, and “Tú y yo coincidimos en la noche terrible,” a memoir on murdered Mexican journalists. Her first novel, “Fecha de Caducidad,” co-authored with Beatriz Rivas and Armando Vega-Gil (Alfaguara, 2015) is a love story marked by the disappearance of the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa, Mexico. Eileen is now working on her second non-fiction book on the exile and asylum process from Mexico to the U.S.

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Ken Stone

Journalist

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In his 40-year journalism career, Ken Stone excelled at fact checking and copy editing at 10 newspapers (ending with The San Diego Union-Tribune for 24 years) and several websites (including three years with the Patch hyperlocal network).

His 20-year-old hobby site, masterstrack.com, won the Track and Field Writers of America’s inaugural prize for online excellence in 2009.

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Robert P. Laurence covered city hall, politics and rock ‘n’ roll music for The San Diego Union (later the Union-Tribune) for 35 years. He found his nirvana as the paper’s TV critic, a job he approached in the spirit of the rude kid sitting in the back of the class.

It was sometime in high school that Bob discovered he had a knack for writing.  He soon decided this was a skill that could be used for earning a living as a newspaper reporter. It was certainly more enjoyable than most other forms of work.

Bob has a B.A. degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and an M.A. in political science from San Jose State. His first reporting job was at the weekly Milpitas Post in what is now known as Silicon Valley; he later covered California’s nascent environmental movement for United Press International. When his wife, Susan White, was hired as an editor for ProPublica in New York City, the couple moved to Brooklyn for a three-year stay.

While Susan worked in Manhattan, Bob spent his days exploring the city and reporting what he found in 86 lengthy emails to friends that he later collected in an ebook, “Letters From Brooklyn: A Slightly Irregular Memoir of Everyday Life in New York City with a Tour Guide Thrown in.”

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Elizabeth Douglass is a veteran journalist whose work in print and online has received national recognition. She was a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award, and her stories have led to appearances on The Rachel Maddow Show, Public Radio International, Chicago public radio, and local radio and television stations, as well as in a PBS documentary about turmoil in the defense industry.

Most recently, she covered energy companies, pipelines and the nexus between energy and climate change for InsideClimate News. Her work there included widely-cited stories about vulnerable oil pipelines that cross through Yellowstone and other rivers; how energy projects across the country lock in decades of harmful carbon emissions; and how a culture of fear permeated a nuclear power plant.

Prior to InsideClimate News, she spent 10 years at the Los Angeles Times, where she covered energy, telecommunications and aerospace, and 10 years at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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Anthony DePalma spent 22 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, serving as Bureau Chief in Mexico and Canada. In 2001 he published “Here: A Biography of the New American Continent,” which was re-released as an e-book in 2014. He has focused his journalism on Latin America, especially Mexico and Cuba, but he has also travelled widely and reported from places as diverse as Albania, Montenegro, Guyana and Suriname.

His second book, published in 2006, was “The Man Who Invented Fidel,” about the rise of Fidel Castro and the impact that journalism has had on U.S.-Cuba relations. The book has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, and the film rights were purchased by Moxie Pictures. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, he wrote many of the Portraits of Grief articles that won a Pulitzer for The Times in 2001.

He left The Times in 2008 to become writer-in-residence at Seton Hall University, where he completed his latest book, “City of Dust,” about the environmental and health crises that followed 9/11. The book was the basis of a CNN documentary “Terror in the Dust,” which won the Society of Professional Journalists’ award for best documentary in 2011.

DePalma also is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Among his many professional recognitions are a 2007 Emmy finalist for “Toxic Legacy,” a documentary co-production of The New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. In 2009, Columbia University awarded him the Maria Moors Cabot Award for distinguished international reporting. He has been named a media fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a visiting scholar at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

He continues to write and lecture about Latin America and the environment, while also reporting on many other subjects.

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Joanne Faryon is a journalist and documentary producer specializing in long-form multimedia projects. Her work has been broadcast on the PBS NewsHour; NPR; The National, CBC’s flagship TV news program, and across multiple PBS affiliates in California.

In 2014, she was the first journalist to report on California’s “vent farms,” special nursing home units where thousands of people are kept alive artificially, lingering for years in various states of consciousness. The project, which she produced for inewsource, was awarded the Columbia School of Journalism Meyer “Mike” Berger Award for outstanding human interest reporting, a first place Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) award for investigative journalism, two National Edward R. Murrow awards, a National Association of Health Care Journalism Award, the 2015 SPJ Mark of Excellence Award (San Diego chapter) and was nominated for a national Emmy.

Faryon has gone inside three California prisons to document how sentencing laws contribute to an aging, sick, and expensive prison population. Her documentary, Life in Prison: The Cost of Punishment, has been viewed more than one million times on YouTube.

Faryon was also the first journalist in California to raise questions about the efficacy of the whooping cough vaccine in her 2010 documentary When Immunity Fails. Data showed most of the kids who got sick were up to date with their immunization.

Faryon traveled to the Netherlands where scientists had discovered a new mutant strain of the disease. Faryon has been a recipient of the USC Annenberg Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, two other National Edward R. Murrow awards, a Radio and Television News Association Golden Mike for investigative reporting, two regional Emmys and several San Diego SPJ awards.

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Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction.

His latest book is “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic” (Bloomsbury, 2015), for which he traveled across the United States. “Dreamland” was awarded National Book Critics Circle award in March 2016 and was named one of Amazon.com’s “Best Books of the Year.”

Quinones worked for the Los Angeles Times for 10 years (2004-2014). He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking and the border.
 

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New York Times bestselling author and investigative journalist Caitlin Rother has written or co-authored 10 books, drawing from decades of newspaper experience covering topics ranging from criminal justice, suicide, addiction, mental illness and murder to corruption, incompetence, and waste at City Hall and in Congress. Rother has done more than 100 TV and radio appearances as a crime expert. Her latest book, “Then No One Can Have Her,” and her Kindle short, “A Complicated Woman,” were published in 2015. Her next book, “Love Gone Wrong,” a compilation of intriguing murder cases, will be released in 2016. She is currently working on a political crime book about San Diego’s historic Strippergate corruption case.

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