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Editorial Advisory Board

Amy Bernstein

Amy Bernstein is the vice president for thought leadership at Manpower, the global employment services company. Her work focuses on innovation, particularly the new ways of thinking required to address the needs of the changing World of Work. Ms. Bernstein came to Manpower from Booz Allen Hamilton, the global management and IT consulting firm. There she served as executive editor of the firm’s thought leadership journal, strategy+business. Prior to Booz Allen, she was executive editor at both Business 2.0 and the Industry Standard, editorial director of Brill’s Content, and an assistant managing editor of U.S. News & World Report.

David Brewster

David Brewster is publisher, editor, and founder of Crosscut.com in Seattle, as well as chairman of the board of Crosscut Public Media, the nonprofit concern that publishes Crosscut.com. He was founder and longtime editor/publisher of Seattle Weekly, 1976-97, when it was sold to Village Voice Media. From 1997-2006 he was founder and executive director of Town Hall Seattle, a performance and civic venue. In Seattle, he has worked for a magazine, a television newsroom, and other publications. Mr. Brewster was a leading figure in alternative weekly journalism, being the first president of the Institute for Alternative Journalism, which spawned Alternet.

Sandy Close

Sandy Close has served as Executive Director of Pacific News Service since 1974 where she founded YO! Youth Outlook, a monthly magazine of youth writing and art in 1991; and co-founded in The Beat Within, a weekly writing journal by incarcerated youth in 1996. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Ms. Close was formerly China editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong), and founder of the Oakland-based Flatlands newspaper. Among her many awards and recognitions, in 1995, Ms. Close received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award" Fellowship; and in 1997, she co-produced the Academy Award-winning short documentary, “Breathing Lessons.” She is the Executive Director at New American Media.

Bob Cohn

Bob Cohn is the editorial director of TheAtlantic.com, the digital side of The Atlantic. Prior to joining TheAtlantic.com in January 2009, Mr. Cohn was for eight years the executive editor of Wired Magazine. Under his leadership, Wired was nominated seven times for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence and won the honor three times. For nearly two years during the dot-com boom, Mr. Cohn was executive editor at The Industry Standard, a newsweekly covering the Internet economy. He began his journalism career at Newsweek, where he worked in the Washington bureau for 10 years. Mr. Cohn graduated from Stanford with high honors and later earned an M.A. in the Study of Law from Yale Law School as a Ford Foundation Fellow.

Paul Grabowicz

Paul Grabowicz is senior lecturer, associate dean and director of the New Media Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He also helps run the Knight Digital Media Center Multimedia & Technology Training Program at the school, which trains mid-career journalists in digital storytelling. Prior to coming to Berkeley, he spent most of his career as the investigative reporter at The Oakland Tribune. He has written for publications such as the Washington Post, Esquire, The Village Voice, Newsday, the Online Journalism Review and Nieman Reports. He is co-author of California Inc. (Avon, 1983), a book about how the entrepreneurial spirit shaped the politics, culture and economy of California. Mr. Grabowicz is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a B.A. in sociology.

Susan Mernit

Susan Mernit is the founder of Oakland Local, a news & community hub for Oakland, CA focused on environmental, food, development and social justice issues, and the recipient of a 2009 New Voices grant from J-Lab at American University. She is also the consulting web strategist for The Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch project. A former VP at AOL and Netscape, and a former Yahoo Senior Director, Ms. Mernit was the consulting program manager for The Knight News Challenge in 2008-09, as well as a consultant to organizations including Salon.com & TechSoup Global. She is a contributing editor at BlogHer, a blogger, and a co-founder of Public Media Collaborative, a volunteer group focused on training nonprofits, ethnic media & community groups on using social media tools.

Jim Schachter

Jim Schachter is associate managing editor at The New York Times, directing a range of projects aimed at expanding The Times’s footprint online and in print. In the past year, his team has introduced local news pages in copies of The Times sold in the Bay Area, Chicago and Texas, in collaboration with local nonprofit news organizations – respectively, The Bay Citizen, the Chicago News Cooperative and the Texas Tribune. Closer to home, Mr. Schachter leads a pilot project, The Local, that is exploring whether The Times can create hyperlocal Web sites teaming professional journalists with journalism students and local residents. He helps direct the Times newsroom’s involvement in social media and online education, and he led a relaunch in 2010 of the Times’s online business report at NYTimes.com/BusinessDay. Previously, Mr. Schachter was deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine, and of the newspaper’s Culture and Business reports. Before joining The Times in 1995, he was a reporter or editor for the Los Angeles Times, the Kansas City Star and the Jacksonville (Fla.) Journal.

Evan Smith

Evan Smith is the CEO and Editor in Chief of The Texas Tribune. He spent nearly 18 years at TEXAS MONTHLY, stepping down in August 2009 as the magazine's president and editor in chief. On his watch, TEXAS MONTHLY was nominated for sixteen National Magazine Awards and was twice awarded the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Mr. Smith previously held editorial positions at a number of national magazines, most recently The New Republic, where he was deputy editor. He hosts a weekly interview program, TEXAS MONTHLY TALKS, that has aired on PBS stations all across Texas since 2003, and he is an occasional guest on numerous TV and radio shows. A New York native, Smith has a B.A. in public policy from Hamilton College and a M.A. in journalism from the Medill School at Northwestern University.