Line-Up of Featured Columnists:

Jon Margolis 

Jon Margolis is former chief political correspondent for The Chicago Tribune having covered Washington, DC for 23 years, leading coverage of the presidential elections from from 1976 through 1988.    He is the author The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964.   Jon currenty lives in Vermont, teaching at the University of Vermont, Burlington. Jon graduated from Oberlin College and is a native of New Jersey.

Lisa Getter

Lisa Getter is  former investigative reporter for both the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald.  At the Herald, she was part of a two-time Pulitzer prize winning team, and she herself was twice a Pulitzer prize finalist. There, Lisa uncovered police and political corruption, as well as voter fraud and lax reconstruction regulation after Hurricane Andrew.  As a national correspondent for the Times in Washington, Lisa revealed the inner workings of the National Prayer Breakfast and covered campaign finance in the 2004 Presidential election.

Lisa received her B.S in journalism from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard.

Tracy Thompson

Tracy Thompson graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Emory University in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. From 1981 to 1989, she was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, where she covered federal courts. In 1984, she was awarded a fellowship at Yale Law School, where she received an MSL (Master of Studies in Law) degree. In 1987, she wrote a series for the Constitution entitled “Rural Justice,” an investigation into racial disparities in sentencing and the breakdown of the public defender system in a rural Georgia judicial circuit. It was a finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. For more on Tracy and her work, see here.

Walter Dean

Wally Dean is director of training for the Committee of Concerned Journalists. He has been a journalist for over 40-years, during which he has anchored one of the country’s highest rated local newscasts, spent a decade as news assignment manager of the CBS News Washington Bureau, authored a landmark study of local television news content, and trained several thousand journalists in the US and abroad.

Dori Maynard

Dori J. Maynard is the president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the oldest organization dedicated to helping the nation's news media accurately and fairly portray all segments of our society. In its 33 year history, the Institute has trained thousands of journalists of color, including the national editor of the Washington Post, the editor of the Oakland Tribune and the only Latina to edit a major metropolitan newspaper.

Prior to joining the Institute in 1994, Maynard spent a decade working as a reporter at the Bakersfield Californian, The Patriot Ledger, in Quincy, Mass. and the Detroit Free Press. In 1993, she became the first daughter to follow her father to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow. In 2001, The Society of Professional Journalists named her a Fellow of the Society, in 2003, she was named one of the 10 Most Influential African Americans in the Bay Area and in 2008 she received the Asian American Journalists Association’s Leadership in Diversity Award.