The Rio Grande chapter will be holding its annual election of board members starting Nov. 15. It will include the election of the board’s 11 seats and a vote on amendments to the chapter’s bylaws. An email ballot will be sent to members on Nov. 15. All members are encouraged to vote.
Five executive positions are open on the board — president, vice president of communications, vice president of development, secretary and treasurer. All board members serve one year terms starting Jan. 1 and running until Dec. 31. Meetings are typically every other month in Santa Fe or Albuquerque or by conference call. One face-to-face meeting a year is required by the chapter’s bylaws.
Below are the candidates. Currently there are nine for the 11 positions.
2011 SPJ-Rio Grande Chapter board candidates
Rivkela Brodsky
Rivkela Brodsky
Rivkela is a columnist and award-winning business reporter for the Albuquerque Journal. She is a 2006 graduate of the University of New Mexico and was editor of the New Mexico Daily Lobo from 2005-2006. She is running for an open board seat.
She is a 2010 graduate of Leadership New Mexico’s Connect program and currently serves as vice chair for the curriculum committee for the program. She is a member of SouthWest Writers and the chair of the Albuquerque Journal’s team for the 2011 Walk to Cure Diabetes. She has served as a member of SPJ’s Rio Grande chapter for the past year and hopes to continue as a board member during this upcoming year.
Besides all that, she loves to write creatively and dance whenever possible.
Gwyneth Doland
Running for secretary
Gwyneth Doland
Gwyneth is a political correspondent for New Mexico in Focus and the producer of “Public Square” on KNME. She teaches writing and digital journalism at the University of New Mexico. Gwyneth is the former editor of The New Mexico Independent, a pioneering online-only news site. Before that she spent nearly a decade working at newspapers in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
Robert Galin
Robert Galin
Robert is running for an open board seat on the Rio Grande SPJ board because he would like to continue to be involved in developing student journalists and appreciation from all sectors of our communities for the real work that journalists perform. Because of the changing journalism landscape, fewer and fewer people seem to understand how important objective, thorough and truthful journalism can affect their lives. He wants to help with public campaigns that bring many different parties together to discuss how working journalists and journalism students can help make their worlds better.
An example of his student work at UNM-Gallup are the student projects in his various classes where students find a problem in their communities and do the research and writing to propose—and even sometimes carry out—the solutions. Students evaluate different media, prepare reports and contact many different sources. Students thus learn that they can positively affect their communities while learning college and real-life skills.
Robert started with SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi when he was a college newspaper editor and staff writer. His past SPJ work includes board member and program chair for the Northern California Chapter in the 1990s and his recent work with the Rio Grande Chapter, such as assisting with the Eric Draper event. He thinks it is important to continue his work with the board so that the western part of New Mexico continues to be represented.
Julie Ann Grimm
Running for president
Julie Ann Grimm
Julie Ann covers local government and writes features for The Santa Fe New Mexican, where she has worked for more than 8 years. She is a 2001 University of Missouri graduate who spent two years with the Associated Press in Albuquerque before joining the staff at the oldest family-owned newspaper in the West. She helps sixth graders at Salazar Elementary School produce their school newspaper.
She stepped in as SPJ-Rio Grande president this spring after the position became vacant and have enjoyed her role in putting on events and encouraging community-building among journalists. Before that, she served as the group’s treasurer. She attended this year’s national SPJ conference and came back feeling excited about our profession.
Shaun Griswold
Running for vice president of development
Shaun Griswold
Shaun works as an assignment desk editor and web producer at KOB-TV and he wants to help SPJ for a number of reasons. He is running for an open board seat. He thinks it’s important to provide a network for New Mexico journalists and he wants to expand our membership base. He has plenty of friends who are recent college graduates with journalism experience who need jobs and he wants to help them through SPJ.
SPJ helped him get his job at KOB-TV and it can provide more support for up and coming journalists. He thinks his web producer experience can help the SPJ website. He would also like to expand SPJ’s community outreach.
One idea he has in the works is to create a middle school newspaper at an area school. He thinks it can provide necessary media literacy knowledge, writing and reading exercises. The SPJ network has already been helpful with this project and he thinks it can expand through guest speakers and other help.
At KOB-TV on weekends, Griswold is in a unique flex position that combines the web and news desk, which he runs for the early evening and 10 p.m. broadcasts. Griswold also plays a role as an editor with KOB’s 4 On Your Side investigative team.
Griswold was a print journalist before he entered TV. He has bylines with The Santa Fe New Mexican, The Las Cruces Sun-News, The Weekly Alibi, The Gallup Herald and UNM’s Daily Lobo. Griswold was also a web producer at 89.9 KUNM.
He met his fiancée Chelsea Erven at the Daily Lobo. She later replaced him as a news editor. The two are expecting their first child in February.
Griswold grew up in Gallup, N.M. His mother was a sports editor at The Gallup Independent and he spent most of his childhood in a newsroom. That experience left him with a lifelong passion for journalism.
Sandra Baltazar Martinez
Sandra Martinez
Sandra been a reporter and section editor for The Santa Fe New Mexican for three years, time in which she has also concentrated in general assignment reporting and on immigration issues. She is running for an open board seat. She allocates about two days of the week to her sections, La Voz de Nuevo Mexico and Generation Next. Both sections challenge her in different ways and she welcomes the daily challenges — including trying to quickly switch from writing/thinking in English to Spanish or even Spanglish at times!
Before joining The New Mexican, Sandra completed Master’s in Community Journalism degree though the University of Alabama and the Anniston Star in Anniston, Ala.
This October, Sandra began participating as an Inland Fellow, a three-year fellowship program organized by the Inland Press Association that will allow her to learn more about the business aspect of running a newspaper. It’s another challenge that she embraces.
She enjoys working with SPJ and helping our chapter become stronger by the numbers. In order to do so, she would love to remain on the board and help her colleagues with projects, including the Building Bridges workshop that will allow the chapter to connect both Spanish and English language media. A few weeks ago National SPJ awarded the Rio Grande Chapter a $500 grant for this workshop, tentatively scheduled for the beginning of 2012 in the Las Cruces area. She strongly believes that SPJ is becoming a leader in our field; recently we sponsored a public brown bag immigration discussion on whether journalists should keep using the words “illegal alien” and she was one of four panelists. She would love to remain on the board to keep helping build a community of journalists who are in touch with the communities we cover.
Staci Matlock
Staci Matlock
Staci is a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican, covering energy, environment, public lands and agriculture. She manages the newspaper’s online site, The Green Line, which currently has 527 members. She is a running for an open board seat.
Staci was part of the group that in 2009 jump started the New Mexico chapter of SPJ, which had been dormant for almost 25 years. For the last 7 months, she has served as the VP of communications. She would like an opportunity to continue working with the rest of the board to promote the chapter’s great efforts to bring colleagues practical and interesting workshops and to promote journalism in a challenging, exciting time for the profession.
Staci holds a M.A. degree in journalism from the University of Arizona. She founded and operated a Spanish/English environmental newspaper, The Sonoran Journal, for four years in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. She was editor of an outdoor sports newspaper for four years and then worked at The Taos News before joining the New Mexican. She was a 2010 Maynard Institute Fellow.
Elva K. Österreich
Elva Osterreich
Elva has been on the editorial staff at the Alamogordo Daily News for 13 years, and her love for learning about history, community and people only has grown stronger. Her goal is, and has always been, to keep learning. SPJ has, over the past two years of her membership, opened a venue that has allowed her to continue growing and learning in her field in numerous ways she is grateful for. The world of print journalism is changing so rapidly, sometimes the old issues fall by the wayside just in the attempt to keep up with the times. But Elva feels both old and new issues need to continue to be addressed and the opportunity for everybody to continue to be educated in what they love is essential to their ability to perform at their best.
At the University of New Mexico she received her BA in photography and creative writing. Post graduate studies were aimed at a degree in communication disorders which was subverted after a year and a half when life happened. I started at the Alamogordo Daily News in 1998 as community life reporter, graduated to reporter, then news editor. She is an award winning” journalist, earning state contest first and second place awards in something-or-other almost every year she has worked at the Alamogordo paper. This year her continuing coverage of issues at the Alamogordo Primate Facility earned her a First Place NMPA-APME award, Daily Newspapers Class II. The learning curve over the past 13 years has been amazing and SPJ helps keep it that way. She would love to help the SPJ board continue to support the workshops, newsletters and information that SPJ provides to its members.
Laura Paskus
Running for vice president of communications
Laura Paskus
Laura is an independent reporter and editor based near Albuquerque. She writes about environmental and social justice issues for a variety of magazines, ranging from the Santa Fe Reporter to Ms. Magazine and is also interim editor of Tribal College Journal, a quarterly magazine. Although she recognizes and appreciates online reporting and technological changes within the field of journalism, she is most passionate about print magazines, newspapers and books and the power of long-form narrative journalism.
She was elected to the Rio Grande Chapter’s board of directors last year and served on the communications team. In that capacity, she set up the chapter’s Facebook page, promoted events and seminars and helped with the Rio Grande Chapter’s website. She is also the chapter’s local contact for SPJ’s 2012 High School Essay Contest. If re-elected this year, she would like to serve as vice president of communications.
Peter St. Cyr
Peter St. Cyr
