Melanie Plenda is a member of the NENPA Board of Directors and an award-winning freelance journalist and the Director of The Granite State News Collaborative. Her role with The Collaborative includes coordinating coverage for the group’s editorial projects, building partnerships and handling the day to day operations of the organization. Melanie’s freelance work has appeared in a variety of regional and national publications including The Atlantic.com, The Daily Beast, and The Washington Post. Melanie is based in New Hampshire.

Angie Drobnic Holan is the editor-in-chief of PolitiFact. She has extensive experience fact-checking the presidency, Congress and political campaigns, and was a reporter on the PolitiFact team that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She serves on the advisory board of the International Fact-Checking Network.

She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a master’s of library science from the University of South Florida. Her undergraduate degree is from the Plan II liberal arts program at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a native of Louisiana and attended the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts.

Joy Mayer founded Trusting News in 2016 after a 20-year career in newsrooms and teaching. She spent 12 years at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she created an audience engagement curriculum and a community outreach team in the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian and also taught web design and print design. She lives in Sarasota, Florida, and can be reached at joy@TrustingNews.org or on Twitter @mayerjoy.

Darrell Davis is the Vice President of Creative Services for Metro Creative Graphics, Inc. With more than 30 years of experience in media and advertising, Darrell leads a team of art directors, designers and copywriters in producing creative content to help newspapers and their local advertisers thrive.

Darrell attended Syracuse University and earned a BFA in Graphic Design at Binghamton University. He also studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he remains a resident and ardent observer of evolving design and advertising trends.

Sue Robinson (PhD, Temple University) holds the Helen Firstbrook Franklin endowed research chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication where she teaches and researches about journalism. She has three books: How Journalists Engage: A theory of trust building, identities and care (2023, Oxford University Press), News After Trump: Journalism’s crisis of relevance in a changed media culture (2021, Oxford), and Networked News, Racial Divides: How power and privilege shape public discourse in progressive communities (2018, Cambridge University Press).

Kristen Hare covers the local news industry and teaches local journalists as a faculty member for the Poynter Institute. She also writes a weekly feature obituary for the Tampa Bay Times and is the author of all three editions of “100 Things to do in Tampa Bay Before You Die.” Hare, a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, spent 5 years as the Sunday features writer and an assistant editor at the Saint Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, and five years as a staff writer covering race, immigration, the census and aging at the St. Louis Beacon. She also spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America. Hare and her family live outside Tampa

Robert A. Bertsche, a First Amendment and media litigator and counselor, holds up Klaris’s Boston location. A former journalist, Rob has earned a national reputation representing print and online magazines, newspapers, broadcasters, documentary filmmakers, and websites, including in their video, film, podcast, television, and social media incarnations. He serves as editorial counsel to dozens of publications nationwide, including not only one of the country’s largest-circulation consumer magazines, but also one of its most storied and respected news magazines.

Rob specializes in extensive prepublication and pre-broadcast review and also counsels editors and journalists with the aim of avoiding litigation when possible. Where that has not been possible, he has represented media in more than 35 lawsuits in federal and state courts in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire, including two libel trials and other cases involving invasion of privacy, access, and public records, copyright and trademark infringement, and Section 230.

Longtime general counsel to the New England Newspaper and Press Association, Rob also serves on the board of the New England First Amendment Coalition and as a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s Judiciary-Media Committee. For the Media Law Resource Center, he writes the annual outlines of First Circuit media libel and Massachusetts employment libel law. Since 2005, he has been selected by the American Society of Magazine Editors to conduct annual legal training programs in the editorial and business aspects of print and online publications.

For the past 15 years, Rob has regularly been rated as a “Best Lawyer”® and “Super Lawyer”® in the fields of media law and First Amendment litigation. He has also been honored by Massachusetts Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts for his pro bono work and is an Oliver Wendell Holmes Fellow of the Massachusetts Bar Foundation, Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and member of the invitation-only Litigation Counsel of America. Most recently, he was recognized by a national publication as Boston’s 2022 “Lawyer of the Year” for First Amendment litigation and media law. A graduate of Wesleyan University and Harvard Law School, Rob is admitted to practice in Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.

Katherine Jacobsen is the U.S. and Canada Program Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, a global non-profit organization based in New York. In this role, Jacobsen works with local news organizations and reporters to monitor and respond to attacks on the media.  Prior to working at CPJ, Jacobsen worked for four years as a reporter in Ukraine and Russia, writing for outlets including the Associated Press and Businessweek.

Stephanie Sugars is the senior reporter for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, where she documents press freedom violations in the U.S. and by U.S. officials abroad. A graduate of NYU’s Global and Joint Program Studies program in journalism and international relations, her professional work focuses on human rights, politics and identity-targeted violence. She has previously worked at the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Post-Conflict Research Center, and her freelance reporting has appeared in Al Jazeera, Open Democracy and Balkan Diskurs.