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Unity '99 Bios
Return to IRE Training
Lori Aratani is an education writer at the San Jose Mercury News, where she has covered a variety of issues ranging from bilingual education to the influence of technology on classroom life. She has also worked as a general assignment and city hall reporter. She is a graduate of Boston University.
Robert Benincasa is database/special projects editor at Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C. His duties include collaborating with GNS reporters on enterprise and breaking news stories involving computer-assisted reporting, and assisting journalists at Gannett newspapers with their computer-assisted reporting efforts. His recent projects have included analyses of campaign contribution records, welfare reform results and employee pension plans.
Donald Blount has been a business writer at the Denver Post for the past 2-1/2 years where he covers finance and international business. He has written series for the Post about Colorado's relationship to Japan and Canada. He was a lead writer for the Post during China Premier Zhu Rongji's visit to Denver and also the Denver Summit of the Eight. Previously, he was the financial writer for The Morning Call, a Times-Mirror Co. newspaper in Allentown, Pa. A graduate of Lehigh University, Bethlehem Pa. with a degree in accounting and minor in journalism.
Len Bruzzese is deputy director of IRE and an assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He oversees IRE's publications, its World Wide Web site, the IRE Resource Center, the Campaign Finance Information Center and IRE's diversity efforts. He also assists in the administration of IRE and the running of IRE's national and regional conferences. He comes to IRE after 20 years in newspapers, including editing and writing stints at USA Today, The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Miss.), the Pensacola News Journal and Gannett News Service. He most recently served as editor of The Olympian in Olympia, Wash.
Dianna Hunt has been a staff writer for The Dallas Morning News for three years. Before joining the News, she worked 13 years at the Houston Chronicle, including seven years as a special projects reporter. She also has worked at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Hunt has won national, state and local awards in virtually every category of reporting, including investigative reporting, spot news and features. Her stories have included an analysis of traffic tickets that revealed widespread arrests and disparate ticketing of ethnic minorities in suburban areas throughout Texas. Hunt, a Cherokee, is a member of the Native American Journalists Association and is serving as co-chairman of the Unity '99 convention program committee.
George E. Jordan is a business writer at The Star-Ledger. He joined the newspaper in 1995 from Newsday, where he was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting for coverage of the Union Square Subway crash. Jordan, 42, is a former staff writer at the Miami News, Cleveland Plain Dealer and Minneapolis Tribune and summer intern at the Boston Globe. He is a 1979 graduate of the University of Minnesota.
Rafael Lorente has worked in the Washington bureau of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel since 1998. Before that, Rafael covered government and higher education beats in Florida for the Sun-Sentinel. He worked at The Miami Herald from 1993 to 1995. Rafael is a graduate of the University of Miami and the University of Maryland's graduate School of Journalism.
Victor Merina is a freelance writer and a fellow at the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center in New York. He is a former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he worked for nearly 20 years. As an investigative reporter at the Times, he was a member of the paper's special projects team that produced a multi-part series — "And Justice for Some: Solving Murders in Los Angeles County" — which was a 1997 Pulitzer finalist and won the IRE award. He also shared in the Times' 1993 Pulitzer for "spot news" coverage of the Los Angeles riots. He has covered city hall, transportation and law enforcement for the paper, among other beats. Merina has been a senior lecturer at the University of Southern California School of Journalism and a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. He is a former national board member of the Asian American Journalists Association.
Judy Miller is projects editor of the Miami Herald. She supervised an investigation of voter fraud in the Miami mayoral election that was awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Goldsmith Prize from Harvard University. She also supervised coverage of a bus shelter electrocution that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the Spot News Category. She is president of the IRE Board of Directors.
Stephen C. Miller is Assistant to the Technology Editor at The New York Times. He oversees the training of reporters and editors in the use of new technologies and helps determine the news department's computer and telecommunications needs. He also writes on computers and consumer electronics for the paper. Miller started his career in broadcasting, spending 17 years at CBS News. He recently completed a fellowship at the Freedom Forum. He is completing his book, While Our Backs Were Turned: How Computers Changed Journalism.
Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss. His stories have led to the arrests and convictions of one-time, KKK Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for the 1966 murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer and Klansman Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Mitchell, who has been interviewed on Nightline and other national news programs, was portrayed in the 1996 Rob Reiner film, Ghosts of Mississippi. This year, he won eight national awards, including the prestigious Sidney Hillman Award. His story of a civil rights activist who befriends a former Klan terrorist, The Preacher and the Klansman, will be made available to schools and community groups across the U.S. this fall.
Barbara A. Serrano is a staff reporter for The Seattle Times who began covering race, class and regional enterprise this year. She has extensive experience writing on state and local politics and was the Times' chief political reporter for two years. She previously worked in the newspaper's state capitol bureau and has written major investigative stories on politicians, public-private partnerships, municipal finance and the state Bar Association. A native of California, Serrano began her journalism career at The Stockton Record and was the co-writer of an award-winning investigative project on a pedophile ring and the mishandling of sexual abuse cases in the district attorney's office. She later worked at the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif., covering the city of Anaheim and immigration and Hispanic affairs. Serrano is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and has a degree in political economy of industrial societies. She also has a master's degree in international journalism and completed a one-year fellowship at the University of Southern California, before moving to Seattle in 1990. Serrano has been an active member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) and served as a regional and at-large board member for three years. She was chairwoman of the association's 1997 convention in Seattle and is a founder of the Latino Media Association in Washington.
Cheryl W. Thompson has been with The Washington Post since January 1997, She covers the District's police department (police administration) and the Department of Corrections. Prior to coming to The Post, she was a member of the projects team and the national staff at the Kansas City Star. She also has worked at the Chicago Tribune and the Daily News of Los Angeles. She has a bachelor's degree in speech and a master's in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Throughout her 14 years in journalism, she has won numerous national, regional and local awards.
Duff Wilson, a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for public service, is an investigative reporter for The Seattle Times, currently on leave while he works on a book, his first, for HarperCollins Publishing. Wilson won the Oakes award for environmental reporting and was co-winner of the Goldsmith prize for investigative reporting for articles that revealed how heavy industries saved money disposing of hazardous wastes by recycling them into fertilizer. He also has won more than 30 other journalism awards. Wilson maintains the Reporter's Desktop on the World Wide Web, which recently took a new home at IRE's reporter.org site (http://reporter.org/desktop).
Ben Winton has been an editor since November 1997 for Native Peoples magazine, a quarterly Phoenix-based publication with 300,000 readers in 44 countries. In summer 1998, he was promoted to editor of the magazine, which is the flagship publication of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. Winton has been a print journalist for 22 years, starting as a copy boy at The Arizona Republic and working his way up to reporter, where he covered every major news beat on the city desk — from the Arizona Legislature to night cops — before moving into reporting on religion, race and culture. As a religion writer, Ben transformed the beat into one that covered religion for its social and political force in the world, elevating it to the same coverage status as the newspaper's other major news beats. His coverage won him a vote in 1992 by the Religion Newswriters Association as one of the 10 best religion writers in America. In 1994, the Native American Journalists Association gave Ben its highest award for mainstream newspapers' coverage of Indian issues — the Phoenix Award — for "accurate, fair and sensitive coverage of Native people." He is a board member of the Native American Journalists Association, serving as its treasurer this year, and was recently appointed by the Phoenix City Council to the Phoenix PRIDE Commission.
