Bruce Theriault Named to Board of Directors of the Institute for Nonprofit News

June 28, 2016 -- Bruce Theriault, former Corporation for Public Broadcasting senior vice president for journalism and radio, is one of four new directors appointed to the board of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a nationwide network of investigative and public service news outlets.

Theriault’s appointment was announced Monday along with those of four elected board members: Steve Beatty, editor of The Lens in New Orleans; Lee Keough, founder and editor-in-chief of NJ Spotlight; and Norberto Santana Jr., founder and publisher of the Voice of Orange County (CA). Anne Galloway, founder and editor of VTDigger.org, was re-elected.

"I’m honored to serve on the INN board,” Theriault says. "Journalism has a critical role in a civil society and nonprofit news organizations play an increasingly vital part. Journalism -- and especially mission-driven journalism -- needs to be continually supported and encouraged. INN is a major player and leader in advancing the craft and promoting the value and benefit of public service, accountability journalism. I look forward to helping advance that mission.”

INN functions as an innovation network supporting and advancing nonprofit news in the public interest, with a growing membership of about 120 news organizations, from investigative reporting studios to newsrooms providing accountability journalism and community engagement in underserved areas.

“The board and staff of INN welcome these directors who bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to this network of newsrooms finding new ways to report, support and promote public access to news,” said board Chair Brant Houston.

Theriault, who retired in May from CPB after a long career in public media, is one of four public members of the INN Board. He joins Houston, who is Knight Chair of Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Reginald Chua, executive editor, editorial operations, data & innovation at Thomson Reuters; and Neal Shapiro, president and chief executive officer of New York public media provider WNET.

Beatty, Keough and Santana were elected and Galloway re-elected by INN members on June 16. They join incumbent elected members Trevor Aaronson, executive director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and Laura Frank, president and general manager of news at Rocky Mountain PBS. Houston announced he will step down as INN board chair and serve an emeritus term. The board is expected to elect a chair in the coming weeks.

Frank and Houston were among representatives of 27 nonpartisan, nonprofit news organizations that founded INN (then the Investigative News Network) in 2009 as a collective of nonprofit newsrooms dedicated to serving the public interest. Today, INN has grown to nearly 120 nonprofit media organizations in North America. The community shares best practices, collaborates on stories, pools resources and pursues innovative ways to support newsgathering.

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Bruce Theriault, Public Seat

Theriault has been a senior executive in local, state, and national public media organizations for nearly four decades. Until May 2016, Theriault was senior vice president, journalism and radio for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where he led initiatives to encourage, fund and build stronger local, regional and national public media journalism through collaborations and partnerships. Previously, as co-managing director of Public Media Co. Theriault worked with public radio stations to expand their services through creative partnerships, acquisitions and finance strategies. Theriault also helped develop and launch Marketplace and Public Radio International’s The World while SVP of PRI and managed KTOO-FM and KRBD-FM in Alaska, where he co-founded and served as president of Alaska Public Radio Network and launched Alaska News Nightly, the first statewide daily news program for public radio. Theriault helped establish and then served as chair of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB). Currently, he is president of Bolder Strategies, a strategic management consulting firm to nonprofit public media organizations. Theriault holds the degree of master in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School. In his spare time he enjoys mountaineering and road biking.

Steve Beatty, INN Member Representative. Beatty, a veteran investigative journalist, is editor of The Lens. He worked as an editor for the Times-Picayune for 15 years, leaving New Orleans just before Katrina to take a position as an editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and quickly rising through the ranks to be an editor of the newspaper’s watchdog investigative team. He returned to New Orleans in May 2009. Before joining The Lens, Beatty worked as an investigative reporter for the Pelican Institute, a public policy think tank.

Anne Galloway, INN Member Representative. Galloway is the founder and editor of INN-member VTDigger.org and executive director of the nonprofit Vermont Journalism Trust. VTDigger, based in Montpelier, VT, is dedicated to watchdog coverage of state government, politics, education, business, energy, health care, the environment and criminal justice. Sixty-five percent of VTDigger’s revenues come from sustainable sources. In 2015, the organization has a 13-member staff, 150,000 unique readers a month and a budget of $1 million. VTDigger has received funding from the Knight Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, Ben & Jerry’s Foundation and J-Lab. Galloway previously worked as a reporter and editor in Vermont for 20 years. She was the editor of the Sunday Rutland Herald and Barre Times Argus from 2004 until January 2009, when she was handed a pink slip along with 16 other employees. For many years, Galloway was a contributing writer for Seven Days Newspaper in Burlington. Her reporting has appeared in the New York Times (the Vows column), the New York Daily News, Vermont Life and City Pages (Minneapolis).

Lee Keough, INN Member Representative. Keough is the editor-in-chief and founder of NJ Spotlight. Keough is an award-winning journalist and editor with more than 25 years experience. After starting her career as a reporter at N.J. daily the Herald-News, Keough began working at a variety of computer publications. She served as editor-in-chief of Techweb, a network of web-sites for IT professionals. Under her guidance, Techweb was cited as one of the three most important B2B sites by Advertising Age. Keough led Data Communications, a McGraw-Hill Companies publication and web site to more than 40 national awards for editorial excellence while editor-in-chief. Keough also served as editorial director of Telecom ’97 and ’99, the world’s largest telecom trade show, which is sponsored by a division of the United Nations. There she oversaw television programming and a daily newspaper. She is cofounder and president of The Forsite Group, an editorial services company.

Norberto Santana Jr., INN Member Representative. Santana is an award-winning investigative reporter with 20 years of experience at major daily newspapers. Before founding Voice of Orange County in 2009, Santana was a lead investigative reporter for the Orange County Register and spent a decade covering local governments across Southern California with newspapers such as the San Diego Union Tribune and the San Bernardino County Sun. He also worked as a staff writer with Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C. and covered territorial government with the U.S. Virgin Islands Daily News. In addition to his experience as a journalist, the Southern California native has a master’s in Latin American Studies and has worked as an elections analyst with the National Endowment for Democracy. He also has direct experience on Internet start-ups as one of the founders of CubaNet.org, a website for dissident writers inside Cuba that has operated since 1995. As publisher of Voice of Orange County, Santana has worked on numerous aspects of building a startup civic newsroom including recruiting and retaining diverse staff, board members, foundations and distribution partnerships. Over the past six years, Voice of Orange County has published nearly 6,000 stories, created a following of roughly 50,000 monthly unique visitors, successfully led two public records lawsuits and reached the $500,000 budget mark. The newsroom employs a half dozen reporters and editors and is expanding this year with a membership, sponsorship and events program.

For further information:  INN CEO Sue Cross, sue@inn.org or 213.709.7126