INN's Board of Directors is comprised of individuals representing INN members and those from external organizations. Interested in serving on the board or a committee? See board member job descriptions and our conflict-of-interest policy in the INN bylaws.
Laura Frank, Board Chair, Member Representative
Laura Frank is the Executive Director of COLab, the Colorado news collaborative. She pioneered collaborative journalism in Colorado as the founder of I-News, the nonprofit investigative news organization that merged with Rocky Mountain Public Media in 2013, the first such merger in the nation. She led the journalism team there for seven years, and is now leading 20-plus newsrooms in collaborative reporting through the Colorado News Collaborative.
She had previously been an investigative reporter at Denver's Rocky Mountain News until it closed in 2009. Laura is a Denver native who spent 20 years reporting for newspapers, radio and public television around the country, specializing in investigative reporting and data analysis. She trained hundreds of journalists for more than a dozen media organizations.
She was a founding member of the Institute for Nonprofit News and now serves as its board chair. Her work has won awards in both broadcast and print, and led to changes in laws and lives.
Marcia Parker, Secretary, Member Representative
Marcia Parker is publisher and chief operating officer of Calmatters, a nonprofit journalism organization covering California politics, policies and personalities. Prior to joining Calmatters she was executive director of content and audience engagement for Penton’s Technology news portfolio. She previously was editorial programming and audience development director at State.com, a global opinion platform, and was West Coast editorial director of Patch.com, AOL’s venture into hyperlocal journalism. Parker taught at and was assistant dean at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for several years, and then joined the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley. She served as launch manager for the website of California Watch, CIR’s statewide investigative reporting unit. Previously she did stints at AOL, where she was a director of programming and was assistant managing editor at Intuit’s quicken.com, then the leading personal finance website.
Bruce Theriault, Treasurer, 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
Erika Dilday, Member Representative
Erika Dilday currently runs Futuro Media, an organization that produces the radio shows Latino USA and In The Thick and creates audio, video and digital content for and about people of color.
Prior to Futuro Media, Dilday was the Executive Director of Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem where she oversaw community cinema and education programs and produced the award-winning documentary, In Transit.
In 2017 she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Columbia Journalism School for her work and is a 2020 Nieman Knight Visiting Fellow at Harvard exploring how we break the norms of media that alienate people of color and other marginalized communities.
Erika is currently the producer, with director Rachel Boynton of the upcoming documentary, Civil War, which explores our nation’s inability to deal with its history of slavery and how that history fuels racial tensions today.
Mark Horvit, Public Seat
Mark Horvit is an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he teaches investigative reporting and is director of the State Government Reporting Program. He previously served as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, where he conducted training in investigative reporting and data journalism throughout the world. Horvit worked as a reporter and editor for 20 years before joining IRE. He serves on the boards of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
Sheila Krumholz, Member Representative
As executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, Sheila Krumholz is the nonpartisan watchdog group’s chief administrator and spokesperson, and is cited frequently in prominent national media outlets. Sheila became Executive Director in 2006, prior to which she was CRP’s research director for eight years, supervising data analysis for CRP’s website, OpenSecrets.org, and for CRP’s partners and clients in the media, academia and elsewhere. Sheila has testified before Congress and the Federal Election Commission on issues related to government transparency and regularly makes presentations to scholars, government officials, NGOs that conduct research and advocacy, and at meetings of professional news organizations. During her tenure, she has grown the organization to a 20-person staff with 7 million unique visitors to its OpenSecrets.org website and 30,000 media citations in 2016.
Ron Nixon, Public Seat
Ron Nixon is global investigations editor for The Associated Press, leading AP investigative teams around the world, and is also co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society, a professional association for investigative reporters of color. Nixon joined AP in 2019 and guided coverage of the war in Yemen, edited a major investigation of opioid sales in China and contributed to news coverage disclosing that close associates of President Donald Trump sought profits in the Ukraine while trying to dig up dirt on the president’s rivals. He previously was homeland security correspondent for The New York Times, where he covered border and aviation security, immigration, cybercrime and security, transnational crime and violent extremism. Nixon is the author of the book “Selling Apartheid: South Africa’s Global Propaganda War.” He is based in Washington DC.
Norberto Santana Jr., Member Representative
Norberto Santana Jr., 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.
Ron Smith, Member Representative
Ron Smith is an instructor of practice in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Marquette University’s Diederich College of Communication and the editor/program director for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. The nonprofit service provides evidenced-based journalism coverage of Milwaukee’s communities of color and is staffed by professionals, student-journalists and community residents. Before his current role, Ron served as the managing editor for news at USA TODAY.
In addition, he was the deputy managing editor for daily news and production at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he oversaw the breaking news hub, production desks and was the key point person for print story selections and workflow. Ron has been blessed to work in newsrooms across the country, including The Oregonian, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. He’s also worked as an advertising sales director and as the interim student adviser for New Expression, a citywide teen publication written by and for Chicago youths that had a monthly circulation of 70,000. He has edited several Pulitzer Prize-winning reports and is known for championing great journalism and the great journalists who produce great works.
A sought-after speaker, Ron has led sessions for Poynter, American Society of News Editors, National Association of Black Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association. He served as the co-leadership chairman for the American Society of News Editors and worked as an instructor for the organization’s Emerging Leaders Institute, which trains diverse mid-career professionals to be newsroom leaders.
Neal Shapiro, Public Seat
Shapiro is president and chief executive officer of New York public media provider WNET. Before coming to WNET, Shapiro was president of NBC News from June 2001 to September 2005, where he oversaw the global operations of NBC Universal’s top-ranked news division: "Today" in the morning, "NBC Nightly News" in the evening and "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning. From 1993 to 2001, Shapiro was executive producer of "Dateline NBC." Before NBC, Shapiro spent 13 years at ABC News, where he produced for all the network’s news programs and worked with Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson, among others. Shapiro has won 34 Emmys, 31 Edward R. Murrow Awards, nine Sigma Delta Chi Awards, three Alfred I DuPont-Columbia University Silver Batons, three George Foster Peabody Awards, three George Polk Awards, three Overseas Press Club Awards and many more. Shapiro graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University with degrees in history and political science. He has taught journalism at Tufts and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has lectured at many universities, including MIT and Stanford.
Hsiu Mei Wong, Public Seat
Wong is a member of the Management Group at PA Consulting Group, a global consulting, technology and innovation firm. She has over 20 years’ experience in planning, developing and managing complex initiatives in the financial services, healthcare, consumer goods and media sectors. She uses cross-industry insights to drive business and operating model innovation. She has a unique perspective on these industries having worked in North America, Australia, China, Thailand, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Germany and the UK. Wong has worked with many Fortune 100 companies to advise and deliver major transformation, develop new revenue streams, set direction for digital initiatives and deliver business improvement projects. Wong’s previous work includes helping to launch CampingRoadTrip.com and a five-year stint at the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ). She is based in New York.
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Brant Houston, Emeritus Director
Brant Houston is a co-founder of the Institute for Nonprofit News, which began with more than 20 member organizations in 2009, and he served as INN's interim executive director in INN's first year. He also has been active for the last 11 years in supporting many INN member organizations as they start up, providing organizational, fundraising and editorial advice. Houston is a professor and Knight Chair of Investigative Reporting at the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he oversees, CU-CitizenAccess.org, an award-winning newsroom. Houston previously served for more than a decade as the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a 5,000-member organization. Before joining IRE, he was an investigative reporter at U.S. daily newspapers for 17 years, with a speciality in data journalism. Houston has authored five editions of “Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide” and co-authored the fourth, fifth editions and sixth editions of The Investigative Reporter's Handbook. He has taught investigative and computer-assisted reporting in 25 countries, and he is co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.
Robert J. Rosenthal, Emeritus Director
Robert J. Rosenthal is one of the co-founders and former board member of INN. He is now on the board of the Center for Investigative Reporting/Reveal and was CIR's executive director from 2008 until 2017, during which time he expanded its staff from 7 to 70 . CIR/Reveal is widely recognized for the quality and credibility of its journalism and its constant innovation around storytelling and distribution. Rosenthal spent the bulk of his nearly 50-year career in journalism at The Philadelphia Inquirer, starting as a reporter, and a foreign correspondent and becoming its executive editor in 1998. He became managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002. Before joining the Inquirer in 1979, Rosenthal worked as a reporter for The Boston Globe and The New York Times, where he was a news assistant on the foreign desk and an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pentagon Papers project. As a reporter, Rosenthal won numerous reporting awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting. Rosenthal is also currently on the board or advising multiple journalism nonprofits. In 2018 Rosenthal was named a Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists for his "extraordinary contribution to the profession of journalism."