Society for News Design Vice President Bonita Burton and the SND Executive Committee are pleased to announce the appointment of Susan Mango Curtis and Jonathon Berlin to key positions. We’re still seeking volunteers for several other positions.
Susan Mango Curtis, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and an SND past president, has been appointed president of SND’s Foundation, filling the vacancy created by Bill Gaspard’s resignation last week. Curtis will serve through the remainder of Gaspard’s term, Dec. 31, 2009.
The Foundation is SND’s nonprofit education and research arm. With support from donations and matching grants, the Foundation provides training grants for out-of-work visual journalists, university-level scholarships, travel grants for students to the Annual Workshop & Exhibition, grants to the student designers of the year, and outreach to minority journalists and journalism students at universities with large minority enrollments. The Foundation also provides research grants for projects on the future of journalism developed in partnership with other journalism organizations.
Curtis is an educator, designer and consultant. Before coming to Medill, she worked as an assistant managing editor for the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, where in 1991 she spearheaded a complete redesign and won multiple SND awards. Three years later, she was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for a series titled “The Question of Color.” In 1996 she received the Garth C. Reeve chair in journalism and took a sabbatical to teach visual journalism at Florida A&M University.
Prior to joining the Beacon Journal staff, Curtis was a designer at the Journal newspapers in suburban Washington, D.C. She also has worked as an artist for the Washington Post Sunday magazine and as art director for the National Rifle Association. Curtis operates a design consulting business that caters to publications and organizations both in the United States and abroad.
She was SND President in 2004 and has been the adviser of Medill’s SND student chapter for 12 years. She has also chaired the visual task force for NABJ’s annual workshop and Unity convention.
Jonathon Berlin, design director at the Chicago Tribune and editor of SND’s Design magazine, has been appointed Publications Director, filling the vacancy created by Tyson Evans’ resignation last week. Berlin will serve through the remainder of Evans’ term, Dec. 31, 2009.
Berlin says his top priorities are getting a regular HTML newsletter up and running; coordinating a steady flow of SND business content and thought-leading material at snd.org; wrapping up the next edition of Design magazine for publication in the next three months; and working to get more member voices in the mix.
At the Tribune, Berlin supervises the graphic artists and is responsible for the general look and feel of the paper. He helped lead the team of editors and designers behind September’s award-winning redesign.
Prior to joining the Tribune, he was the senior editor for design and graphics at the San Jose Mercury News, leading the paper’s design and graphics departments to a record number of SND awards. He also worked in a previous stint as A1 and special projects designer for the paper during the year it won “World’s Best-Designed Newspaper™” distinction from SND. Berlin also has worked as assistant design director at the Rocky Mountain News; as a graphics editor and features designer at the Times of Northwest Indiana; and as design director for YourHub.com.
Have you ever wanted to become more active in SND? Have you ever wanted to increase your contacts with visual journalists, and learn more about design trends globally? Have you ever wondered how to organize a Quick Course or meetup in your area?
SND is now seeking enthusiastic visual journalists to assist with SND activities in three regions:
• Region 2 — East Coast Metro Region Delaware, DC, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia (vacated by the resignation of Regional Director Jon Wile last week, term runs through 2010)
• Region 6 -– Plains Region Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. (vacant since 2008, term runs through 2010)
• Region 11— Mexico–Central America–Caribbean Region (vacant since 2008, term runs through 2009)
If you are interested in volunteering to help SND, please contact SND Vice President Bonita Burton, bburton@orlandosentinel.com.
Don’t forget about the Society’s upcoming events, which include:
• Signing up on July 1, 2009, to serve as a facilitator at the judging for the 31st Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition, Feb. 5-9, 2010, at the University of Syracuse. Link.
• Submitting April-June entries by July 7, 2009, for the Best of Multimedia Design Competition.
• Registering for the Web Design Boot Camp, July 11-12 in Las Vegas.
• Registering for the FREE San Francisco Meetup, July 18, 2009.
• Registering for SND Buenos Aires, Sept. 24-26, 2009.
Thank you Susan Mango Curtis and Jonathon Berlin for filling these positions for SND.
Thank you Bonita for arranging this
I also want to say THANK YOU for stepping up and helping. You are taking the right approach which is to step up and help lead the society through this time.
Why in the world would anyone want to be part of such a fractured, flawed, fubared, good-for-nothing, board-infighting, comment-board-filling, tick-tock-debating organization?
I think the answer is deep within a few of the less vitriolic comments from other threads on this site. It has to do with what SND can and should do for us.
That’s the key, all of this is US.
SND has been around for 30 years and weathered all sorts of personalities. Nice folks. Asses. Gurus. Goofballs. It made it through pagination. Helped actually. Struggled for relevance against a heavily entrenched world of print journalism. Helped. Helped elevate our craft to an incredible degree of competency.
And on the shoulders of all of these people who fought for—and, yes, sometimes among themselves—the same stuff we are fighting for today. Relevance. Right. Respect. Fulfilling and valuable work. A good life for our families.
These were people just like us. People who were us before we were us.
It all brings us to our moment. An insane set of challenges. You know, poor Phil Mickelson has to play against Tiger Woods (or that other guy).
So you all get to decide how you respond to this particular moment. I’m choosing to stick around and see what we can do with this old, beaten up organization. Don’t know if it’ll go anywhere. But it seems it’s worth a try. It won’t be perfect. It even promises to be painful. But to me there’s a flicker of chance if we work together we can make a difference.
There’s plenty of room if anyone else is interested. We’ll make those ways clearer on this site in the coming weeks and months.
Jonathon, those are inspiring comments. Your words are delightfully refreshing. Thank you so much to you for stepping in to contribute to even more to the leadership of SND. I know you will help make a difference for the membership.
I thought we might see Johnathon Berlin stepping up here. It’s good to see signs the organization is pressing on. Still much discussion to be had, no doubt. But the optimism is refreshing and I think absolutely vital for success in any possible outcome here.
Thanks, both, for taking these roles on. Looking forward to learning more about what lies ahead.