Monday, November 29, 2010 10:07 AM
Active press club members will receive a piece of snail mail on Tuesday or Wednesday marked “Ballot Inside” for the election of seven new journalists to the Press Club Board of Directors. Please open it up, select your choices and mail it back right away, because we’ll be counting the votes on December 13. If you do not receive your ballot by Thursday, December 2, please contact Diana Ljungaeus at Diana @lapressclub.org so she can get you a ballot immediately.
Candidates for 2011 LA Press Club Board are: Tony Castro, Daily News; Eric Leonard, KFI News; Martha Sarabia, La Opinion & Sharon Waxman, The Wrap. Incumbents running: John Amato, Crooks&Liars; Diana Ljungaeus, int’l journalist; Jon Regardie, Downtown News & Gry Winther, documentary filmmaker.
Thanks for participating in the club’s annual election of new directors.
2011 LOS ANGELES PRESS CLUB BOARD CANDIDATE BIOS
JOHN AMATO founded the Los Angeles-based Crooks and Liars political website at crooksandliars.com in 2004. He is often referred to as “The Vlogfather” for helping pioneer the use of video blogs. In 2009, his site was named by Time Magazine as one of the nation’s top 25 blogs. His contributors include Nicole Belle, Logan Murphy, Mike Finnigan and many others. The site publishes original material including breaking news and interviews with political and entertainment figures. It also publishes clips from TV and cable such as “The Daily Show.” Crooks and Liars received a Best Video Blog award at the Weblog Awards in 2006 and a Best Weblog About Politics award in 2008. He is also an accomplished sax and flute player who toured with Duran Duran. He is a current member of the Press Club Board of Directors.
TONY CASTRO is a Los Angeles Daily News features and political reporter who began at the Herald Examiner in 1978 after his Neiman fellowship at Harvard. He was the editor of the Los Angeles Independent chain of local weekly newspapers, where he helped the papers win awards as they covered the city’s many neighborhoods. He’s had a varied and colorful career including stints at Sports Illustrated and the National Enquirer. Also an author, he wrote a biography of Mickey Mantle, “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son,” and the widely praised “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America.” His rite of passage memoir, about his struggles earlier in life, “The Dance: Images and Illusions of A Youth,” will be published in 2011, as will his dual biography of baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, “Gehrig and the Babe: The Friendship, The Feud.”
ERIC LEONARD became a news reporter at KFI-AM (640), the most widely-heard talk radio station in the Western U.S., at age 18. He has spent the last 15 years covering major trials, political scandals, crime, natural disasters and other major news. An award-winning broadcaster, he scooped up a Distinguished Journalist of the Year Award in 2007 from the L.A. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and won a Golden Mike in 2003 for best investigative reporting after uncovering illegal fundraising in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. He is known for his ability to live-broadcast encyclopedic detail of trials, from those of Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona to Michael Jackson. He covered the arrest of the Grim Sleeper, the recall of Governor Gray Davis and lived for weeks outdoors in New Orleans while covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, he even busted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for riding a motorcycle without a license.
DIANA LJUNGAEUS, executive director of the Los Angeles Press Club, is also a foreign correspondent for Swedish media. She runs the day-to-day business of the Press Club, produces most club events and has produced or co-produced the annual awards gala for seven years. She was a director of the Press Club board 2001-2007. Ljungaeus is an award-winning journalist with a broad background as a reporter, editor, researcher and producer. She has also lived and worked in Sweden and England. “I want to continue to improve and grow the stature of the press club and make it the most vibrant, exciting organization for journalists in California.”
JON REGARDIE, award-winning Executive Editor of Los Angeles Downtown News, has been working as a journalist in Los Angeles since 1993, and has served as executive editor of Los Angeles Downtown News for the past four, overseeing the day-to-day operations of the editorial department of the newspaper that serves the heart of the city. A current member of the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Press Club, he also is the editor of The 8-Ball, the Press Club’s recently revived newsletter. He has won four California Newspaper Publishers Association awards, including two first-place prizes in the Columns, Commentary and Criticism category, and was the recipient of an L.A. Press Club first place award for business reporting. His work has appeared in many local and national publications including Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine, Blender, Spin, Budget Living and Maxim.
MARTHA SARABIA is an award-winning entertainment and lifestyle reporter at La Opinion, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the country. She has covered the red carpet for events such the Oscars, Grammys and Golden Globes and has written about such top entertainers and figures as Alejandro Fernandez, Los Tigres del Norte, Selena Gomez and Hillary Swank. She was among the few reporters — and the only Spanish-speaking one — present at the confirmation of Michael Jackson’s death, a story she covered throughout. She has worked at the North County Times, the bilingual newspaper La Prensa in San Diego, and the La Prensa/The Press Enterprise in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. She was an assignment desk editor in Univision San Diego and worked in the creative services department at KGTV, an ABC affiliate in San Diego. For her work in both Spanish and English, she has won awards from the Inland Southern California Society of Professional Journalists, San Diego Press Club, and L.A. Press Club, which honored her with a National Entertainment Journalism Award and a best entertainment feature award in 2010.
SHARON WAXMAN, Editor in Chief and Founder of TheWrap.com, is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author. Waxman is the former Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times and a leading authority on the entertainment business and media. Before the Times, she was a correspondent for eight years for The Washington Post’s Style section. She started out as a foreign correspondent, covering Europe and the Middle East for a decade. She is the author of “Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World,” and “Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System.” Waxman won the University of Missouri’s top feature-writing prize in 2000 for an article on violent video games and was nominated by The Washington Post for the Pulitzer Prize for her work from the Gaza Strip.
GRY WINTHER is an award-winning Norwegian journalist and independent documentary filmmaker who has covered international news and current affairs for 18 years. She moved to the U.S. in 2004 and has been working as a political correspondent registered with the U.S. Foreign Press Centre for Norwegian television (TV2), radio (P4) and newspapers (Aftenposten). She was granted an exclusive sit down with “Bush’s brain,” Karl Rove, at the White House in 2005, interviewed Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and met with former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Khatami. She has made 10 documentaries, including “Las Damas de Blanco,” about the fight waged by women living under Castro’s regime in Cuba to free their political prisoner husbands. Her last documentary, detailing the fight for freedom in Iran, was nominated for best documentary at Norway’s Volda Filmfestival. She is a current member of the Press Club Board of Directors.
