The following professionals are members of the board of advisers for the National Center on Disability and Journalism. The board helps chart the center’s course and serves as a source of advice and support.
Nan Connolly
Connolly is a longtime advocate for persons with disabilities. A former business editor with Knight Ridder, Connolly was a business and military affairs reporter at two Gannett newspapers and for The Associated Press. She won state news association awards for political coverage at the Maryland statehouse and began her career in the film lecture department at the National Geographic Society.
She teaches news reporting to print majors at the Nicholson School of Communication, University of Central Florida, in Orlando. Connolly is currently developing an online news site about health care in central Florida. She is a member and fundraiser for National Alliance on Mental Illness and for Special Olympics.
Connolly’s interest in the special needs community was sparked by volunteer work she did while in college at a respite clinic for family members of children with disabilities. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Master of Arts degree in journalism and mass communications from the University of Florida in Gainesville. She was a Poynter Institute for Media Studies fellow in media management and entrepreneurship as a graduate student. She is currently enrolled as a master’s student in exceptional education at the University of Central Florida, with a focus on learning disabilities and English for speakers of other languages
Steve Doig
Doig is the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. Before joining ASU in 1996, he worked for 20 years as an investigative reporter and editor at The Miami Herald, where he became a specialist in computer-assisted reporting. Projects on which he worked at the Herald won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and other major awards.
Doig’s interest in the topic of disabilities in journalism dates back to his experience working with the late John Wolin, a Herald editor who had a stellar career there despite numerous surgeries necessitated by his particularly difficult condition of achondroplasia dwarfism.
Doig holds a degree in political science from Dartmouth College and graduated from, and later taught at, the Defense Information School. He spent a year as a combat correspondent for the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star for his service.
He actively consults with print and broadcast news media outlets around the world on computer-assisted reporting problems and is an active member of IRE, serving on the 5,000-member organization’s board of directors for four years. Recently, he worked with IRE to organize a new journalism contest, called the Phil Meyer Award, to recognize the best journalism using social science techniques. In addition, he has been a speaker at many national meetings of journalism and other organizations. He also has traveled to Canada, England, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Brazil and Indonesia to do training in precision journalism techniques. His research interests include newsroom diversity, demographics, public opinion polling and finding techniques used by other professions that can be developed into tools for journalists.
Beth Haller
Haller is Professor of Journalism/New Media at Towson University in Maryland. She is the former co-editor of the Society for Disability Studies’ scholarly journal, Disability Studies Quarterly (2003-2006), and currently maintains a blog on disability issues in the news, Media dis&dat, as well as a Web site on media and disability research.
Haller has been researching media images of disability since 1991 when she did a master’s thesis at the University of Maryland, College Park, on the coverage of deaf persons in The Washington Post and New York Times. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Temple University in Philadelphia investigated elite news media coverage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Her media and disability research has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Disability & Society, Journalism Studies, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Research in Social Science and Disability, Journal of Comic Art, Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, Mass Comm Review and Journalism History. She is the co-author of the textbook “An Introduction to News Reporting: A Beginning Journalist’s Guide” (Allyn & Bacon, 2005).
Haller is a native of Fort Worth, Texas, and received her undergraduate degree in journalism from Baylor University. She worked as a print journalist for newspapers in Texas, New Mexico, Illinois and Maryland before becoming a college professor. She also serves on the advisory boards of DREDF’s Disability & Media Alliance Project and Disability Rights Promotion International’s Media Monitoring Project.
Jennifer LaFleur
LaFleur is director of computer-assisted reporting for ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization that produces journalism in the public interest. She is based in New York City.
Before joining ProPublica, LaFluer was the computer-assisted reporting editor for The Dallas Morning News, where she worked on the investigative team and directed newsroom stories based on data analysis. She has held similar positions at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
LaFleur held a Media Law Fellowship with The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C. She has taught journalism at the University of Missouri and American University, and she was the first national training director for Investigative Reporters and Editors, an educational organization based at the University of Missouri.
She is co-author of a book on computer-assisted reporting and has won awards for her coverage of disability, legal and open government issues. She is on the board of directors for the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
Suzanne Robitaille
Robitaille, of Greenwich, Conn., is the founder and editor-in-chief of Abledbody.com, a consumer Web site that covers disability news and assistive technology. She was the assistive technology columnist for BusinessWeek.com in New York from 2001-2005, giving rise to her interest in technology that helps people with disabilities surmount barriers in the workplace and their living spaces.
She also worked at The Wall Street Journal Online and continues to write for print and Web publications, including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek.com, Disaboom and Media Post.
She is the author of the book “The Illustrated Guide to Assistive Technology & Devices.”
Robitaille has a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Massachusetts and a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Greg Smith
Recognized as one of the leading voices in the disability movement, Smith, of Ocean Springs, Miss., is host and producer of “On A Roll – Talk Radio on Life & Disability,” a nationally syndicated radio program which he founded in 1992. It is the only commercial, syndicated radio talk program for the disability community.
Smith is a 1986 graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU, where he was sports director of the campus radio station and a sports announcer. He has been a student of disability issues for more than a decade and is a living example of independent living philosophy applied: a severely disabled, power wheelchair user, custodial father of three non-disabled children and successful entrepreneur, speaker, facilitator and spokesperson.
Smith also is the author of three books, including his memoir “On A Roll: Reflections from America’s Wheelchair Dude with the Winning Attitude,” and is the subject of the Audience-Award-winning PBS Documentary “On A Roll: Family, Disability and the American Dream.” He has served on the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, the American Association of People with Disabilities and the National Association on Alcohol, Drugs and Disabilities Inc.
