UC Berkeley Journalism - Program

Newspaper Faculty and Lecturers

Faculty

Lydia Chavez (Professor)
Lydia Chбvez started as a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune, later moving on to Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, where she served as El Salvador and South American bureau chief. In 2005, Chбvez and her students collaborated to publish “Capitalism, God and A Good Cigar: Cuba Enters the Twenty-First Century” (Duke University Press). And in 1998, Chбvez published, “The Color Bind: California’s Battle Against Affirmative Action,” which won the Leonard Silk Award (UC Press). She has also written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Examiner and magazine pieces for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazines and George Magazine. She holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
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William Drummond (Professor)
William J. Drummond’s career includes stints at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, where he covered the civil rights movement, and the Los Angeles Times, where he was a local reporter, then bureau chief in New Delhi and Jerusalem and later a Washington correspondent. Drummond was appointed a White House Fellow in 1976 by Gerald R. Ford, worked briefly for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and eventually became associate press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. In 1977 he joined NPR and became the founding editor of “Morning Edition.” Drummond has been honored with a National Press Club Foundation Award, the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Journalism Excellence, and the Award for Outstanding Coverage of the Black Condition from the National Association of Black Journalists. His research interest lies in incorporating stress-reduction techniques into journalism education. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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Tom Goldstein (Professor)
Goldstein is a Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications and Director of the Mass Communications Program at Berkeley. He has been a journalism educator for more than 20 years, first at the University of Florida, then at Berkeley (where he served as dean from 1988 to 1996) and finally at Columbia (where he served as dean from 1997 to 2002). Goldstein worked as a reporter at A.P., Newsday, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He served as press secretary to New York City Mayor Edward Koch. Goldstein has written The News at Any Cost, A Two-Faced Press and co-authored The Lawyers Guide to Writing Well. He edited the Killing the Messenger: 100 years of Press Criticism. A native of Buffalo, he is a graduate of Yale and Columbia's law school and journalism school.

Cynthia Gorney (Professor)
Cynthia Gorney joined the faculty in 1999, after a career at The Washington Post that included serving as an award-winning national features writer, South American bureau chief and the first writer for the Post’s Style section based on the West Coast. She is the author of “Articles of Faith: A History of the Abortion Wars,” and has written for many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and the American Journalism Review. She is currently a New Yorker staff writer. Gorney is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.
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Neil Henry (Professor)
Neil Henry worked for 16 years as a metro, national and foreign correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya for The Washington Post, and as a staff writer for Newsweek magazine, prior to joining the faculty in 1993. A former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, he is the author of a 2002 racial history, Pearl's Secret. His second book, American Carnival: Journalism under Siege in an Age of New Media, was published in May, 2007. A graduate in political science from Princeton University, Prof. Henry earned his master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
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Susan Rasky (Professor)
Susan Rasky was the congressional correspondent for The New York Times. A winner of a George Polk Award for National Reporting, she began her career in Washington, D.C., covering economic policy for the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. and later reported for Reuters from Capitol Hill and the White House. Rasky was a columnist and contributing editor for the California Journal as well as a frequent political commentator for the Los Angeles Times, The Sacramento Bee and NPR. She established and supervises the J-School’s California News Service, which gives students experience covering government and politics for news organizations throughout the country. She joined the faculty in 1991. Rasky received her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a master’s degree in economic history from the London School of Economics.
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Lecturers

Andrea Behr (Lecturer)
Andrea Behr is features copy desk chief at The San Francisco Chronicle, where she has worked since three weeks before the Loma Prieta earthquake. Before that she held a variety of editing positions at the San Jose Mercury News. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from San Francisco State University.

David Charron (Lecturer)
Charron has a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford and his MBA from Haas. He joined the faculty in 2003 after having served as CEO of 6Gear Inc. and Osner Inc. Charron has also consulted for various startups, serves as Executive Director of the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Laboratory and is a Mentor to the Global Social Venture Competition at Haas. Charron teaches several courses at Haas including, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Entrepreneurship Workshop for Start-Ups Life as an Entrepreneur, Business Model Innovation for New Ventures.
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John Curley (Not Selected)
John has an extensive background in journalism, and most recently served as a deputy managing editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. John was the operational leader at the paper, helping to direct the work of reporters, editors and photographers. On a daily basis, he was responsible for the content and presentation of Page One. Previously, he was a beat writer, general assignment reporter and a columnist. From a multimedia perspective, for two years he appeared nightly on San Francisco's KPIX television during the 11 p.m. newscast, giving updates from the newsroom about the paper's biggest stories. He also wrote and did photography for the Culture Blog, an online-only, street-level look at some of the people and things that make the Bay Area the unique place it is.

Terisa Estacio (Lecturer)
Terisa started working with KRON in 2001. A veteran of the news business, Terisa's experience spans much of the nation. She previously worked as a correspondent for CBS's Newspath traveling the nation to all breaking news events. Terisa has covered numerous high-profile court cases including the trial of the men accused of beating and killing Matthew Shepard's because he was gay, and the trial and execution of Timothy McVeigh. Terisa has also traveled the country covering national disasters including the country's worst floods, hurricanes, and fires. Turning to politics, Terisa worked as a White House correspondent for Tribune Broadcasting during President Clinton's first term. She was later on the scene for much of the breaking news surrounding the 2000 Presidential race between President Bush and then Candidate Al Gore. In more than two decades as a journalist, Terisa has worked for television stations in Los Angeles, Houston, Texas, Sacramento, Reno and Eureka. Now settled in the Bay Area, Terisa covers a wide range of topics for KRON-TV, with an emphasis on crime, the courts and top investigative stories of the day. Terisa was born and raised in the Bay Area and is very proud and extremely happy to be back home covering the important stories for Bay Area residents. She lives in the North Bay with her dog, Kalvin.

James Finefrock (Lecturer)
Jim Finefrock has been a journalist in San Francisco for more than 35 years for both the old San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was the first head of the Examiner's investigative team, Metro editor and editor of the editorial pages. He helped to create the Chronicle's Insight section and was its editor for the last six years. He's won several national awards for his reporting, including the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel, and numerous state and local awards.

Andrew Gilbert (Lecturer)
Andrew Gilbert has covered music, modern dance and film for numerous publications since 1989. He is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Contra Costa Times. His CD reviews air monthly on KQED’s “California Report.” Born and raised in Los Angeles, he earned a B.A. in politics from U.C. Santa Cruz. His master’s thesis for U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, a half-hour documentary on jazz/cabaret singer Wesla Whitfield, won a Golden Spire award at the 1999 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Rob Gunnison (Lecturer)
Rob Gunnison is Director of School Affairs at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. He arrived in 1999 after writing for 15 years for the San Francisco Chronicle in Sacramento, CA where he covered State government and politics with an emphasis on budget and tax issues. Before that, he was Sacramento Bureau Manager for United Press International where he covered government and politics for 11 years. His reporting on the savings and loan debacle was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Gunnison teaches “Reporting and Writing the News” and has co-taught an investigative reporting class with Professor Bergman for six years.

Tyche Hendricks (Lecturer)
Tyche Hendricks is a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she covers immigration and Latino affairs. She has worked in newspapers for a dozen years, including the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News and the Seattle Times, and has covered transportation, urban planning, local government and breaking news. Hendricks has filed dispatches from Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua and she is currently writing a book on the U.S.-Mexico border for the University of California Press. She has also worked as a freelance radio producer. Prior to entering journalism she was an administrator and fundraiser for several non-profit organizations, including the League of Women Voters and the Seva Foundation. She speaks near-fluent Spanish and passable French. Hendricks holds a BA from Wesleyan University, and an MA in Latin American Studies and an MJ in Journalism, both from UC Berkeley.

David Lewis (Lecturer)
David Lewis is a projects editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he specializes in narrative journalism. He is also an independent filmmaker whose work has been shown at film festivals throughout the world. During his 18 years at The Chronicle, Lewis has edited numerous narrative serials, and he helped oversee an investigative narrative project about needle contamination that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. These days, Lewis is preparing for a newly created position at the newspaper in which he will help plan and edit Page 1 centerpieces and enterprise stories.

Robert Rosenthal (Not Selected)
Robert Rosenthal is a Carnegie Fellow and former San Francisco Chronicle editor.

Joan Ryan (Lecturer)
Joan Ryan is an award-winning journalist and author. She is currently working on her third book, The Water Giver (2009, Simon & Schuster). It is a chronicle of two journeys: her 16-year-old son's recovery from a severe brain injury last year and her own transformation as a mother. Her newspaper work spans 25 years, the last 22 in San Francisco, first as a sports columnist, then an Op-Ed columnist and finally a metro columnist. She left the Chronicle in 2007. Her first book, "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters'' (1995, Doubleday) was a controversial, ground-breaking expose. Sports Illustrated named it one of the "Top 100 Sports Books of All Time.'' Her most recent honor, in 2007, was the prestigious Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents Association for her searing four-part series about wounded soldiers, "War Without End.''

Russ Rymer (Lecturer)
Russ Rymer is an award-winning journalist and author whose career has been split between editing and writing. His freelance work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harpers, Atlantic, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. He has written two books. His first, Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, received a Whiting Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. His second book, American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory, was named a New York Times Notable Book and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Mr. Rymer has served as the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine, executive editor for Portland (Oregon) Monthly, and as senior editor for other regional and national magazines including the Sunday magazine of the Atlanta Constitution, National and International Wildlife, and Science ’86. He has also been contributing editor for The Sciences and Hippocrates and writer-at-large for Los Angeles Magazine. His editing helped garner several National Magazine Awards for General Excellence; the 1988 National Magazine Award for Single Topic Issue went to a special edition of Hippocrates concerning medical ethics which he conceived, assigned and edited. He taught science writing at the California Institute of Technology and has lectured on journalism topics at Columbia, Sciences Po Paris, The Commonwealth Club and other universities and foundations and has talked about his books on The Today Show, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Diane Rehm Show and other national television and radio shows. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2002. He is currently at work on his third book, Out of Pernambuco, to be published by Houghton Mifflin and Berlin Verlag in 2008.

David Tuller (Lecturer)
David Tuller was a reporter and editor for ten years at the San Francisco Chronicle. He served as health editor at Salon.com and frequently writes health stories for the New York Times. He received his masters in public health at Berkeley in 2005.

Previous Instructors

Stephen Buel (Lecturer)
Stephen Buel is the editor of the East Bay Express. He has worked primarily for alternative newsweeklies since 1985, when he started Spectrum Weekly, a paper inspired by the one he leads today. He also has worked as a reporter and editor at the Arkansas Democrat, United Press International, and San Jose Mercury News. He attended the Graduate School of Journalism.

Kathy Corcoran (Lecturer)
Katherine Corcoran has been an award-winning newspaper journalist and magazine writer for more than two decades, including 13 years as a staff writer at the San Jose Mercury News. She was a 2005 Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu and is currently Latino affairs writer at the Mercury News. Her journalism teaching experience includes visiting lecturer positions at Stanford and San Francisco State universities.

Larry Friedlander (Lecturer)
Larry Friedlander has been a professor of English Literature and Theater at Stanford University since 1965, with a specialty in Shakespeare and performance. In addition to his academic and critical activities, Friedlander worked in the professional theater as an actor and director for many years. He was founder and co-director of the Stanford Learning Lab, and e also co-directed the Wallenberg Global Learning Network, an international consortium dedicated to exploring issues of technology and learning. Friedlander has been heavily involved in museum design and planning, working with such institutions as the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Exploratorium. Friedlander is currently a Carnegie Fellow here at the Journalism School.

Michael Mechanic (Not Selected)
Michael Mechanic (Berkeley MJ, 1994) has been managing editor of the East Bay Express since 2002. Prior to that he was a special reports editor and senior writer for tech-business magazine The Industry Standard. He also served stints as science editor for doomed environmental journalism startup Verde, as a copy jockey for the Hearst San Francisco Examiner and Mother Jones, a staff writer for Metro newspapers, and a freelancer for various other newspapers and national magazines.

Victor Merina (Lecturer)
Merina is a former investigative staff reporter with The Los Angeles Times. Most recently he has been a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow working forthe Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

Laurel Rosenhall (Lecturer)
Laurel Rosenhall has covered education for The Sacramento Bee since 2002, writing daily stories about testing, school lunches and church-state conflicts, as well as long-term projects that show how education policy decisions play out in the lives of individual students. She has reported on schools across California's varied landscape, from a one-room schoolhouse in the Sierras that served only two students to inner-city campuses where few students can read at grade-level.

Robert Scheer (Lecturer)
Scheer, a journalist with over 30 years experience, has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. From 1976 to 1993, he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where he wrote articles on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. He is currently a contributing editor at The Times, as well as a contributing editor for The Nation magazine. An accomplished author, Scheer has written six books including "Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power"; "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War" and "America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals." For links to his work, visit www.robertscheer.com

Lance Williams (Lecturer)
Williams is an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. He has written on subjects including the California cocaine trade, the BALCO sports steroid scandal and the career of San Francisco mayor and political power-broker Willie Brown. His journalism has been honored with the George Polk Award; the Edgar A. Poe Award of the White House Correspondents‚ Association; the Gerald Loeb Award for financial writing; the California Associated Press‚ Fairbanks Award for public service; and the Center for California Studies' John Jacobs Award for political reporting. He was the SPJ's Northern California Journalist of the Year in 1999. Before joining the Chronicle, he worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune and the Hayward Daily Review.