Meet the IFAC Board

James Reindl is IFAC Board Chairman and the director of major accounts for The Associated Press. Based in Chicago, Reindl works with AP’s largest member customer groups. He joined the AP in Detroit in 1983. Reindl has directed AP operations in three states — Florida, Indiana and Illinois — serving as chief of bureau in Miami, Indianapolis an Chicago. He began his career as a reporter with The Muskegon Chronicle in Michigan. He was a Kiplinger Fellow at Ohio State University.

Cheryl Wormley is IFAC Vice Board Chairman, publisher and co-founder of The Woodstock Independent, a past president of the Illinois Press Association (IPA) and a current member of the Illinois Press Foundation (IPF). She and Denise Graff Ponstein launched The Woodstock Independent in 1987. Since then, the newspaper has won more IPA contest sweepstakes trophies than any other single newspaper in the entire state. In 2001, Wormley received the National Newspaper Association's Emma C. McKinney Award, the highest honor presented to a woman by the NNA. She is also a past president of the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association.

Jack Brimeyer is IFAC Board Secretary. He served as managing editor of the Journal Star in Peoria, is a graduate of Iowa State University and began his career in 1970 as a reporter at the Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald before becoming local news editor. He became assistant managing editor/nights at the Journal Star in 1982 and assistant managing editor/news in 1985. The Journal Star then named him managing editor in 1990. He is a founding member of the Heartland Regional Network, a member of the Illinois Associated Press Editors Executive Board and a past member of the Bradley University College of Communications and Fine Arts International Advisory Board.

John Barron is the Publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times. He is also President and Publisher of the company’s Pioneer Press Newspapers, a collection of 39 weeklies in the Chicago area.

At the Sun-Times, Barron has held a variety of leadership posts, including General Manager, Editor in Chief, Executive Managing Editor and Features Editor. Barron also served as Executive Editor of the Sun-Times News Group, consisting of the Sun-Times and more than 60 other newspapers.

Prior to joining the Sun-Times in 1995, Barron was editor of Detroit Monthly, the city magazine of metro Detroit, published by Crain Communications, Inc. While in Detroit, Barron also wrote a weekly video column for the Detroit News and was an entertainment correspondent for WXYT-AM. He began his journalism career as an assistant editor at Crain’s Chicago Business.

A native of Chicago, Barron attended Marquette University in Milwaukee. He lives in Oak Park with his wife, Maureen, and two daughters.

Don Craven serves as general counsel for the Illinois Press Association. He joined his father, James C. Craven, in 1986 to concentrate on media issues and voting rights litigation. His firm, Donald M. Craven, P.C. focuses its on libel and First Amendment issues, access to government meetings and records and business concerns of newspapers. He also is general counsel to the Illinois News Broadcasters Association and the Illinois Broadcasters Association.

Nancy Day is the Journalism Department Chair at Columbia College Chicago. She earned her M.A. in Communication at Stanford University. Nancy is a Nieman Fellow, Harvard University; Department Chairperson; former editor and reporter, San Francisco Examiner, Associated Press; former reporter, Chicago Sun-Times, Illinois State Register, Anchorage Daily News; freelance editor, writer, consultant, whose articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, People magazine, Rolling Stone, Columbia Journalism Review and many other national, regional and online publications; Fulbright Scholar; winner, American Bar Association Gavel Award, UPI Spot News Award.

Bruce Dold is the editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune. He supervises production of the newspaper’s editorials and Commentary page. Mr. Dold joined the Tribune in 1978 as a reporter. He covered the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns and the mayoral campaigns of Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley. He was appointed to the Tribune’s editorial board in 1990 and became deputy editor of the board in 1995. He was named editorial page editor in 2000. Dold received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1994 for a series on the death of a three-year-old boy and the failure of the juvenile court and child welfare system to save the child. His writing contributed to sweeping reforms in the protection and care of abused children in Illinois. He received the 2009 Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing from the Society of Professional Journalists and the 1999 National Journalism Award for Commentary from the Scripps Howard Foundation. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. He is a frequent commentator on television and radio programs including The Newshour with Jim Lehrer and Chicago Tonight.

Shawn W. Denney is Archdeacon of Springfield and Vicar of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Springfield, Illinois. A graduate of MacMurray College (B.A. 1973), Jacksonville, Illinois, and the University of Illinois College of Law (J.D. 1976), Urbana-Champaign, Fr. Denney is a licensed attorney who was employed in the Office of the Illinois Attorney General for over 26 years, serving five Attorneys General. At the time of his retirement from State service (December 31, 2002), he was Senior Counsel to the Attorney General, Ethics Officer and chair of the Attorney General’s Ethics Commission. Previously, he had served as First Assistant Attorney General (1988-1995), Solicitor General (1987-1988), Chief Attorney in the Springfield office (1983-1987) and Chief of the Attorney General’s Opinions Division (1980-1987).

Mary Field is Executive Producer of Chicago Tonight, WTTW 11's nightly live news and current events hour. She is also responsible for all news and public affairs production at the station, including Chicago Tonight, Chicago Tonight: The Week in Review, the Friday Night Program and segments produced for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

In more than 30 years in the news business, Field has been a William Benton Fellow in broadcast journalism at the University of Chicago, an investigative/special projects producer for WGN-TV, an assistant news director for WIND Radio and a reporter for the legendary City News Bureau.

She has been honored with numerous journalism awards for investigative reporting as well as a Peter Lisagor Award for public service and a National Silver Gavel Award for legal affairs reporting. She is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Oberlin College.

Karen H. Flax is Assistant General Counsel of Tribune Company. She is the lead in-house lawyer for the Chicago Tribune Media Group which, in addition to the Chicago Tribune, includes chicagotribune.com, Chicago Magazine, ChicagoNow and the RedEye. Karen provides day-to-day counseling and litigation management in areas involving prepublication review, libel and privacy law, reporter access, copyright, internet, distribution, circulation, tort and contract law. She also provides legal counseling to the Tribune Publishing Group which includes the ten other major newspapers owned by Tribune Company, as well as managing certain outside litigation for the parent company.

Karen serves on the Board of Directors of the Illinois Press Association and the Constitutional Rights Foundation. She is a member of the Media Law Resource Center and serves on the NAA’s Legal Affairs Committee.

Prior to joining Tribune Company, Ms. Flax was a partner at the law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. Before joining Sonnenschein, Ms. Flax was a law clerk to Federal Judge Hubert L. Will of the Northern District of Illinois.

John Foreman is the editor and publisher of The News-Gazette in Champaign, the 1997 Illinois Press Association (IPA) president and the 1994 recipient of the IPA’s James C. Craven Freedom of the Press Award. He joined The News-Gazette as a reporter in 1977 and became city editor in 1981, managing editor in 1985, editor-in-chief in 1987, general manager in 1999 amd publisher in 2002.. He has taught journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has been inducted into Eastern Illinois University Journalism School’s hall of fame and into the Lincoln League of Journalists by the Illinois AP Editors Association.

Steven Helle has been named national Freedom Forum Journalism Teacher of the Year and twice has received the campuswide award as outstanding undergraduate professor at the University of Illinois, where he is former head of the Department of Journalism. He has also received the James C. Craven Freedom of the Press Award and been named UIUC Distinguished Teacher/Scholar. His articles on freedom of the press have appeared in Duke Law Journal, Illinois Bar Journal, Iowa Law Review, Journalism Quarterly, Editor & Publisher, University of Illinois Law Review and numerous other journals and newspapers. He is former head of the Media Law Committee and of the Human Rights Section Council of the Illinois State Bar Association, as well as former chair of the Law Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. His J.D. and M.A. in journalism are from the University of Iowa.

James A. Klenk is a First Amendment lawyer with Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in Chicago. A trial lawyer since 1974, his clients have included Howard Publications, the Orlando Sentinel, the Chicago Tribune and Time magazine. He edited the Wisconsin Law Review from 1973 to 1974 and was law clerk to U.S. Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit Chief Judge Thomas Fairchild from 1974 to 1975. He authors the Media Law Center’s treatise in Illinois defamation law.

Mike Lawrence was named director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU in October 2004. He joined the institute as associate director in 1997. In addition to serving as director, he taught classes in both the political science and journalism departments. He retired on November 1, 2008. Prior to joining SIU, Lawrence was press secretary and senior policy adviser to Gov. Jim Edgar for nearly a decade. He joined Edgar’s staff after working as a journalist for 25 years. Lawrence capped his newspaper career as chief of the state capital bureaus for Lee Enterprises and the Chicago Sun-Times. He was honored by the Associated Press Editors Association for exemplary service to other journalists and newspapers in Illinois and received the Paul Simon Award for Public Service from the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. He writes a bi-weekly column on Illinois politics and government for several newspapers.

Richard "Dick" O'Brien is a media law and intellectual property attorney at the law firm of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood in Chicago. He joined the firm in 1981 after serving as a law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Abraham L. Marovitz in Chicago. His clients have included the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal and several radio and TV stations. He is also a member of the Libel Defense Resource Center. He firm publishes an annual newsletter of recent media law developments for the Illinois Press Association.

John David Reed taught journalism for 32 years at Eastern Illinois University and served as publisher of The Daily Eastern News for much of that time. He is the 2005 recipient of the Illinois Press Association's James C. Craven Freedom of the Press Award as well as the 1993 Louis E. Ingelhart First Amendment Award from College Media Advisers. Reed is executive director of Mid-America Press Institute, a member of the Illinois Press Foundation's board of directors and a founder of the Illinois College Press Association. He's been inducted into the Lincoln League of Journalists by the Illinois AP Editors Association and the College Media Advisers Hall of Fame. He also has received the Gold Key Award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, a Distinguished Service Award from the Illinois Press Association, the Distinguished Four-Year College Newspaper Adviser Award from CMA, and Distinguished Faculty Member and Outstanding Faculty Member Awards from Eastern. A reporter and editor at the Chicago Sun-Times before joining Eastern's faculty, Reed holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in journalism from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and the University of Missouri, respectively, and a B.A. in English, earned while he worked as a student journalist at The Daily Illini at the University of Illinois.

Michelle Stevens's past experience includes Sunday Commentary editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, editor of the Letters to the Editor and a member of the editorial board. After two years at the City News Bureau, she began her newspaper career in 1975 at the Chicago Daily News and moved to its sister paper, the Sun-Times, in 1978 when the Daily News ceased publication. After several years as a reporter, copy editor and section editor, she joined the editorial board in 1993 and began writing a weekly opinion column. Stevens was named deputy editor of the editorial pages in 1993 and editor in 1995. She also served as night news editor before returning to the editorial board in 2000. She was a founding member of the Association for Women Journalists and served on the board of directors of the Chicago Headline Club. She is a graduate of Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism and the John Marshall Law School.