Vote for the 2022 SPJ Oregon board
SPJ Oregon has four empty seats on its board of directors, as well as a new one: the Education Seat for college students or professors.
Unlike other board seats, the Education Seat is a one-year term. The remaining seats are two-year terms.
SPJ Oregon’s nine-member volunteer board meets at least once a month. The board elects its own president, vice president, secretary and treasurer at the first meeting of the year.
Voting closes at 8 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 7. Ballots were emailed to SPJ members in Oregon on Monday, Oct 4. If you are a current member and did not receive a ballot or want to join SPJ in order to vote, please email us for help.
Ballots ask members to choose four general board candidates and one Education Seat candidate.
Here are the candidates’ statements.
GENERAL BOARD SEAT
There are four general board seats up for election this year. These are 2-year terms.
Roman Battaglia
The value of local news is something I'm intimately familiar with. Serving as a Report for America fellow at Delaware Public Media throughout the worst of the pandemic, I learned to dive deep into the hyper-local but extremely important issues facing Delaware's diverse set of communities.
I've since returned to Jefferson Public Radio in Southern Oregon to continue to amplify the voices of Southern Oregon and Northern California.
Looking at the makeup of the current board, its membership reaches only as far south as Eugene, leaving out at least half a million Oregonians and dozens of news outlets without representation in Oregon's largest professional news organization.
In serving on the SPJ Oregon board, I would hope to accomplish a few goals:
• Represent the needs and concerns of news organizations in Southern Oregon
• Help to amplify and support young, emerging and LGBTQ+ journalists in the state
Bryce Dole
I’m passionate about covering issues facing rural Oregon. I grew up in Grants Pass and have spent the majority of my career writing about communities beyond the I-5 corridor.
I attended the University of Oregon journalism school, spending much of my time writing about environmental issues facing small communities like Oakridge and Charleston. After graduation, I was a Charles Snowden intern at The Oregonian in the summer of 2020, covering the COVID-19 pandemic and protests for racial justice in Portland. That fall, I began my first reporting job at the East Oregonian. I lived in Hermiston and Pendleton for a year and covered everything from crime to politics to hospitals and public health in Umatilla and Morrow counties.
In December 2021, I moved to Bend to take a job as The Bulletin’s education reporter in Central Oregon, where I live now. I recently became the paper's crime and public safety reporter, starting the job a week before the shooting at our local Safeway in August.
My experience has shown me the importance of local newspapers in small communities. As much of rural Oregon becomes a news desert, I would advocate for stronger open records law and resources for smaller papers to ensure their communities receive ample coverage and that the powerful institutions serving them are held accountable.
I believe my experience makes me a strong candidate for this position, but I would argue I can also provide valuable input as a young reporter. I look forward to learning more about this position and speaking with you about how I can help contribute to the team. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Tim Gruver
I am running for the board to improve representation and advocacy for fair labor standards and educate journalists on their rights in newsrooms that play fast and loose with employment law. As more newsrooms dissolve, I am interested in promoting more freelance workshops and training.
Moreover, I am running to finally codify diversity and inclusion into SPJ Oregon's mission statement and bylaws. We must improve how we report our stories and ensure they represent the communities we claim to serve.
This includes recruiting more people of color, LGBTQIA+ people and people with more diverse lived experiences into journalism in the first place, offering more peer mentorship and support when their newsrooms will not.
Henry Houston
Henry Houston is the news editor at the Eugene Weekly, where he covers local and state news, music, the local food scene and more. Previously he was the editor and lone reporter for the Springfield Times and got his start in journalism in 2009 at the Santa Maria Sun in California while attending community college. He graduated from California State University, Monterey Bay with a BA in Humanities and Communications in 2013, and from the University of Oregon with a MA in International Studies in 2017.
After being appointed early 2021 and serving as president 2021 to 2022, he has accumulated knowledge in how the SPJ Oregon board functions and how to organize its events and fundraisers. If elected, he hopes to use some of his experience on the board to include community college and university students in the system, such as help facilitate the creation of SPJ chapters on campuses.
Colin Miner
I’ve spent almost 40 years in this business, starting out as a staff writer for High Times Magazine as a 16-year-old. Since then, I've reported for The Oregonian, KGW, KATU, KOIN (at the three television stations, I worked the assignment desk as well as producing special reports and exclusives), The New York Times, Washington Post, New York Post NY1 News, The New York Sun and more. I’ve been a print reporter, city editor, managing editor, television producer, radio reporter, online reporter. The last almost 7 years, I was at Patch working as a reporter, editor, and the creator of Patch’s partnerships program which ended up with almost 200 news organizations across the country working with Patch, sharing content and helping promote each other.
That’s a major reason I would like to join the SPJ Oregon board.
We’re in a time where local journalism (and, to a certain degree, all journalism) faces threats from many places. I’m not saying that we should abandon individual organizations or anything like that but we are at a point where we need to stress cooperation over competition. We all have the same goal – to make sure that the people of Oregon have the information they need to make informed decisions every day.
Having worked in several different mediums – print, online, broadcast – I understand that each has their own demands, their own stresses.
Whether it’s working together to get a story out, fighting together to force officials to follow the law and release documents in a timely fashion or coming to the aid of each other in times of crisis, there are so many opportunities to live by the motto of We’re all in the together working for the people of Oregon.
Erin Tierney-Heggenstaller
Erin Tierney-Heggenstaller is the executive editor of The Chronicle, the only locally owned, subscription-based weekly newspaper serving the southern Willamette Valley. A 2013 graduate of Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, Erin was the associate editor for a daily newspaper, The (Lock Haven) Express, before becoming the editor for The Creswell Chronicle in 2016. In 2019, Erin and her publisher led the effort in expanding coverage to Springfield and Cottage Grove — a move that redefined the community newspaper and one that proved instrumental in securing the publication's survival in the pandemic. Since then, The Chronicle has earned over 40 “Better Newspaper Contest” awards for editorial, advertising and design efforts – including some of her own for news, feature, enterprise and government reporting. She leads a team of four full-time reporters and more than a dozen correspondents and photographers.
Katy Sword
As a current SPJ board member, I'm proud of the ongoing work our board has achieved in advocating for transparency and supporting journalists — financially and with skill-building opportunities. We've continued to offer grants to journalists navigating layoffs, funded public record requests and this year we'll offer an in-person conference after a 3-year hiatus.
My background is in community journalism and I'm running again for the SPJ Board to continue serving our community as an advocate and to continue this important work.
EDUCATION SEAT
The Education Seat is for a college student or professor. This is a one-year term.
Zachary Jones Neuray
My name is Zachary Jones Neuray and I’m an incoming senior at the University of Oregon, majoring in Journalism with a minor in Anthropology. Born in Brussels, Belgium, I moved over to Portland, Oregon in 2006. I grew up in a multilingual household, juggling French and English with friends and family throughout my life. As an expat with no recognizable accent, I’ve often been miscategorized or misheard due to my unique cultural and linguistic upbringing. I’ve understood personally how important it is to be furiously curious and to seek the stories that often go unheard or are misrepresented. During my high school summers, I participated in community and culturally oriented volunteer trips to Costa Rica, Peru and Thailand. These experiences were fundamental to my passion to immerse myself in the nuances of diverse cultures and life, further establishing my desire to study anthropology and to become a documentary filmmaker.
In 2018, I worked for Carolyn Long’s midterm campaign in Vancouver, Washington. During that year, I worked in Tanzania for two months, focusing on primary education and urban gardening in Arusha. In 2021, I joined the Daily Emerald as a freelance writer while also leading the International Youth Silent Film Festival’s Student Board as President during the pandemic. At this moment, I’m a reporter for the Catalyst Solutions Journalism project, covering youth and rural voices in Oregon before the midterm election and am a DJ at the student radio station. These experiences have allowed me to understand the privilege and power of journalism and the responsibility of being able to tell another’s story. I hope to be able to contribute and add a different perspective to the SPJ Board of Directors.
Hannah Seibold
Hannah Seibold is a reporter for the Catalyst Journalism Project at the University of Oregon, where her writing is centralized on investigative and solutions journalism. Seibold is driven to catalyze change in bridging media and society by reporting with humility. The roots of her journalism career, thus far, were planted in working for her high school yearbook, where the unwanted Oxford comma hadn’t been banished for her quite yet.
Since her youth, she has found her passion for people. The forefront of her goals as a reporter come from an understanding that everybody’s story is worth telling; we are closer to one another than we could fathom. She believes that if she can be the listening ear that gives someone the space to feel heard, then there’s no better way to spend a matter of minutes.
As an SPJ board member she aims to provide a platform for people to build trust in the media, find resolutions for improving media literacy and generate work that signifies connectedness in hopes for higher engagement from an audience.