2026-2027 Board
Officers
President
-
Tanya Gazdik is automotive editor at MediaPost's Marketing Daily. She is the chief programmer for MediaPost's Marketing: Automotive conferences held in conjunction with the New York and Los Angeles auto shows. A longtime automotive enthusiast, the Detroit native also freelances for websites including WardsAuto and A Girl’s Guide to Cars. She previously was animal welfare reporter at The (Toledo) Blade, Detroit bureau chief of Adweek, associate editor at Ward's Automotive Reports and Ward's AutoWorld. She started her career at The Associated Press as an editorial assistant and then a newswoman. She has both a B.A. in journalism and a J.D. from Michigan State University and she is president of the board of directors for The State News Inc., the multimillion-dollar nonprofit that funds the independent student media group at MSU. At JAWS, she is the captain of the Detroit regional group. She is a longtime animal lover and fosters animals for Michigan Humane, transports rescue dogs across the U.S./Canada border for Open Arms Transport, and serves on the board of directors for Leuk’s Landing, an Ann Arbor sanctuary and advocacy group for Feline Leukemia-positive cats.
Vice President
-
Andrea Shalal reports on U.S. foreign policy and global economics for Reuters. For over three decades, she has reported from Europe, the United States and occasionally the Middle East, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification and politics, a host of U.S. elections, OPEC, energy and the environment, global arms sales, as well as politics, the arts and civil rights. She helped found a diversity initiative at Reuters in the United States in the late 1990s, has taught college and graduate courses on diversity and media ethics, appears frequently on podcasts from New Zealand to Germany, and lectures occasionally about Arab American literature and media issues.
She has earned a “Blue Nose†for crossing the Arctic circle, hit 7Gs in a Super Hornet over the desert in UAE (without getting sick), and was among a group of Washington-based journalists selected as Reuters Journalists of the Year in 2015 and again in 2025 for breaking news. She serves on the board of directors of the Journalism and Women Symposium, a professional organization for women journalists, and co-chairs its Washington regional group. Shalal is a longstanding union activist and serves as a shop steward in the News Guild for her team at Reuters. For fun, she enjoys outdoor activities, including kayaking and gardening, and facilitates a recurring gathering of German speakers in the Washington area. She is the proud mother of two grown sons who live and work in Washington State.
President-elect
-
Justine Griffin is the Economy and Health Editor at the Tampa Bay Times, overseeing business coverage and investigations. She is a previous JAW vice president and board member, has co-planned CAMP in the past. Justine lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., with her horses, dogs and chickens.
Treasurer
-
As the founder and co-director of the Washington-based Communications Consortium Media Center, Kathy has been at the forefront of dozens of media campaigns that marked a sea change in domestic and global policies affecting women’s rights, children, families, and communities. From 1988 to 2019, CCMC developed communications strategies for policy change by helping nonprofits throughout the United States and in many countries conduct successful campaigns around issues related to gender equality, sexual and reproductive health and rights, child welfare, economic equality, health care reform, early education, immigration, racial justice, reproductive rights, the census, energy efficiency, and telecommunications. Over these years, CCMC’s work was funded by dozens of foundations including Ford, Packard, Hewlett, Revson, Buffett, and Gates along with smaller family foundations.
She is the co-author of the Jossey-Bass Guide to Strategic Communications for Nonprofits and has authored numerous book chapters, toolkits, studies, and papers, including a 1988 academic journal piece that details the development of the gender gap in elections. She is a contributor to Ms. magazine, online and in print.
Kathy was an advisor to the U.S. delegation to the U.N.'s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. She served as the lead media strategist for the Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights at the U.N. Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. During the 1990s, Kathy was privileged to work with several women's international NGOs to gain media and U.N. attention for the case that ""women's rights are human rights.""
As the volunteer chair of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Media Committee (1973 to 1978) and then with funding as the Women’s Media Project of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (1978 to 1988), she coordinated actions before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and other activities related to improving the advertising images of women, ending discriminatory media practices like sex-segregated help-wanted ads, and advocating for women’s employment opportunities, better coverage of feminist issues, and women’s ownership.
In this capacity, Kathy was invited to the founding meetings of JAWS in Estes Park, Colorado, and the Women’s Media Center at Gloria Steinem’s apartment.
She served as the press secretary for the NOW ERA Countdown Campaign from 1980 to 1982 when former First Lady Betty Ford and actor Alan Alda were co-chairs; as the media director for the National Commission on Working Women; as a Public Information Officer for the National Commission for International Women Year and the Houston Women’s Conference at the U.S. Department of State; and as a research analyst for the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice that worked to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1964 by monitoring elections and redistricting cases.
She is on the boards of JAWS and ERA NOW, a small group recently founded by former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. Previously, she served on several boards of directors with annual budgets between several thousand dollars and $150 million, including the National Council of Women’s Organizations, the National Press Club Journalism Institute, the National Women's Hall of Fame, Pathfinder International, Families USA, the Kakenya Center for Excellence, and Too Young To Wed.
Today, Kathy lives on the coast of Maine in Brooksville, not far from Acadia National Park, with her husband Marc Tucker and dog Iris. She does a limited amount of paid consultancy while focusing more on providing pro bono support to nonprofits.
Secretary
Directors
-
Stephanie Beasley is an experienced journalist who has spent more than a decade reporting from Washington, D.C., covering philanthropy, global development, food and drug safety, and transportation policy. Her work connects domestic and international issues, with stories from Ohio, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, and the U.S.–Mexico border.
Beyond reporting, Stephanie is a skilled moderator and public speaker, having led high-level discussions at the U.N. General Assembly, Independent Sector National Summit, and Journalism and Women Symposium. She is passionate about mentoring early-career journalists and served on Politico’s diversity pipeline committee for two years. In December of 2025, she stepped in as the fellowship director for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Stephanie actively invests in professional growth through fellowships and seminars with organizations such as the International Center for Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, NABJ, the National Press Club, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
-
I ran the Scripps Howard Foundation’s Semester in Washington internship program for 13 years. Before that I taught journalism, mostly at the University of Maryland-College Park (where I got my MA). I was an assignment manager at News4 (WRC-TV). I started my career in D.C. at The Washington Star, mostly covering Virginia, and was the Virginia assistant bureau chief when the paper went out of business in 1981, part of the wave of the disappearance of afternoon newspapers. Since retiring, I was a tour guide at the Newseum’s final four years. I volunteer through the Cleveland-Woodley Park Village, where we help seniors stay in their homes by running errands or giving rides. I wrote "Your Loving Son, Ty: A World War II Story of Hope and Horror in the Pacific," a book about my mother’s cousin, who was on the Bataan Death Mach in the Philippines in WWII. I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and graduated from UN-L.
-
For nearly a decade, Dorine Bethea edited breaking news, and enterprising stories and projects about global, national and regional politics, business, technology, health, the arts, culture and entertainment for The Washington Post. She also served as interim night editor on The Post's Metro Desk and in leadership roles at the Orlando Sentinel and LNP News in Pennsylvania. Her training in leadership and in editing includes stints at Harvard University. This former staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch led a team that earned the Virginia State Press's first-place honors for spot news reporting. Her reporting and writing have been published in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education and Essence. She has taught at Howard and Rutgers universities and at the Missouri School of Journalism. Dorine volunteers with the Urban Journalism Workshop as a mentor to high school students in training. As a recipient of the National Association of Black Journalists' Ethel Payne Fellowship in foreign reporting, she spent five weeks on assignment in Tanzania. Dorine is also a member of Journalism and Women Symposium. She is a graduate of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education Editing Program and the Maynard Media Academy. She recently completed a Maynard 200 fellowship in Investigative Storytelling. She is Editorial Director for Brilliant Discourse (freelance and developing consultancy). Dorine's body of work includes authoring a calendar of events newsletter early in her career, and later, editing magazine content and manuscripts that are now books: A Salute to Michelle Obama (From the Editors of Essence); Give Me My Flowers Now; Black Gardenias: A Collection of Poems, Stories and Sayings From a Woman's Heart; and Loving Love: A Poetic Journey Through Love, Love and Grief.
-
I'm an independent journalist with deep experience in news standards, ethics and multimedia news production. I focused on international news coverage for the Voice of America, which I joined in 2014 as a writing editor and left a decade later as associate standards editor. In between, I pioneered as the “bridge†editor for VOA’s Latin America and then Africa divisions, shaping and sharing stories originating in various language services for broader audiences. Before coming to VOA, I edited and reported for Scripps Howard News Service’s Washington bureau. Earlier, I worked in newspapers, mostly with the Milwaukee Journal – where I led the Sunday magazine and food section – and Journal Sentinel. I left to launch the Journalism Fellowships in Child & Family Policy, a University of Maryland program for working journalists. I also co-founded American Food Roots, which was an award-winning website on food and culture.
-
Julia Métraux is Mother Jones' first disability reporter, where she covers disability as it relates to politics. In addition to being a board member of JAWS, Métraux is also a member of the Association of Healthcare Journalists and the Disabled Journalists Association. Métraux is also an alumna of UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and has received fellowships through JAWS, the National Press Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, and the Gerontological Society of America. She copes with the world by FaceTiming her family dog.
-
Helen Ubiñas is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and founder of The Ñ Fund for Latinas in Journalism. For more than three decades, she has reported on and written about communities too often overlooked, using journalism to hold power accountable, amplify lived experiences, and inspire action.
A member of the Hartford Courant team that won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting and a 2008 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, Helen has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and the Hartford Courant. Her journalism and community work have helped spark initiatives addressing civic engagement, gun violence, and the urgent need to build trust between journalists and the communities they serve.
Today, through The Ñ Fund, Helen is working to help create more pathways and opportunities for Latinas in journalism. She brings to JAWS a deep commitment to journalism and mentorship, along with firsthand experience building community, opening doors, and creating the support systems that help journalists thrive and make our profession more inclusive and equitable.
