Speakers 

Laura Bischoff has covered Ohio politics and state government for two decades, including the past three years for the USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau. A University of Michigan graduate, she was named best investigative journalist by the Associated Press in Ohio in 2020. 

Ashanti Blaize-Hopkins is the 2023-24 national SPJ president. She currently serves as interim associate dean for the Center for Media and Design and professor of journalism at Santa Monica (California) College. She’s worked as a TV news anchor, reporter and producer in Florida, Texas and Nevada and produced branded video content for companies. 

Jeff Brogan is vice president and general manager of WCPO 9, the Scripps television station in Cincinnati. He received his B.A. in Communication at the University of Dayton.  He leads the day-to-day operations of news, sales, marketing, digital and engineering for the ABC affiliate.  He’s worked most of his career as a journalist receiving regional and national awards. He serves on the boards of the Ohio Association of Broadcasters and Give Where You Live Northern Kentucky.

Becca Costello is WVXU’s Local Government Reporter, focusing primarily on the City of Cincinnati. Before joining the WVXU newsroom, Becca worked in public radio and TV in Bloomington, Indiana, and Lincoln, Nebraska. She grew up in Clermont County listening to WVXU and considers public radio journalism her "dream job."

Serena Maria Daniels is a Chicana journalist. She is the city editor for Eater Detroit and the founder and editor of Tostada Magazine, a digital food and culture journalism platform that centers the experiences of communities of color in Detroit. She is a former staff writer for The Detroit News, Chicago Tribune and The Orange County Register. Serena was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in the Pacific Northwest and San Fernando Valley. She is a longtime member of the National Association for Hispanic Journalists and a graduate of California State University, Northridge.

Mo Egger has hosted the afternoon show on ESPN1530 since 2007. He’s also heard on 700WLW and on ESPN Radio. Mo also contributes to University of Cincinnati football and basketball programming and he’s a contributor to the Cincinnati Bengals Radio Network. Mo also writes sports betting columns for Forbes and he's written for The Athletic and Bearcat Journal. He is a graduate of Scott High School in Taylor Mill, a proud alumnus of the University of Dayton, and his radio career started in 1998, when he started as a 700WLW producer.

Perry Farrell is a 38-year veteran of the newspaper industry, serving as the internship coordinator at Wayne State University in Detroit. He covered Michigan State University basketball and football and 10 Final Fours for the Detroit Free Press before moving onto the NBA beat to cover the Detroit Pistons for a full decade. He was the main beat reporter for the 2004 season when the Pistons captured the championship. He has written two books: Tales from the Detroit Pistons and Tales from the Pistons Locker Room. He helped start the Lem Tucker scholarship fund at CMU. To date, the fund has put 20 minority students through school with most going into the industry. That, along with the birth of his two daughters, are his proudest moments.

Marty Fischhoff, when not serving as president of Detroit SPJ, is the director of community engagement at Detroit Public Television, part of the journalism team. After 20 years as an editor at The Detroit News and 5 years at Detroit Monthly magazine, he took a slight detour away from journalism to become managing director of the Taubman Medical Research Institute at the University of Michigan. Now, he’s back.

Chris Graves is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She joined the faculty of her alma mater in 2020 after decades as a print, TV and public radio reporter and editor, with a focus on documenting human suffering and the human experience. One of the first journalists on the Pike County story, Graves is currently writing a book about the crime and its aftermath. 

Rebecca Hanchett is the Frankfort correspondent for LINK nky. She has covered politics and legislative news for over two decades during careers in both journalism and government public affairs. Hanchett returned to journalism in 2021 after retiring from the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission in Frankfort. She is a graduate of the University of Kentucky.

Melanie Laughman has been a Greater Cincinnati journalist for 32 years, spending more than half in sports. The 1992 Ohio University E.W. Scripps School of Journalism graduate earned the 2024 Ohio High School Athletic Association Media Service Award working at the Cincinnati Enquirer as a digital content coach for high school sports. She’s won a few Cincinnati SPJ Awards including best sports feature in 2020 for “Cincinnati high school football coaches: It gets to your soul, the things you see.”

Angenette Levy has covered some of the nation's biggest cases in crime and courts over the last 20 years. Most recently, she covered the trial of Alex Murdaugh in South Carolina, the arrest of Bryan Kohberger for the murder of four University of Idaho students and the defamation trial between actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife, Amber Heard. She currently hosts the daily YouTube show and podcast, Crime Fix, for Law&Crime. Prior to that, she was a reporter and fill-in anchor at WKRC-TV in Cincinnati for 10 years. 

Beryl Love is editor and vice president of news at The Cincinnati Enquirer. He also serves as a regional editor for the USA TODAY Network, overseeing the Columbus Dispatch, Akron Beacon Journal and the network’s other sites in Ohio. Love earlier served as an executive editor at USA TODAY and editor of the Reno Gazette Journal in Nevada.

Ginny McCabe is Region 4 coordinator and a Cincinnati-based freelance journalist.

Tom McKee teaches broadcast news in the Media Production Department at the University of Cincinnati. That follows a 40-year career with WCPO-TV in Cincinnati as a reporter, producer, assignment manager and multimedia journalist. His specialty was politics and he won a Walter Cronkite Award for political coverage in 2013.

Evan Millward is in his 10th year at Cincinnati's WCPO-TV, now as anchor of the 4, 7, and 11 p.m. news. He also reports on LGBTQ+ and other underserved community issues and heads Pride efforts for WCPO and E.W. Scripps Co. in Cincinnati. Millward is the current president of the Ohio Valley chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He is a Beavercreek, Ohio, native and proud Ohio University Bobcat.

Megan Mitchell is an Emmy-award winning anchor and reporter at WLWT News 5 in Cincinnati. Mitchell was named a 2022 LGBTQ+ TikTok Trailblazer with more than 1.9 million followers. She was also selected to be a 2022 Curve Award Fellow, given to female and non-binary journalists for their work covering LGBTQ+ issues.

Kyle Nagel has been a managing editor with Cox First Media for 3 years as part of his 25-year journalism career that began with his first internship at the Dayton Daily News. He oversees teams that produce and promote content focused on digital audiences, highlighting digital optimization, key engagement loops, personal experience and more. His career has included stints as a reporter covering sports, crime and regional enterprise and editor roles over visuals teams and the Journal-News in Butler County.

Patricia Gallagher Newberry joined The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2022 as an enterprise/watchdog reporter after teaching journalism at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, for 25 years. She earlier worked for news outlets in Nebraska, Colorado, Texas and Chicago, and served as SPJ national president 2019-20.

Keith Pandolfi is the Food & Dining writer for The Cincinnati Enquirer. He previously worked as a senior editor for Saveur magazine and the features editor for Serious Eats, where he won the 2017 James Beard Award for Personal Essay. His work has also appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, The New York Times, Punch, Taste and Yankee Magazine, among others. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Amy, and his daughter, Sylvia.

James Pilcher is a lead reporter for Local 12 News WKRC, the CBS affiliate in Cincinnati. He made the transition from print to TV in March of 2020, after time as an investigative reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer and work for other news organizations. He specializes in accountability reporting and in diving into databases to find the real story behind the numbers. 

Ken Schneck is editor of The Buckeye Flame, Ohio’s LGBTQ+ newsroom. For this work, he was honored with the Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for National LGBTQ Journalist of the Year. He is the author of several books, including three LGBTQ+ history books, and a tenured professor of education at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio, south of Cleveland.

Tristan Vaught is co-founder of Transform Cincy, which provides free wardrobes for transgender and gender non-conforming youth. Vaught is also an adjunct professor in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and CEO of a DEIBA consulting firm.

Howard Wilkinson joined the WVXU news team in April 2012 after nearly 30 years of covering politics for The Cincinnati Enquirer. He has covered every Ohio governor's race since 1974, along with 16 presidential nomination conventions and four presidential inaugurations. 

Brandon Wuske has been head food critic of Cincinnati Magazine since 2021. A librarian by day and food critic by night, he began his food writing career in 2009 as a contributor to Hungry City: Chicago. The Cincinnati native has also written for Cincinnati Refined. His favorite food is either pizza or tacos; he is willing to do more research to figure out which.

Maryanne Zeleznik is the vice president of news at 91.7 WVXU, Cincinnati’s public radio station.  She started there in 2005 coming from WNKU where she served as News and Public Affairs Director for 20 years. At WVXU, she is responsible for all news and public affairs programming, hosts Morning Edition Monday through Friday, and fills in to host Cincinnati Edition.