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FEATURED
SPEAKERS
CONFERENCE FACULTY

Andrei Codrescu

Frank Deford


Nigel Holmes

Sarah Smith

Sreenath Sreenivasan

Tom Sternal

Normand Lecours



Nancy Bartosek


Steve Boerner

Tracy Sterling Bristol

Freddie Cross

Sally Ann Flecker

Pamela Fogg

Tom Griffin

Scott Hauser

Tina Hay

Matthew Jennings

Suzanne Johnson

Dale Keiger

Jeffrey Lott

Laura McDaniel

Ken Morris

Michael Penn

Catherine Pierre

Betsy Robertson

Brian Speer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speakers/Faculty

Message From Your Co-Chairs

Being an effective periodical editor involves far more than an understanding of words and pictures, let alone of the institutions where we work. It requires a broad and deep toolkit encompassing everything from inspired creativity to the effective management of people, technologies, and information. In other words, you’ve got to be more than just an editor. And that’s the approach we’ve taken in putting together the 2008 CASE Editors Forum.

Join us for three days of top-notch speakers and innovative workshops that will inform, engage, and entertain you and inspire you do your job even better.

There’s something for everyone, from the largest research institution to the tiniest independent school, from the most seasoned vet to the freshest rookie. And where better to revive our professional spirits than the city that defines enduring spirit: New Orleans!

pegharPaul Pegher, Conference Co-Chair
Editor, Denison Magazine
Denison University

Paul Pegher is in his fourth year as the editor of Denison Magazine, which in 2006 won the Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year Award as well as a CASE Gold Medal for Magazine Publishing Improvement and a Silver for Visual Design in Print. Pegher also serves as Denison’s associate director of public affairs, spearheading many of the college’s new marketing and communications initiatives.

Upon graduating from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Pegher entered the college magazine and communications business right away, serving stints at the College of William & Mary, Carlow University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Between Pitt and Denison, he ventured into the dark side, working as a project manager for a marketing communications and design agency—a role that had him working ungodly hours and frequently hopping from Düsseldorf to Dearborn, Green Bay to Miami Beach. But he eventually saw the light, and realized not only that higher ed is a cooler, smarter, safer place to work, but it also gives him a heckuva lot more time to devote to his favorite project: raising kids Samuel and Ella (that’s right, “Sam&Ella”—a real sicko, their dad is) alongside lifemate Deborah.

Sean PlottnerSean Plottner, Conference Co-Chair
Editor, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine
Dartmouth College

Sean Plottner, 45, has served as editor of Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, a bi-monthly published in Hanover, New Hampshire, for eight years. He has been a magazine editor for more than 20 years and held positions at Whittle Communications, US magazine, The National Sports Daily, AdWeek and MediaWeek, ’94 Cup Daily, Disney Adventures, and Golf Digest. He has also written freelance stories for a variety of publications.

Plottner is a 1984 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. He is married, has two young children, and lives in South Strafford, Vermont.

 

Featured Speakers

Andrei CodrescuAndrei Codrescu
Author, Commentator and Editor of the online literary journal, ExquisiteCorpse.com

Andrei Codrescu is the author of New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City (Algonquin Books), a collection in response to the catastrophe that devastated his adopted city in 2005. In 1989 he returned to his native Romania to cover the collapse of a catastrophic history, and wrote The Hole in the Flag: An Exile's Tale of Return and Revolution. The proximity of history is explored playfully in a book-length interview called Miracle and Catastrophe: An Interview with Andrei Codrescu by Robert Lazu, published in Romania by Hartmann publishers in 2005.

Codrescu is MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he edits Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters & Life (www.exquisitecorpse.org). He is also a regular commentator on National Public Radio and winner of the Peabody Award for the film "Road Scholar."

Codrescu's books include: Wakefield, a novel (Algonquin, 2004); It Was Today: New Poems (2003); Casanova in Bohemia (2002); Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1997; The Blood Countess (1995), Messiah (1999) Ay, Cuba: a Socio-Erotic Journey (1997); Hail, Babylon: Looking at American Cities (1998) (1992). His work has been widely translated, and he is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for poetry, and editing, the Romanian Literature Prize, the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award, and the Ovidius Prize.

Frank DefordFrank Deford
Author, NPR Commentator, and Senior Contributing Editor, Sports Illustrated

Author and commentator, Frank Deford is among the most versatile of American writers. His work has appeared in virtually every medium. The author of fifteen books, his newest, The Entitled, a novel about celebrity, sex, and baseball, was published in the spring of 2007 to rave reviews.

On radio, Deford may be heard as a commentator every Wednesday on Morning Edition on National Public Radio and, on television, he is a regular correspondent on the HBO show, RealSports With Bryant Gumbel. In magazines, he is senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated.

Morever, two of Deford’s books – the novel, Everybody’s All-American, and Alex: The Life of a Child, his memoir about his daughter who died of cystic fibrosis – have been made into movies. Another of his books, Casey On The Loose, is being turned into a Broadway musical.

As a journalist, Deford has been elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters. Six times, Deford was voted by his peers as U.S. Sportswriter of The Year. The American Journalism Review has likewise cited him as the nation’s finest sportswriter, and twice he was voted Magazine Writer of The Year by the Washington Journalist Review.

Deford has also been presented with the National Magazine Award for profiles, a Christopher Award, and journalism Honor Awards from the University of Missouri and Northeastern University, and he has received many honorary degrees. The Sporting News has described him as “the most influential sports voice among members of the printed media,” and the magazine GQ has called him, simply, the world’s greatest sportswriter.” In broadcast, Deford has won both an Emmy and a George Foster Peabody Award. ESPN presented a television biography of Deford’s life and work, "You Write Better Than You Play."  A popular lecturer, Deford has spoken at more than a hundred colleges, as well as at forums, conventions, and on cruise ships around the world.

For sixteen years, Deford served as national chairman of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and he remains chairman emeritus. He resides in Westport, Connecticut with his wife, Carol. They have two grown children – a son, Christian, and a daughter, Scarlet. A native of Baltimore, Deford is a graduate of Princeton University, where he has taught in American Studies.

holmesNigel Holmes
Principal, Explanation Graphics

Nigel Holmes is principal at Explanation Graphics. He graduated from The Royal College of Art in 1966, and worked for newspapers and magazines in England until 1977, when he was hired by Time Magazine in New York.

As graphics director of Time, his pictorial explanations of complex subjects gained him many imitators and some academic enemies. To this day he remains committed to the power of pictures and humor to help readers understand abstract numbers and difficult scientific concepts.

After 16 years, Time gave him a sabbatical, and he never went back. Now he explains things to and for a wide variety of clients, including Apple, United Healthcare, Nike, and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as doing graphics for publications such as Harper’s and The New York Times.

He’s written six books on aspects of information design. Wordless Diagrams, first published in the U.S. in 2005, now has Chinese, German, Dutch, and Swedish editions (probably because there are no words to translate.)

He has lectured in India, Japan, Brazil, Singapore, and all over Europe and the United States.

Normand Lecours
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
Cascades Fine Papers Group

Normand Lecours is the vice president of sales & marketing for Cascades Fine Papers Group. He retired briefly in 2005 but returned to the industry in February 2006 with the objective of selling and marketing fine papers with a high component of recycled fibers.

His bachelor's degree in chemistry, professional accountant license and MBA provided the basis for more than 30 years managing various roles in diverse segments of the paper industry.

smithSarah Smith
Author, The Fact Checkers Bible and Managing Editor, The New York Times Magazine

In the 1990s, after graduating from Oxford with a degree in English and getting a master's degree in English and Comp Lit at Columbia, Sarah Smith spent five years fact checking at the New Yorker Magazine, where she worked with writers like Adam Gopnik, Lawrence Wright, Jeffrey Toobin, and Lillian Ross.

After a couple of years of impoverished agony trying to make it as a freelance writer, in 2002 she took a job as head of fact checking at the New York Times Magazine, which had had a recent checking debacle when Michael Finkel's profile of a modern-day slave turned out to be based on a composite character. In 2004 she published The Fact Checker's Bible, a guide to the doing the job right, and in 2005 she became managing editor of the magazine. Married to a poet who is also a magazine editor, she has three children and is working on a new book proposal.

Screenath ScreenivasanSreenath Sreenivasan
Dean of Students and New Media Director, Columbia University Journalism School
Technology Reporter, WNBC-TV, New York

Sree Sreenivasan is dean of students at Columbia University's journalism school, where he runs the new media program, and the technology reporter for WNBC-TV. He appears on the air (and online) twice a week in NYC and contributes occasionally to NBC News programs.

He previously spent six years as WABC's Tech Guru. A founding member of ONA and the founding administrator of the Online Journalism Awards, he serves as judging leader for the online category of the National Magazine Awards. His work explaining technology has appeared in the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science (where he was a member of the "Geek Chorus"). In March 2004, Newsweek magazine named him one of the 20 most influential South Asians in the nation.

Tom Sternal
President, JK/Generation

Tom Sternal is the president of Generation and the executive vice president for Jan Krukowski & Company in New York. He is responsible for the conceptual and visual direction of all print and interactive projects. Since joining Jan Krukowski in 1992, he has worked with more than 75 colleges, university, and independent schools.

Sternal graduated from Northwestern University in 1991 with a bachelor's degree in American culture.

 

Conference Faculty

Nancy BartosekNancy Bartosek
Director of Editorial Services
Texas Christian University

Director of editorial services at Texas Christian University (TCU) since 2001, Nancy Bartosek is responsible for producing the quarterly, 80-page The TCU Magazine and is editor of Endeavors, the annual online research magazine published by the Office of Graduate Studies and Research. She is a member of the management team for Marketing & Communication where she helps produce university print, radio, and broadcast marketing, branding, and advertising. She plans marketing campaigns and produces award-winning print materials for admissions, graduate studies, study abroad, and other departments and offices across campus as part of a creative team. In addition to chairing the TCU Editorial Priorities Committee, Bartosek has served as co-chair of the CASE Publications Professionals conference.

A 1996 communications graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington, she began her journalism career at UTA’s student paper, where she was a lead investigative reporter on the team that earned the prestigious Freedom of Information Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Bartosek was the higher education reporter at the Arlington Star-Telegram for a year before joining TCU in 1997 as assistant director of editorial services. She has written stories from Wyoming, California, Belize, and Romania.

boernerSteve Boerner
Designer, Rochester Review
Steve Boerner Typography & Design

Designer Steve Boerner spent his formative years around letterpress print shops, setting type by hand and gaining a lifelong appreciation for the visual appearance of the printed word. After a long detour as a professional news photographer and editor, he spent several years designing newspaper pages at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle - learning, along the way, a few of the intricacies of digital print design.

He has since left the newspaper industry to operate a freelance graphic design business, Steve Boerner Typography & Design, and has designed magazines and other publications for clients such as Corning Inc., the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Rochester.

Like most designers, Boerner prefers to focus on the creative parts of his job and is more than willing to let computers do as much of the boring work as possible. And he enjoys learning new ways to make his life - and the lives of the editors that he works with - a little bit easier.

He also teaches publication design and is the faculty adviser for the student newspaper at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.

Sterling BristolTracy Sterling Bristol
Art Director
Texas Christian University

Tracy Sterling Bristol is an art director and writer at Texas Christian University. She holds a BFA in advertising design from TCU, where she was named a Nordan Fine Arts Scholar and the national winner of the Nissan Student Advertising Contest. She has worked at a number of advertising agencies creating print and broadcast concepts for a wide range of national brands, including Quaker Oats, Johnson & Johnson and Satellite Sports Network. (Her most fun client – partly because it's so much fun to say, spell, and eat – was Van Camp's Beanee Weenee.)

In addition to running an advertising consulting business, Sterling Creative, she has also dabbled in television graphics, fine art painting, teaching art, and designing costumes for theater. She has won awards for all of the aforementioned, but she is most proud of winning a CASE Grand Award for a Publication Design entry entitled "Captain Filth," which featured a headline created entirely from cigarettes and garbage. For the past six years, Tracy has been ensconced in a sunlit cubicle with her kitschy collection of 250 souvenir snow domes, where she designs and writes for The TCU Magazine and creates award-winning ads and materials for departments across campus. A native Texan, Tracy currently has one husband, two teenagers, three dogs and a pony. She follows and shares the advice of her mother, which is to "try to have a little fun every day."

CROSSFreddie Cross
Director of Research
CASE

Freddie Cross has served as director of research for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) since 2003. In this position, Cross oversees CASE’s various research and survey projects on advancement, higher education, and independent schools. She is the author of a number of CASE studies, including the annual CASE Report of Educational Fundraising Campaigns.

Prior to joining CASE, she was with Consulting Research and Information Services where she contributed to numerous research studies on U.S. Department of Defense schools around the world.

Cross began her research career studying volcanic groundwater at the U.S. Geological Survey in the late 1970s. She holds an associate’s degree in environmental science from Northern Virginia Community College, a bachelor’s degree in general science from the University of Mary Washington, and a master’s degree in math and science from Virginia Polytechnic and State Institute.

In 2005, Cross earned her doctorate in education: research and evaluation from Virginia Polytechnic and State Institute. Her dissertation, The Contribution of Respondent Computer Experience on Primacy Effect and Satisficing, examined how one’s computer experience affected the accuracy of data in online surveys.

fleckerSally Ann Flecker
Writer and Editorial Consultant

Sally Ann Flecker has worked in the university magazine field for almost 20 years. She was the editor in chief of Pitt Magazine until 2001, when she gave up job security to return to her roots as a writer. She writes features, profiles, and essays for a number of publications, including the Penn Stater, Notre Dame Business magazine, NDSU, winner of a 2006 CASE gold medal, and Denison, winner of the 2006 Sibley Award. She is often called upon as a writing coach to work one-on-one with writers and editors and has traveled to many schools to spend a day or two with the magazine staff, identifying and strengthening trouble spots in the publication, guiding editorial redesign, and teaching sessions on narrative feature writing.

She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her husband and two preschool boys.

Pamela FoggPamela Fogg
Art Director, Middlebury Magazine
Middlebury College

At Middlebury College, Pamela Fogg art-directs a variety of communications projects, including Middlebury Magazine and admissions recruitment materials. She likes challenging projects that offer the opportunity to learn about the subject and the audience and then craft an effective visual approach. Since she began working in higher education, Fogg has been involved with the University and College Designers Association (UCDA) and in 2005 she began a four-year term on the UCDA board of directors, serving as president in 2007.

Fogg has worked in the field of graphic design for 20 years. She received her bachelor's degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. After freelancing her way through design school, she was design director at South Street Seaport Museum, where she oversaw the design of everything from a four-color history magazine and a multitude of other print from brochures to banners and T-shirts. Before coming to Middlebury, she worked for Rizzoli Publications with a cadre of artists, architects, photographers, and authors, developing museum catalogs and art books.

When she isn’t at the office she can be found restoring her 125-year-old farmhouse, biking, birdwatching, gardening, or reading. In the winter she spends a lot of time at Middlebury’s town rink devising ways to keep warm while watching her 12-year-old son play hockey.

GRIFFINTom Griffin
Editor, Columns Magazine
University of Washington Alumni Association

Tom Griffin has been editor of Columns, the University of Washington alumni magazine, since it was founded 18 years ago. During that time, the magazine has won more than 150 awards from CASE, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Washington Press Association, and PRINT magazine. His article on the fate of Japanese American students interned during World War II won a 2007 “Best Article of the Year” Silver Medal from CASE.

Griffin has been a co-chair and a presenter at CASE’s Editors Forum and has served on the faculty of CASE’s Summer Institute in Marketing and Communications. Though wedded to print, he launched the Web version of Columns in 1995 and six years ago helped start UW NewsLinks, an electronic newsletter for UW alumni. He is also the author of the book The University of Washington Experience, published by Documentary Media. Prior to joining Columns, Griffin was the editor of the faculty/staff newspaper at the University of Washington, a daily newspaper reporter in Madison, Wis., and an English teacher in Paris.

He has both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin.

hauserScott Hauser
Editor, Rochester Review
University of Rochester

Scott Hauser is the editor of Rochester Review, the magazine of the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y. He joined the magazine's staff in 1998 as associate editor and was named editor in 2001.

As editor, he has overseen Review as it has expanded from a three-times-a-year publication to a bimonthly magazine that is mailed to about 100,000 alumni and friends. In addition, he oversees a staff of writers and editors who produce Rochester’s faculty-staff newsletter and other print and electronic publications.

He moved to Rochester from the University of Iowa, where had been a writer and editor for Iowa’s news service. He began his writing life as a newspaper reporter, working for dailies and for the Associated Press in Iowa.

hayTina Hay
Editor, The Penn Stater
Penn State Alumni Association

Tina Hay is editor of The Penn Stater, which won the 2007 Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year Award from CASE and has garnered more than 130 other national awards in the past five years. She has twice co-chaired the Editors Forum, has written nearly a dozen articles for CURRENTS magazine, and will be on the faculty for the magazine track at this year's Summer Institute in Communications and Marketing. She has been editor of The Penn Stater since 1996; before that, she was in charge of communications for Penn State’s College of Health and Human Development, and earlier in her career she was news and sports director for a pair of radio stations in State College, Pa. A really long time ago, she was the all-night DJ on an FM rock station. For more than 20 years she also has been the public address announcer for Penn State women’s basketball games in the Jordan Center.

In her spare time Hay plays soccer, sings alto in a choral society, and goes grocery shopping on her Piaggio motor scooter (which, she’ll have you know, gets 50 mpg). She also dabbles in travel photography; in fact, she has some swell photos from Alaska, Provence, the Galapagos, and other places at www.personal.psu.edu/tmh1.

jenningsMatthew Jennings
Editor, Middlebury Magazine
Middlebury College

Matt Jennings has edited award-winning publications for more than a decade, first at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., and for the past five-plus years at Middlebury College in the beautiful Champlain Valley of Vermont.

He’s proud of the fact that his magazines have won CASE Circle of Excellence gold medals at each institution; less proud of the number of technicals he received as a high school basketball coach; and more proud of his 18-month-old son, John. If pressed, he’d admit that his greatest talent is an ability to read a magazine while walking across any imaginable terrain.

johnsonSuzanne Johnson
Associate Editor, Auburn Magazine
Auburn University

Suzanne Johnson has been immersed in the rigors of higher education publishing since the fates placed her in a work-study job writing for her alma mater alumni magazine almost 30 years ago. Since then—except for a three-year stint chasing ambulances at a daily newspaper—she has plied her trade at universities in Alabama, Illinois, Texas, California, and Louisiana, picking up more than 50 national CASE awards in magazine writing and editing along the way. At Rice University, she and her team won the Robert Sibley Award for magazine of the year for Sallyport in 1990, and at Tulane University, as editorial manager for university publications, her Tulanian staff consistently received national awards for magazines and for staff writing.

In 2007, Johnson decided to return to full-time magazine work and her home state of Alabama, and now is happily ensconced at Auburn University, where she serves as associate editor of Auburn Magazine.

keigerDale Keiger
Associate Editor, Johns Hopkins Magazine
Johns Hopkins University

Dale Keiger is associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine and the Johns Hopkins Publishing Group. A writer-for-hire since the age of 19, he is a 15-year veteran of university magazines and has won 12 CASE medals for feature writing, including three grand golds for article of the year. He has also won a Washington Monthly national journalism prize and an H.L. Mencken Award for investigative reporting.

Dale is a 1976 summa cum laude graduate of the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.

lottJeffrey Lott
Editor, Swarthmore College Bulletin
Swarthmore College

Jeff Lott has been editor of the Swarthmore College Bulletin since 1992, winning several CASE national and district awards. He co-chaired the Editors Forum in 1998 and 2006 and was a leader among editors in conceiving, drafting, and urging adoption of the CASE Principles of Practice for College and University Editors. He is currently a member of the CASE Communications and Marketing Commission.

Lott was educated at Middlebury College and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied studio art and art education. He taught elementary and secondary school art for 12 years before turning to graphic design, journalism, and publications management in the 1980s.

McDanielLaura McDaniel
Editor, NDSU Magazine
North Dakota State University

Laura McDaniel is assistant vice president in the Office of University Relations at North Dakota State University. She began her career at NDSU in 1989, about the same time the communications department acquired its first Macintosh computer, in the ensuing years,  has done internal news, media relations, feature writing, directed the publications office, and with the help of generous and talented people, launched the current NDSU magazine. NDSU magazine has won numerous awards, including a CASE Gold Medal in 2006. McDaniel has an undergraduate degree from the University of North Dakota, and a master’s from North Dakota State University.

McClellanJeff McClellan
Editor, BYU Magazine
Brigham Young University

Jeff McClellan has been the editor of BYU Magazine for 10 years. He leads a talented group of editors, writers, designers, and students in the creation of a quarterly print publication for 200,000 readers as well as a monthly e-mail newsletter for about 120,000 readers. The magazine frequently wins design awards, has been honored with regional CASE writing awards for five straight years, and has also received two national CASE writing awards for articles of the year (one gold and one silver).

McClellan has degrees from Brigham Young University and Northwestern University. A Scout leader and nature lover, he enjoys camping and hiking and teaching young men. He and his wife are the parents of two beautiful daughters and enjoy dramatic views of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains from their front yard.

MORRISKen Morris
Printing Consultant
Courier Printing Company

Ken Morris has worked in communications for over 25 years.

Holding a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Kentucky University (1981), Morris has worked in publications, communications, and marketing, including newspapers, magazines and advertising.

He has served as associate editor, feature writer, and chief photographer for a weekly newspaper, art director for two city magazines (in Houston and Nashville), and creative director for a Nashville advertising agency. Morris also worked freelance as a creative consultant, editor, art director, and illustrator serving business and music clients nationwide. He served as a graphic designer for five years at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He won numerous awards including a CASE District III Award of Excellence for magazine cover illustration.

In 2002, Morris left Sewanee for Courier Printing (a Consolidated Graphics company) in Smyrna, Tennessee, near Nashville. His position as a printing consultant has enabled him to observe many inside aspects of commercial printing. The sum of his experience enables him to work with a variety of clients and their projects—some of which involve demanding complexity. His experience in higher-education marketing has enabled him to consult with many of his clients well beyond the purview of ink-on-paper.

Michael PennMichael Penn
Senior Editor, Grow
College of Agricultural & Life Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Michael Penn joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences in January 2007 as founding editor of Grow Magazine, a three-times-a-year publication covering research advances in the life sciences. Previously, he spent 12 years on the staff of On Wisconsin, UW-Madison’s quarterly alumni magazine, most recently as senior editor.

With On Wisconsin, Penn was part of an editorial team that won four CASE Circle of Excellence awards for writing, including the 2007 Grand Gold Medal for periodical staff writing.

PierreCatherine Pierre
Editor, Johns Hopkins Magazine
Johns Hopkins University

Catherine Pierre is editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine and director of the Johns Hopkins Publishing Group, which provides consulting, editorial, and design services for university and alumni publications.

She was previously the arts and culture editor at Baltimore magazine, where she also covered health and other topics of general interest; she was manager of public relations at the Walters Art Museum, an internationally renowned institution located in Baltimore; and has published freelance articles in a number of regional and national publications.

Pierre holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Maryland (where she graduated summa cum laude) and a master's degree in English literature from Indiana University.

robertsonBetsy Robertson
Editor, Auburn Magazine
Auburn University

Betsy Robertson joined Auburn University in March 2005 as editor of Auburn Magazine, which mails quarterly to 47,000 dues-paying members of the Auburn Alumni Association.

A native of Gainesville, Ga., Robertson began her writing and editing career as a daily newspaper reporter and has served as a freelance news writer for CNN.com. She has worked in higher-education publications and public relations for 14 years, including stints at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she oversaw that institution's alumni magazine as well as its media relations team, and at Kennesaw State University, where she served on the public relations staff. Robertson hates bad grammar and loves her two-year-old chow chow, Whiskey.

SpeerBrian Speer
Director of Integrated Marketing and Design
Art Director, Colby Magazine
Colby College

Brian Speer is the director of integrated marketing and design at Colby College in Maine. He is responsible for both the conceptual and visual direction of college marketing efforts, including art direction of Colby magazine. Working in communications and design for more than 20 years, Speer’s work has received numerous awards from CASE, the University and College Designers Association (UCDA), and the Society of Publication Designers (SPD) among others.

Speer graduated from Ohio University in 1988 with a BFA in graphic design. After spending two years as a designer in Chicago, he worked in Portland, Maine, as a freelancer, joining Colby in 1993.