Officers
President: Laura Leslie, NC Public Radio/WUNC
Laura is Capitol Bureau Chief for North Carolina Public Radio. She’s been in Raleigh since 2004. Before that, she was at KXJZ in Sacramento, where she covered the election of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. She’s worked in public radio since 1994. She’s been a board member of Capitolbeat since 2005, and president since 2007.
She’s won radio and blogging awards from Capitolbeat, the AP, SPJ, the Public Radio News Directors, Radio/TV News Directors, and various other groups. She was also a lead reporter on a WUNC series that won a DuPont-Columbia baton and a Casey medal. Her work has been heard on NPR and Marketplace.
Laura has a Masters in English from Indiana U. and a BA from Stetson U. She’s worked as a teacher, a dot-com editor, and a bartender, and she lost to Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. When she isn’t reporting or blogging about NC politics at Issac Hunter’s Tavern, she’s probably either gardening or wrangling a houseful of rescued pets.
Vice President: Mark Binker, Greensboro News & Record
Mark Binker has been the state government and politics reporter for the Greensboro (NC) News & Record since April 2005. A lone gunman, Binker is also the author of Capital Beat, a blog focused on state politics and the legislature.
Before moving to the state legislature, he covered a variety of municipal and business beats for the paper. In the deep dark past, he was a suburban intern for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Binker got his undergraduate degree in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University and his M.A. in Journalism from the University of Maryland.
Binker is married and has two sons. When there is free time, he plays golf (badly) and has the curious ambition to grow a vegetable garden that currently consists of one out-of-control oregano plant.
A Capitolbeat member since 2006, Binker has served on the board since August of 2007. He was the 2008 Raleigh conference chair.
Treasurer: Nancy Cook Lauer, Stephens Media Hawaii
Nancy Cook Lauer is the Hawaii state Capitol reporter for Stephens Media Group, whose newspapers include West Hawaii Today, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
A charter member of Capitolbeat, she also belongs to IRE and is an active contributor to the IRE, NICAR and Newslib listservs. Prior to joining Stephens Media, she was Capitol bureau chief for the Tallahassee Democrat, where she won a first place for beat reporting in her circulation category from Capitolbeat.
Cook Lauer holds a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in psychology from Old Dominion University, where she started at age 16 and worked her way through college. She also has a master’s degree in library and information studies from Florida State University.
Secretary: Alan Johnson, The Columbus Dispatch
Over the course of 24 years working for The Columbus Dispatch - 19 of them as a Statehouse reporter - Johnson has covered five gubernatorial administrations, traveled to 22 countries on city and state trade missions, reported from three national conventions, and stumped through dozens of national, state and local political campaigns.
He is now assigned to criminal justice, mental health and mental retardation and other human interest Statehouse issues. He also has electronic publishing duties with The Dispatch. He has been secretary of Capitolbeat for the past year and a member of the organization’s national board of directors for three years.
Over the past decade, Johnson has become Ohio’s leading reporter on capital punishment and criminal justice issues. He covered nearly all of Ohio’s 27 executions since 1999, conducted numerous Death Row interviews, and written in-depth about lethal injection and related topics.
In 2003, following his two-year series of stories in The Dispatch, two men once sentenced to death - Timothy Howard and Gary Lamar James - were freed from Ohio prisons after serving 26 years for a bank robbery and murder they did not commit. They subsequently received wrongful conviction settlements totaling $4 million, the largest in Ohio history.
He won the 2007 Thurgood Marshall Award from the Death Penalty Information Center, was nominated from an Emmy for his work with the Ohio News Network, and has received dozens of Associated Press and other writing awards. Johnson began his journalism career in 1973 after graduating from Indiana University. He previously worked for newspapers in Dayton and Springfield, Ohio. He is the father of two children and has a granddaughter.
Board Members
Charles Ashby, Pueblo Chieftain
Charles Ashby has been the Denver Bureau Chief for the Pueblo Chieftain since June 2004, though he’s covered the Colorado Legislature for other newspapers in the state since 1998. A graduate of the School of Journalism at the University of Colorado, Ashby has also worked at papers in Nebraska, Virginia and Florida. He has been treasurer/membership director for ACRE since 1999.
Adriana Colindres, Gatehouse News Service Spingfield, IL
Patrick Guinane,The Times of Northwest Indiana
Pat Guinane covers state government and politics for The Times of Northwest Indiana. He’s the conference chair for Capitolbeat’s 2009 meeting in Indianapolis.
Guinane moved east (a little bit, anyway) to Indianapolis in 2005 after three years in the Illinois Statehouse press corps. He caught the Capitol bug while a student and intern in the University of Illinois Public Affairs Reporting master’s program.
In five years as a Statehouse reporter, Guinane has covered one state government dominated by Democrats and another completely controlled by Republicans. He doesn’t recommend either.
Guinane has collected a few awards in his professional career, but none prestigious enough to boost his pay grade. He prefers his policy debates with a dash of politics, and he is sick of writing about property taxes.
Lawrence Messina, Associated Press, West Virginia
From his windowless office beneath the state Capitol, Lawrence Messina has covered West Virginia government and politics for The Associated Press since 2002. He has been with Capitolbeat the entire time, and was elected to the board in 2006.Messina also blogs about politics and government in the Mountain State via Lincoln Walks At Midnight.
Messina’s foray into the government beat began in 1993, with a stint covering that year’s legislative session. He spent the next nine years reporting on West Virginia’s court system for The Charleston Gazette.
Armed with a degree from Wheeling Jesuit University, Messina lives one block from the Charleston Statehouse with his wife, Lesly, and their daughter, Sophia.
James Pindell, Politicker.com
James Pindell is the Managing Editor of Politicker.com, a start-up from the New York Observer that operates 17 state-based political news websites.
James has followed his passion of politics by reporting on it in five states, two of those being the early presidential states of Iowa and New Hampshire. The Washington Post called him the “Insider’s Insider” for his coverage of New Hampshire politics. He ran PoliticsNH.com for four years before joining the Boston Globe in 2006 as a reporter and blogger covering the 2008 New Hampshire primary. He covered the 2000 Iowa Caucuses for the Des Moines Register, and was the Statehouse Bureau Chief of the Morgantown Dominion Post.
James is an Adjunct Professor at New England College, and has provides analysis on national and state television and radio stations on a regular basis.
Ryan Rusak, Dallas Morning News
Tom Scheck, Minnesota Public Radio
Tom has been a correspondent for Minnesota Public Radio since 2000, covering politics and government full-time since 2005. That includes detailed work on the state budget, the legislature, state agencies, and lobbying. He has won numerous awards for his investigative look into the Minnesota Health Department, his in-depth look at Minnesota’s Mental Health system and his coverage of political races. He has also contributed to several NPR shows.
In addition to his on-air coverage, Tom also writes for MPR’s political blog, Polinaut. Tom also has experience with Computer Assisted Reporting, having participated in a weeklong boot camp at the University of Missouri and various “mini-boot camps” in Indianapolis and St. Paul.
Prior to his work at MPR, Tom worked at Indiana Public Radio in the late nineties and at WDIY-FM in Bethlehem, PA. He graduated from Syracuse University with a B.A. in Broadcast Journalism and a B.A. in English Textual Studies. Tom lives in Falcon Heights, MN with his wife, his dog, and soon, their first child.
Rachel Stassen-Berger, St. Paul Pioneer-Press
From August 2007 to November 2008, Rachel was 1st Vice President of Capitolbeat, working hard behind the scenes to help the organization run better. Rachel oversaw a modernization of our bylaws, helped coordinate our very first Strategic Planning process, served as board nag, coordinated our elections and timed the board’s monthly conference calls — no small feat since we span five time zones. She served as a board member from 2006 until boosted to VP status. She’s looking forward to returning to being a board member for the next two years.
When Rachel’s not working on Capitolbeat matters, she’s a reporter in the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press’ Capitol bureau, where she’s worked since 2001. She has covered Minnesota’s budget wrangling, state government shutdown, health care, crime, social welfare issues, abortion and gay-marriage politics and the state’s hot-as-heck elections.
She was a Humphrey Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota in 2003-2004. In 2006, she was staffer for a week at the Urban Journalism Workshop, a two-week residential journalism camp for high school students at the University of St. Thomas.
Email her to ask her about Capitolbeat, her New York City upbringing, how she survives Minnesota winters, her big, shaggy dog or anything else.
Eszter Vajda, UNC-TV
Eszter Vajda was born in Budapest, Hungary. When she was six, her family moved to Israel for two years, then Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Shortly after they moved to California. But a year later it was back to Brazil, and, two years later, Massachusetts.
Eszter attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and received a BA in History. After college, she taught in Szekesfehervar, Hungary through the Peace Corps and Beloit College. She came back to earn her Masters in History at Northeastern University while interning at WBZ-TV in Boston.
Her first on air job was at WCAP-AM talk radio as an anchor/reporter in Lowell, MA. Her TV experience includes anchoring and reporting at a cable station in Mass, WBKP (ABC) in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, WVNY (ABC) in Burlington, Vermont and freelancing at several New England stations.
Eszter enjoys traveling, reading, cross country skiing, running, tennis, and most importantly, catching up with friends and family around the world.
Peter Wong, Statesman Journal (Oregon)
Peter Wong has reported on Oregon public affairs for 28 years, longer than the tenures of most of those he covers. He has been a Capitol bureau reporter since early 2000 for the Statesman Journal in Salem, the state capital. Before then he was a political reporter for the Mail Tribune in Medford (1989-2000), based in Salem during legislative sessions, and a political reporter for The News-Review in Roseburg (1979-89), and a frequent visitor to Salem.
He has been president of the Oregon Legislative Correspondents Association since 2000, a member of Capitolbeat since 2001, and the senior member of the Oregon Capitol news corps since November 2005.
He also was a reporter for the former Daily Report (now the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin) in Ontario, Calif., from 1975 to 1979. While there he covered politics in one of Southern California’s fastest-growing counties. He is an alumnus of the University of Southern California in journalism and political science, and while in college was an intern in the U.S. Senate and for the Newspaper Fund Editing Internship Program, assigned to the now-defunct Providence (R.I.) Evening Bulletin.
He’s won awards from the Northwest region of the Society of Professional Journalists, Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, California Newspaper Publishers Association, Press Club of Southern California, Education Writers Association, National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and recognition from the Bruce Baer (Oregon) and C.B. Blethen (Northwest) award competitions. He lives six blocks from the Capitol in Salem, but he doesn’t sleep in the Capitol (most of the time).
Ex-Officio
Business Advisor: Tiffany Shackelford
Attorney: Kevin Goldberg
Kevin M. Goldberg is special counsel at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth. His expertise is in First Amendment issues, especially those relating to newspaper and Internet publishing. He regularly advocates issues involving freedom of speech on behalf of press organizations, including lobbying against a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow criminalization of flag desecration, lobbying in favor of increased access to government records and proceedings, and protecting the rights and privileges of reporters. Kevin also consults regularly with these organizations concerning the continued freedom of speech on the Internet, focusing on issues such as regulation and voluntary implementation of blocking software. Kevin assists newspapers and television and radio stations in prepublication review of stories for possible legal problems.
When not preserving our democracy, Kevin is an avid soccer player, referee and fan, having played the sport for almost 30 years. He boasts a near-100% attendance rate at United States National Soccer Team Games played in RFK stadium since 1992 and his fandom of the Manchester United Football Club borders on obsessive.
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