Joe Bergantino Joe Bergantino is the Director and Senior Investigative Reporter of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Bergantino has been a national and local investigative reporter for almost 30 years. He spent most of his career as the I-Team Reporter for WBZ-TV in Boston. He also did investigative reporting for WPLG-TV, the Washington Post owned TV station in Miami and spent five years as a correspondent for ABC News where he reported for World News Tonight, Nightline and Good Morning America. During his career, Bergantino has won many of the broadcast industry’s most prestigious awards including a duPont-Columbia Award and Citation, a Robert F. Kennedy Award for reporting on the disadvantaged, and a Gabriel Award. He has won several local Emmy awards including one designating him Best Investigative Reporter in New England. He was twice nominated for national Emmys for his work in 2002 and 2004. His stories have had a major impact on the lives of New Englanders and the results of his investigations have been felt worldwide. Bergantino has also taught news writing at Boston College for the past 13 years and is a clinical professor of journalism at Boston University.

 

Tom Fiedler Tom Fiedler is the Dean of the Boston University College of Communication (COM). He began his tenure on June 1, 2008 following a distinguished career in journalism. Tom joined the Miami Herald after graduating from COM and worked there for almost 30 years as an investigative reporter, a political columnist, the editorial page editor and finally, the executive editor, from 2001 to 2007.In 1987, after presidential hopeful Gary Hart told journalists asking about his suspected marital infedelity to follow him around, Fiedler and other Herald reporters took him up on the challenge and exposed Hart’s campaign-ending affair with a Miami model. The next year, Fiedler received the Society of Professional journalists’ top award for his coverage of the 1988 presidential election. Three years later, his investigative reporting on a religious cult, earned the Herald a Pulitzer Prize. The Herald’s entire staff won another Pulitzer in 1993 for the paper’s coverage of Hurricane Andrew.

As the newspaper’s executive editor, Fiedler was a stickler for journalism ethics, particularly after reporters working for the Herald’s Spanish-language sister publication El Nuevo Herald, were found to be on the payroll of a U.S. government-owned anti-Castro news service in 2006. Fiedler also pushed his reporters and editors to embrace the Internet as a critical means of news delivery, rather than just an appendage of the newspaper.

He also embraced new media as a visiting Murrow Lecturer and Goldsmith Fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, where he investigated the impact of the Web on the presidential primary system and taught a graduate course on the intersection of media, politics and public policy. In addition, Fiedler co-directed a project, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, exploring the future of journalism education.

In 2003, Fiedler received the College of Communication’s Distinguished Alumni Award and in 2005, the college presented him with the Hugo Shong Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism. In 2006, he was elected a member of BU’s Board of Overseers.

 

Maggie Mulvihill is the co-director and senior investigative producer of NECIR. Mulvihill is an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years’ experience in print and broadcast reporting in New England, specializing in investigative journalism. A former media lawyer, Mulvihill serves on the Steering Committee of the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington D.C. She was a 2004-2005 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, focusing on government secrecy and its implications for news organizations. Mulvihill is active in freedom of information and open government issues and serves on the board of directors of the New England First Amendment Coalition. Mulvihill has taught journalism at the Harvard University Summer School and Emerson College and is a clinical professor of Journalism at Boston University.

 

Scott Van Voorhis has over 20 years of experience as a Boston-based reporter and writer. He has spent the last 15 years writing, analyzing and reporting on a range of business sectors, from homes sales and real estate development to the financial services, high tech and casino gaming sectors.

Most recently Scott was a business reporter at the Boston Herald for eight years, during which he was recognized by the New England Associated Press News Executives Association for his reporting on the subprime mortgage market meltdown as well as the landmark, $700 million-plus sale of the Boston Red Sox. Prior to his work at the Herald, he served as senior reporter at the Boston Business Journal, a staff writer for Banker & Tradesman, and a reporter for The Eagle-Tribune and the Haverhill Gazette, a pair of daily newspapers in Boston’s suburbs.

He currently blogs daily on residential real estate for Boston.com, writes the Forever 128 column for the Globe West section of the The Boston Globe, and produces a weekly column on local business trends for Banker & Tradesman. Additionally Scott reports on the casino and gaming trends in the Northeast for the London-based trade website GamblingCompliance.com. He also provides a range of corporate writing services, from white papers to blogs. Other clients have included Mass Insight, State Street Bank, and the University of Massachusetts.

Scott has a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Massachusetts. He lives in Natick, Massachusetts, with his wife and three children.

 

Cathy Chute is a development consultant to NECIR. Formerly publisher of Harvard Magazine, she directed a team of integrated marketing and media professionals with responsibility for advertising sales, audience development, fundraising and alumni engagement, digital communications strategy, and production. She was previously at The New York Times Company for more than a decade as a director of new business development, marketing services manager, marketing director, and circulation planning manager.

 

Beverly Ford is a freelance journalist with more than 20 years of reporting experience. She worked as a staff reporter for The Boston Herald, where she covered crime and legal issues, and also has written for The New York Daily News, The London Sunday Times, The London Mail, Bloomberg News, USA Today Magazine, Boston Magazine and other publications. A graduate of Pennsylvania State University, she has been a guest lecturer and panelist at several Boston area colleges and universities, including Harvard, Boston University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She also was co-recipient of an Associated Press Spot News Award for her coverage of an Amtrak train crash in Boston and has twice received awards from Parents of Murdered Children for her coverage of juvenile justice issues.
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