Ernest Luning has worked as a community journalist since the first Bush administration. He has reported on crime, local government and the arts for the Highlands Ranch Herald, the Broomfield Enterprise, the Littleton Independent and the Aurora Sentinel and been an editor at the Lakewood Sentinel and Aurora Daily Sun, where he also wrote an award-winning column. He was a founding editor of the Panther Post at South Lakewood Elementary School and founded Cattle Call Productions, a theater company in Colorado Springs. He regularly blogs on Colorado Pols and helps develop screenplays for a New York-based production company.

Wendy Norris lives in Fort Collins. After contributing at DailyKos.com for three years, she launched Unbossed, a successful national group blog to help bridge the ever-widening gap between the media and the progressive blogosphere. Unbossed focuses primarily on investigative and original reporting which is pitched to the media to promote more progressive perspectives in news coverage.

She also writes “Unbossed,” a monthly political column for the Rocky Mountain Chronicle.

Wendy serves as the managing editor of The Colorado Independent and covers stories on CD-4, reproductive health, radio/TV media criticism and rural issues.

John Tomasic has worked as a writer and editor at various news, literary and academic publications, including at the Huffington Post, Business 2.0 magazine and Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope All-Story. Most recently he was managing editor at OffTheBus, the Huffington Post’s path-breaking presidential-election citizen-journalism project. Before that, he was managing editor at Pop+Politics, the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s award-winning journalism training program and website. In the early 1990s, he worked as an analyst and editor for the United Nations commission established to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. As a Center for Independent Media fellow, he is covering Obama-era economics.

John has a master’s degree in European history and has taught at the University of Paris-Dauphine, the University of California-Berkeley and Indiana University-Bloomington. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

David O. Williams worked as an editor and reporter for the Vail Daily for five years before launching a competing alt daily. The Daily Trail and weekly Vail Trail won 40 Colorado Press Awards during Williams’ nearly six-year stint as managing editor, including Best News Story for an article on a Vail man’s death in police custody in Thailand. Williams’ coverage led to disciplinary action against U.S. embassy personnel and changes in the State Department’s relative-notification policy.

Williams has freelanced for publications such as the Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times (even if it was only for the Kobe Bryant sex scandal case), Aspen Daily News, LA Weekly, and others, Williams launched realvail.com.

Jason Hancock wrote for the Des Moines Business Record and Cityview, Des Moines’ alternative weekly, before joining Iowa Independent as a senior fellow. A native of Indiana, Hancock currently lives in Ames. He covers politics and does investigative work.

Chase Martyn, managing editor, moved to Iowa four years ago from Palm Beach County, Fla. An avid web user for more than a decade, Chase founded the blog Iowa Progress in 2006, and he currently blogs here. He has done paid (and unpaid) political work for the Iowa Democratic Party and progressive candidates across the state. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Grinnell College and lives in Des Moines.

Lynda Waddington lives in Eastern Iowa with her family of five. She serves on the executive committee for Iowans for Voting Integrity, is publicity chair for Women for Peace Iowa and, in 2006, was elected to represent Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District on the Democratic State Central Committee. She worked for more than a decade as a print journalist before launching her own communications business. She also writes at the blog Essential Estrogen.

Ed Brayton is a freelance writer and the voice behind the popular blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars. He is co-founder of Michigan Citizens for Science and has written for such publications as the Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education. He has appeared as a guest on several nationally syndicated radio talk shows, has addressed many state and national organizations and conferences and has appeared on C-SPAN.

Minehaha Forman was born in the rain forest of Belize and moved to the United States at the age of 15 in pursuit of higher education. Now, she is a freelancer in the Detroit area and a recent graduate of Oakland University. Her work has appeared in Hour Detroit magazine as well as Dbusiness magazine. In 2005, she created the blog ONE, which highlights her creative writing.

Todd Heywood comes to the CIM with a plethora of experiences. With a long history in journalism, advocacy politics, public relations, politics and even a stint as an elected official, he currently is the Capitol correspondent for the GLBT publication Between the Lines. He holds an associates general degree from Lansing Community College with focuses in history, substance-abuse prevention and intervention and theater performance. In addition to his work in journalism, Heywood, as he prefers to be called, continues to nurture his love of theater by running a small community theater, Sunsets with Shakespeare. Plays he authored have been produced at U of M Basement Arts program, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, local coffeehouses and in St. Louis, Mo. His work in theater won him a Pulsar Award as best community director in 2005, a Player’s Award for his portrayal of Otto Frank in “The Diary of Anne Frank” for Lansing Civic Players and a Barney Award from Riverwalk Theatre for best supporting actor in 1997. He lives in Lansing with his beloved dogs Virgil and Gypsy Rose.

Eartha Jane Melzer is a 1997 graduate of Antioch College with a degree in cross-cultural communications. Her documentary work has appeared in outlets as diverse as Fox News and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. She has worked as a freelance reporter and staff writer for the Washington Blade. She recently returned to her hometown — lovely Traverse City, Mich. — with hopes of covering environmental and social issues in the Great Lakes state. Eartha received an Honorable Mention from the National Press Club for the Hume Award this year, in relation to her investigative reporting on private security company Sovereign Deed.

Andy Birkey is a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota with a degree in forestry, urban studies and sociology. He has been active in Minnesota’s LGBT community for the six years he has lived in Minneapolis, and has worked with and volunteered for a number of causes including LGBT rights, HIV prevention and care, transportation issues and environmental research. He has been writing Eleventh Avenue South, a blog about Minnesota LGBT news, issues, and politics, for three years and is a contributor to Metroblogging Minneapolis.

Paul Demko is the Minnesota Independent’s political writer. A staff writer at the altweekly City Pages for eight years, Demko has won numerous awards for his writing — including a Frank Premack Award, an SPJ first place in investigative reporting, and an Investigative Reporters & Editors finalist citation for “The Hit Parade Revisited,” a 2005 feature he co-authored with then-colleague G.R. Anderson, Jr.

Paul Schmelzer is managing editor of the Minnesota Independent. A freelance writer on art and activism, his interviews with activist Winona LaDuke, architect Cameron Sinclair, and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija appear in the book “Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Reader.” A former editor at Adbusters and the Walker Art Center, he publishes Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas. Also a media writer, Paul won a Frank Premack Award for Public Affairs Journalism (2007) and Society of Professional Journalists’ Page One Awards (2006 and 2007) — the first time in the history of both awards that a journalist from a web-only publication has won.

Chris Steller has been writing for Minneapolis community newspapers since 1995. He served as editor of the Southeast Angle, the Seward Profile and their successor, The Bridge, from 1998 to 2006. He helped edit West Bank Boogie (a Minnesota Book Award nominee) and manages the Friends of the Riverfront website.

David Alire Garcia is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of New Mexico. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Austin American Statesman and Hispanic magazine, among other publications. Prior to joining NMI, Alire Garcia worked stints as staff writer for the Santa Fe Reporter as well as editorial writer and columnist for the Albuquerque Journal. He also co-hosts New Mexico In Focus, a weekly public affairs television program broadcast on PBS affiliate KNME.

Marjorie Childress  lives and works in Albuquerque. She is one of the voices behind m-pyre, a local blog founded in 2004. She has a graduate degree in Community and Regional Planning from the University of New Mexico, and works for the SouthWest Organizing Project. She primarily writes about land development growth and issues of ethics and accountability in government.

Gwyneth Doland was a columnist and editor at the Santa Fe Reporter and Weekly Alibi before joining the New Mexico Independent. A native of Washington, D.C., she has lived in Albuquerque since 1994. Over the past decade, Gwyneth has written widely on food, politics, and food politics, among other things.

After seven years as a newspaper reporter and editor, Heath Haussamen left behind a stable paycheck in May 2006 to join the Internet revolution. He started Heath Haussamen on New Mexico Politics, a news Web site covering politics and government in New Mexico that was recently named by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza as one of the best state politics blogs in the nation. Haussamen also contributes weekly to the Diary of a Mad Voter blog published by the Denver Post’s Politics West and the independent Web site NewWest.net. You can find Heath’s blog at nmpolitics.net and learn more about him at haussamen.com.

Trip Jennings has worked in newspapers for nearly 20 years, including the Albuquerque Journal, where he reported on Gov. Bill Richardson, the New Mexico Legislature and state government. In addition to New Mexico, Trip has worked in Georgia, California, Florida and Connecticut where he covered a governor who went to federal prison for corruption.

Matthew Reichbach is a local blogger who co-founded and writes for New Mexico FBIHOP. Matthew has been blogging about politics since September of 2005 and about New Mexico politics since February of 2006.

Laura McGann is editor of The Washington Independent. A former reporter-blogger at Talking Points Memo, she has also written for the Dow Jones newswire, where her bankruptcy reporting was picked up by The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. A story McGann broke about an anti-terrorism data mining program run by the Department of Education and the FBI was inspiration for her dog’s name, FOIA.

Matthew DeLong is managing editor of The Washington Independent, and he edits TWI’s staff blog, The Independent Streak. DeLong worked the McCain beat for TWI from Arizona and aboard the McCain plane in 2008. He has previously reported for the Arizona Daily Sun and KNAU Arizona Public Radio in Flagstaff, as well as Campaigns & Elections (now Politics) magazine in Arlington, Va.

Aaron Wiener is assistant editor of The Washington Independent. He co-edits the blog and runs the Website, in addition to reporting and blogging on energy and the environment. When not glued to a screen, he plays harmonica and rhythm guitar for the folk-blues duo The Mustard Boys.

Spencer Ackerman is national security correspondent for The Washington Independent. He has reported for Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect and The New Republic.

Daphne Eviatar is an award-winning journalist and a lawyer who covers legal issues for The Washington Independent. A former Alicia Patterson fellow and Pew International Journalism fellow, her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Nation and many others. She’s been interviewed widely on radio and television, including on The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC), Al Jazeera (English), and WNYC Public Radio (Brian Lehrer and Leonard Lopate Shows).

Mary Kane covers the economy for The Washington Independent. She is a business writer whose work has appeared in Salon, The Washington Post, Politico.com, The Newark Star-Ledger and other publications. She covered finance for Newhouse News Service in Washington for 11 years. She lives in Arlington, Va., with her husband and three children.

Mike Lillis follows Congress for The Washington Independent. Previously, he has covered health care policy with Inside Washington Publishers, and served as Washington correspondent for Iowa’s Waterloo Courier. He lives in Washington, DC.

David Weigel is a politics reporter covering the conservative movement for The Washington Independent, and a contributing editor of Reason. His work has appeared in The American Prospect, The American Conservative, The American Spectator, The Guardian, Politico and The Economist.

John Arnold, New Mexico Independent
Abdi Aynte, Minnesota Independent
Jason Bane, Colorado Independent
Katharine Bernuth, Colorado Independent
Eric Black, Minnesota Independent
Larry Borowski, Colorado Independent
Luke Canfora, Michigan Messenger
Craig Cox, Minnesota Independent
Tom Elko, Minnesota Independent
Sandra Fish, Colorado Independent
Alan Fisk, Michigan Messenger
James J. Fordyce, Michigan Messenger
Don Fresard, Michigan Messenger
Dan Haugen, Minnesota Independent
Nancy Jaber, Michigan Messenger
Jeremy Jacobs, Washington Independent
Kay Jarvis, Colorado Independent
Matt Martin, Minnesota Independent
Mark Mehringer, Colorado Independent
Michelle Mustonen, Michigan Messenger
Andrew Oh-Willeke, Colorado Independent
Isaac Peterson, Minnesota Independent
Leigh Pomeroy, Minnesota Independent
Anna Pratt, Minnesota Independent
Paul Preston, Colorado Independent
Kerri Rebresh, Colorado Independent
Sarah Reller, Minnesota Independent
Luis Rimbaud, Washington Independent
Leslie Robinson, Colorado Independent
Kevin J. Shopshire, Michigan Messenger
Jim Spencer, Colorado Independent
Joel Thurtell, Michigan Messenger
Nancy Watzman, Colorado Independent
Ben Weyl, Iowa Independent
Dan Whipple, Colorado Independent
Brandon Q. White, Michigan Messenger
Celesete Whiting, Michigan Messenger
Chris Woods, Iowa Independent