2010 Dart Award Judges

A list of the 2010 Dart Award first round judges and final judges.

Final Judges

Maria Alvarez is a freelance reporter for Newsday and adjunct professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) and City University of New York (CUNY). She covers breaking news, as well as judicial courts in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. She is a former reporter for the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and a production assistant for Court TV. From 1996 to 2002 she was a general assignment and beat reporter covering City Hall, education, crime and courts for the New York Post. Alvarez was the lead 9/11 reporter covering the terrorist attacks, followed by a year reporting from ground zero. She has carried out national and international stories including the custody battle of Elian Gonzalez; Vieques/US Naval bombing controversy in Puerto Rico; Columbine school shooting massacre; O.J. Simpson civil trial; and the 2000 earthquake in Turkey. Alvarez was a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow in 2002. She received her Masters in Journalism from New York University, and her undergraduate degree from Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas.

John Barth is the Managing Director of PRX.org, the Public Radio Exchange. PRX distributes network, station and independently produced programs to hundreds of public stations in the US and Canada and has expanded to non-broadcast outlets such as Amazon, Audible, iTunes and others. Barth is a longtime public radio producer, reporter and editor. He was the founding producer of the public radio program Marketplace, went from there to run all of AOL's news operations and business, and then to the premier spoken-word site, Audible.com. Barth was Editorial Director of the Public Radio Collaboration project 'Whose Democracy Is It?' in 2003. He lives in St. Louis.

June Cross is an award-winning producer with thirty years of television news and documentary experience. She was most recently an executive producer for This Far by Faith, a six-part PBS series on the African-American religious experience. She worked for PBS’s Frontline, CBS News, and PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her reporting for the NewsHour on the US invasion of Grenada won the 1983 Emmy for Outstanding Coverage of a Single Breaking News Story. Secret Daughter, an autobiographical film that examined how race and color had affected her family, won an Emmy in 1997 and was honored that same year with a duPont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. She is also the author of a memoir, Secret Daughter published by Viking in 2006. Her latest documentary, The Old Man and the Storm, which follows the travails of an extended New Orleans family for three years post-Katrina, will air on PBS' Frontline in early 2009. Her other credits include: Ashes of the Cold War; Showdown in Haiti; The Confessions of RosaLee; and A Kid Kills. Cross was senior producer for the FRONTLINE productions Living on the Edge with correspondent Bill Moyers, Mandela, and School Colors, which won a duPont-Columbia Journalism Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism in 1995. She received her B.A. from Harvard, and was a fellow at Carnegie-Mellon University's School of Urban and Public Affairs and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Studies at Harvard.

Susan Herman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Pace University. From 1997 to 2005, she served as the Executive Director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, the nation’s leading resource and advocacy organization for crime victims. With more than 25 years of leadership experience in government, criminal justice, and social services, Herman is an internationally recognized spokesperson for victims of crime and a new vision of justice for victims, parallel justice. Previously, Herman served as Director of Community Services at The Enterprise Foundation, Director of the Domestic Violence Division of Victim Services (now Safe Horizon) in New York City, Special Counsel to the Police Commissioner of New York City, Director of Mediation Services at the Institute for Mediation and Conflict Resolution, as an attorney at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, and as an instructor at New York University’s School of Law and NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. She is the author of the new book, Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime.

Matthew Kauffman has been a reporter at The Hartford Courant for 23 years. He is currently assigned to the paper’s investigative desk, where he works on longer-term projects. In 2007, he and Lisa Chedekel won the Dart Award and were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for their series on mentally ill troops sent to war – a series that led to changes in military policy. Outside the paper, Kauffman teaches a graduate-level course in computer-assisted reporting at Quinnipiac University.

Harold Kudler is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. He is also the coordinator for the Mental Health Service Line, Associate Director for Post Deployment Mental Illness Research, Education & Clinical Center (MIRECC), and the Mid-Atlantic Veterans Integrated Service Network of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Durham, North Carolina. Kudler treats combat veterans, ex-prisoners of war, other trauma survivors, and their families and works to advance VA's response to the mental health needs of returning combat veterans and their families.

First Round Judges

  • Christina Cantrell, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
  • Tina Croley, Enterprise Editor/Washington Bureau Chief, Stars and Stripes, and 2005 Dart Award winner
  • Lena Jakobsson, Field Producer, CNN Headline News
  • Ilse Knecht, Deputy Director, Public Policy, National Center for Victims of Crime
  • Russell McCrory,  Features Designer, The Honolulu Advertiser
  • Maryn McKenna, Freelance journalist and author, and 2009 Ochberg Fellow
  • Summer Nelson, Graduate Student/Research Assistant, The University of Tulsa
  • River J. Smith, Ph.D., PTSD Clinical Team, Department of Veteran's Affairs
  • Sara Tiegreen, PTSD Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Veterans Affairs
  • Evelyn Tobin, Public/Victim Member, Massachusetts Victim and Witness Assistance Board
  • Marie Verzulli, Victim/Survivor Advocate
  • Mike Walter, Documentary Filmmaker, Broadcast Journalist, Journalism Professor
  • Yukiko Yamagata, Associate Director, Documentary Photography Project, Open Society Insitute
  • Phil Zabriskie, Managing Editor of Publications, Doctors Without Borders-USA, and 2009 Ochberg Fellow