Lisa’s MeatingPod podcast, covering the meat and the alt-meat industries, in April 2024 took home its third Jesse H. Neal Award in four years for “Best Podcast” in its category — this, for a production only four years old! Chris Scott is the podcast’s producer, and Lisa is its editor in chief. The Neals program is managed by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).
Sean Collins Walsh was part of a team of reporters at The Philadelphia Inquirer who won the Toner Prize for Excellence in Local Political Reporting for coverage of the 2023 mayoral election in Philadelphia.
More info: https://newhouse.syracuse.edu/centers/robin-toner-program-in-political-reporting/toner-prizes/
Yvette Walker was named VP Editorial Page Editor at the Kansas City Star to lead an award-winning team in 2023. She left academia, where she previously was assistant dean at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma.
Coming back to the news industry, this time in the Opinion section, was unexpected but welcomed, she said. It is the second stint at The Star, working in features and news in the early 2000s.
“It really just feels like coming home,” she told The Star. “People like to hear what we’re thinking,” she said. “… We are helping people make decisions about their daily lives through the information that we’re imparting online and in the paper. Opinion does that, too, but in a way that the audience can really understand what we’re thinking and how we’re thinking about it. So that’s a little different, but really so enticing to me.”
The comedy film, “Queenpins,” co-written and co-directed by Gita Pullapilly will stream on NETFLIX globally starting January 18. The film stars Kristen Bell, Vince Vaughn, Paul Walter Hauser, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste. It’s inspired by the true story of two women who counterfeited coupons and made $40 million off the scam.
The film originally sold to Paramount Plus and Showtime in 2001 for a record sale and was recently acquired by Netflix for worldwide rights. Queenpins topped #1 on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.
Pullapilly is currently prepping her next film starring Jeremy Renner.
Medill welcomes three alumni to serve as board members of the new-and-improved Medill Club of the Bay Area. Maria Hunt, Carly Schwartz and Chanel Vargas will provide expert guidance and local assistance with programming, including local events and communications.
As Medill continues to grow its presence in San Francisco and more students are spending time in Northwestern’s satellite campus at 44 W. Montgomery, we hope to expand our alumni programming thematically – and geographically. With the Covid exodus from downtown still echoing, we will be looking to host events outside of central San Francisco, where many Medillians reside and work.
We need your help. If you have an idea for an outing or event, please post a note to the Medill Club of the Bay Area Facebook page or send an email to me at b-clarke@northwestern.edu and I’ll share with the board.
Similarly, if you are willing to speak to, or better yet, host students at your company, we are always looking for off-site opportunities for both our journalism and integrated marketing communications students.
More about our new club leaders:
Maria is a California-based journalist, brand content strategist and author with two book credits: “The Bubbly Bar” and “Tanya Holland’s California Soul: Recipes from a Culinary Journey West.”
While earning her degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Maria learned about designing and managing high end culinary events, fine French and Italian wines and the art of bartending. These experiences prepared Maria for a career as an award-winning food journalist and restaurant critic at the San Diego Union-Tribune.
In the Bay Area, Maria has created successful content and social media marketing programs to drive revenue and engagement for brands including Houzz, Rodan + Fields, and One Medical. She designs cultural and educational events for Northwestern University alumni and students, as well as writing cultural stories for The Guardian, Dwell, OLTRE, Architectural Digest, The Wall Street Journal and Esquire. Maria shares her wine and food adventures, new recipes and pairing ideas on her website, the bubblygirl.com and on Instagram @thebubblygirl.
Carly is a writer, editor, and media entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience as a professional storyteller. She’s currently a consultant with Google’s moonshot division, and she served as editor in chief of the San Francisco Examiner and founding editor of HuffPost’s SF bureau. Her writing has appeared in Quartz, VICE News, GOOD magazine, San Francisco magazine, and Burning Man’s Black Rock Beacon, among other outlets, and Editor & Publisher magazine named her one of ten “women to watch” in 2021. Her first book, a memoir about her adventures overcoming addiction and depression while living in two very different communes, will be released later this year. She lives in San Francisco’s Mission District with her best friend, a three-year-old Boston terrier named Nacho.
Chanel is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. After graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2017, Chanel served as a breaking news writer in Hearst Digital Media’s New York office. Following her stint in NYC, Chanel returned home to California and carved out her beat in the wellness and entertainment space. Her work can be found in various publications including POPSUGAR, Well + Good, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Elle, SELF, Town & Country, Bustle, and more. When she’s not writing and reporting, Chanel loves taking long nature walks, exploring the SF food scene, reading novels, and performing improv comedy with her house team.
Want to help with events and club programming? E-mail b-clarke@northwestern.edu.
Aaron Boorstein (BSJ24) was named the 2024 winner of the Walter S. and Syrena M. Howell Essay Competition offered to Medill students. The annual contest challenges students to discuss “truth gone awry,” in the context of news gathering and dissemination. Boorstein will be awarded $4,000.
Boorstein’s submission, “Broken News, Breaking Trust: The Consequences of Unverified Reporting in the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital Coverage” reviews news reports from Oct. 17, 2023, about an explosion at a hospital in Gaza. Several news organizations initially identified cause as an Israeli airstrike and later had to revise the reporting when the cause could not be verified.
“I wrote about the initial coverage of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion because it exemplifies the consequences of journalism institutions hastily breaking news at accuracy’s expense,” said Boorstein. “While this trend satisfies the economic and social demands of the competitive digital news cycle, it severely undermines journalistic integrity and media trust.”
The contest was judged by a panel of faculty members from the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications
“The judges were impressed by Aaron’s thoughtful essay,” said one of the panelists. “As he wrote, ‘News outlets should use language that refrains from attributing specific actions or blame to parties involved in unfolding situations, ensuring transparency and preventing the presentation of unsubstantiated claims as facts.’
“…His show-don’t-tell’ examples and his concrete suggestions for the industry made him worthy of the 2024 prize.”
Reporter and author Robert Samuels (BSJ06) will address 2024 graduates and their families as the convocation speaker for the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.
“We are honored to have Robert share his advice and insights with the Class of 2024,” said Dean Charles Whitaker (BSJ80, MSJ81). “His outstanding accomplishments will provide inspiration to the graduates as they take the next step in their lives and careers.”
In 2023, Samuels won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction with his colleague Toluse Olorunnipa for their book “His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.”
Samuels also reported on George Floyd’s life and death as part of a team that won the 2020 George Polk Award in Justice Reporting and the 2020 Peabody Award.
Samuels was a national political enterprise reporter with The Washington Post for 11 years, where he focused on politics, policy and the changing American identity. He recently rejoined The Post after working at The New Yorker as a staff writer.
For nearly five years before his time at The Post, Samuels worked for the Miami Herald where he reported on poverty and crime.
During his time at Medill, Samuels was the editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern.
Convocation will take place at 9:30 a.m. on Monday, June 10 at the Ryan Fieldhouse.
Jimmy He is a journalism/economics double major with a certificate in integrated marketing communications. He was print managing editor of North by Northwestern magazine and president of Northwestern Swim Club. He also served on the Asian American Student Journalists’ executive board, as a peer adviser and as a Medill Ambassador.
Aparna Goyal is a journalism graduate student specializing in Media Innovation and Content Strategy. Goyal was a student ambassador for the MSJ program and has proactively worked on building and fostering community both outside and within Medill.
Twelve writers have been accepted into the inaugural George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. The workshop will take place in Evanston in July.
Medill received almost 400 workshop applications from accomplished journalists around the world. The inaugural group of twelve fellows includes Pulitzer Prize, Peabody and Emmy Award winners, and journalists who have reported from war zones around the world, covered politics, food, classical music, religion, and more. They hail from the United States, England, Malaysia, and South Korea.
“I couldn’t have asked for a more talented and passionate group of writers for our inaugural workshop,” said Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, senior lecturer and George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling. “Many are journalists who have wanted to write their first novel for years — several have toiled away on them in their spare time while working as full-time journalists.”
Over the course of the seven-day workshop, fellows will attend craft-focused classes on the various aspects of writing a novel, workshop their book chapters with instructors who are award-winning novelists themselves, attend firesides with visiting authors, have the opportunity to meet literary agents, and also have concentrated writing time.
“Medill is thrilled to be helping these journalists craft their first fiction stories,” Tan said. “We look forward to helping them share their debut novels with the world.”
Participants include:
Ahmad is a Malaysian screenwriter, podcaster and food journalist. She was on the writing team for Emmy-nominated “Saladin,” Malaysia’s first fully-animated series. She has written and produced over 8,000 hours of food content, including a food drama series called “I Eat KL,” which the Asian Wall Street Journal called “a mouth-watering soap opera.” Ahmad’s first film that she co-wrote, “Motif,” featured a female cop on the trail of a small-town murder. She reimagined Walinong Sari into an animation short which has won film fest awards in LA, New York, Mexico, Chile and Japan. She also hosts the “Two Book Nerds Talking” podcast.
Armstrong is an award-winning journalist and professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She has reported from several countries, including Sierra Leone, Kenya and the Philippines, and reported from Haiti from 2010 to 2014, through grants from The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and NYU. She has been featured on NPR and the BBC, discussing rape in the camps in Haiti and HIV/AIDS in the aftermath of the earthquake. Armstrong’s work has been published in The Intercept, the New Yorker and other outlets. She has produced and directed documentaries, including one for CBS News about the role that poor mental health care provided by for-profit companies has played in an increase in suicides in state prisons. She directed a documentary about a young man who was incarcerated in an adult prison when he was 16, which was featured in the Social Impact track at SXSW.
Bahrampour was a staff writer from 2004 to 2023 at The Washington Post, where she covered beats including immigration, education, aging and demography, and reported on war and political upheaval in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Republic of Georgia. She also has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure and other publications, and has taught journalism at New York University and at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs in Tbilisi. Bahrampour is the author of “To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America,” a memoir about growing up in Iran, fleeing the Islamic revolution as a child and returning as an adult. Prior to becoming a journalist, she wrote short stories and vowed to one day return to fiction. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Demillo hosts and reports for CUNY-TV’s Emmy-award winning “Asian American Life.” Her work has received multiple awards, including an Emmy in 2020 for her short documentary on a Philippine-based feeding program. Prior, she spent a decade as a reporter and anchor on the Emmy-award winning FOX-5 morning news show, “Good Day New York.” Demillo was a reporter for the Orange County Newschannel in California and the CBS-affiliate in Sacramento. She is also a tenured journalism professor at Saint Peter’s University and now serves as chair of the Department of Communication and Media Culture. Demillo is the recipient of a grant from the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium in partnership with Slice of Culture to help fill the void of local news in Hudson County, New Jersey. She received her BA in Journalism and International Relations from the University of Southern California and her MSJ from Medill in 1993.
Eng is an award-winning, veteran Chicago reporter. She has worked in Chicago journalism for more than three decades starting at the Chicago Sun-Times and moving to the Chicago Tribune and WBEZ. She has served as an Axios Chicago reporter since the summer of 2021. Eng’s great-grandfather came to Chicago in 1911 and opened Chinese restaurants that served as the inspiration for her first attempt at fiction.
Jaime is the youngest daughter in a tight-knit family, as Mexicans from Guanajuato, of Otomi and Purépecha heritage, who share a legacy of post-colonialism and migration. She is a graduate of Medill whose work has been published by Teen Vogue, The Los Angeles Times, Vice, i-D and more. Most recently, she served as the first-ever Head of Creator Content for The Los Angeles Times. Through culture-shifting journalism, Jaime strives to create digital and physical spaces that are more civically engaged, accessible and reflective of the real world. Her work explores how communities at the margins survive and thrive in the Western world; and the ways cultural phenomena, art and technology can affect populations in disparate ways. Occasionally, she writes personal essays.
Midgette was the classical music critic of The Washington Post, where she established herself as one of the leading voices in her field. She also wrote on the visual arts and did significant work on #MeToo. Before the Post, she became the first woman to write classical music reviews on a regular basis for The New York Times where she contributed reviews and features on music and theater. A graduate of Yale University, Midgette started her career as a journalist during the 11 years she lived in Germany. She is co-author of “The King and I,” a candid book about Luciano Pavarotti written with his manager, Herbert Breslin, and “My Nine Lives,” written with the pianist Leon Fleisher, who lost the use of his right hand and then regained it three decades later. She is working on a historical novel about the woman who built pianos for Beethoven.
Lekas Miller is a journalist who began her work in Palestine, covering daily life under Israel’s occupation for The Daily Beast, before moving to Lebanon—and then Turkey and Iraq—to cover the Syrian civil war, the refugee exodus to Europe and the rise and fall of the Islamic State for Vanity Fair, Deutsche Welle and other publications. Her favorite stories center around love and romance, particularly the ones that show the way that love can flourish in even the darkest places. Her first book, “Love Across Borders,” is a collection of real-life love stories of people who have been displaced by conflict and separated by borders, fighting for their happily ever after in a world that is divided by passports and papers. She plans to write a novel that follows the emotional journey of a young Palestinian journalist navigating life in London while still being tied to the Middle East.
Mumford is a writer and podcast producer, currently bouncing between Minnesota and places closer to an ocean. She started in public radio and now produces a morning news show with The New York Times audio team. Her work in various mediums has won a Peabody Award — and fourth place at the Minnesota State Fair quilt competition (category 205). During the pandemic, Mumford sculpted eight wire-and-mortar tentacles bursting out of her front yard; they’re still standing. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.
Pierre’s work centers the voices and lived experience of people and communities that have been historically marginalized. A former reporter and editor at The Washington Post, he was the initial impetus behind the 2006 groundbreaking series and later book, “Being A Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril.” He was on the Metro reporting team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting massacre in 2007. Pierre is the co-author of “A Day Late and A Dollar Short: High Hopes and Deferred Dreams in Obama’s ‘Post-Racial’ America.” He owns Bald Cypress Media and has provided media solutions to clients including UNCF, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Pierre has taught at Dillard University, Georgetown University and Howard University. Pierre graduated from Louisiana State University.
Rezendes is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist with the global investigations team at The Associated Press. His recent work includes an examination of child sex abuse in the Mormon Church and financial corruption in the Catholic Church. Rezendes is also a television writer, a screenwriter and a biographer. He is currently at work on a biography of the late Jimmy Breslin, the legendary New York reporter who gave voice to the powerless and helped create the New Journalism. Previously, he worked for The Boston Globe Spotlight Team where he shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for revealing the cover-up of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, and one for covering the bombing of the Boston Marathon. Rezendes was running the marathon when the bombs exploded and worked into the night covering the tragedy. In 2015, Rezendes was played by Mark Ruffalo in the Academy Award-winning movie, “Spotlight.”
Smith is Reuters’ bureau chief in Seoul, where he oversees a team of more than 20 journalists covering both South and North Korea. He joined Reuters in 2016 in Afghanistan, then moved to Seoul amid the “fire and fury” of 2017. Smith went on to cover the Trump-Kim summits, lead a rare reporting trip to Pyongyang, and reveal the scale of North Korea’s pandemic border walls. First arriving in Kabul for the military affairs newspaper Stars and Stripes in 2013, Smith spent nearly five years chronicling the West’s attempts to extricate itself from the conflict and the increasing toll on the Afghan population. He has also reported on security affairs from Russia, Europe, Central Asia and Iraq, where he accompanied Shi’ite militias to the frontlines of the battle against Islamic State militants, and in 2019 he reported on the Hong Kong protests, including from inside the occupied Polytechnic University.
Seven alumni joined the 2024 Hall of Achievement class at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. This is the highest honor Medill bestows on its graduates.
“These seven individuals have distinguished themselves with exceptional accomplishments in their fields, from media to top brands to government,” said Medill Dean Charles Whitaker. “It is a pleasure to be able to recognize their impressive contributions with induction into the Hall of Achievement.”
Eig is the author of six books, four of them New York Times best sellers. His most recent book, published in 2023, “King: A Life” won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and has been longlisted for the National Book Award and named one of the best books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time Magazine. “King: A Life” also recently garnered the New-York Historical Society’s annual Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History, endowing Eig with the title of American Historian Laureate.
In addition, Eig’s previous work, “Ali: A Life,” won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award and his debut book “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig” received the Casey Award. Eig’s fourth book, “The Birth of the Pill,” will soon be staged as a theatrical production by TimeLine Theatre in Chicago.
Eig worked for his hometown newspaper, The Rockland County (N.Y.) Journal News at age 16 and went on to report for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
He’s appeared on the Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Eig served as a producer on the PBS documentary Muhammad Ali, directed by Ken Burns. Eig has spoken at the National Cathedral, the Apollo Theater and the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Eig was a “Cherub” in the Medill-Northwestern Journalism Institute before enrolling at Medill.
Adm. Lisa Franchetti assumed the duties as Chief of Naval Operations Nov. 2, 2023. She is the first woman to serve as Chief Naval Officer and the first woman to serve as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She was the second woman promoted to four-star admiral in the U.S. Navy.
Franchetti is a surface warfare officer who received her commission in 1985 through the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps Program at Northwestern.
Her personal awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Defense Superior Service Medal, five awards of the Legion of Merit, six awards of the Meritorious Service Medal, four awards of the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, and two awards of the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal.
Franchetti’s operational tours include auxiliaries officer and first division officer on USS Shenandoah (AD 44); navigator and jumboization coordinator onboard USS Monongahela (AO 178); operations officer on USS Moosbrugger (DD 980); combat systems officer and chief staff officer for Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 2; executive officer of USS Stout (DDG 55); and assistant surface operations officer on USS George Washington Strike Group. She commanded USS Ross (DDG 71) and DESRON-21, embarked on USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74). She also served as commander of Pacific Partnership 2010, embarked on USNS Mercy (T-AH 19).
Ashore, Franchetti’s assignments include commander, Naval Reserve Center Central Point, Oregon; aide to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations; protocol officer for the commander, U.S. Atlantic Fleet; 4th Battalion officer at the U.S. Naval Academy; division chief, Joint Concept Development and Experimentation, on the Joint Staff, J7; deputy director of International Engagement and executive assistant to N3/N5 on the Navy staff; and military assistant to the Secretary of the Navy.
Her flag officer assignments include commander, U.S. Naval Forces Korea; commander, Carrier Strike Group 9; commander, Carrier Strike Group 15; chief of staff, Strategy, Plans and Policy (J-5) Joint Staff; commander, U.S. 6th Fleet/commander, Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO/deputy commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe and U.S. Naval Forces Africa; deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfighting Development, N7; director for Strategy, Plans and Policy (J-5), Joint Staff; and Vice Chief of Naval Operations.
A decade into his tenure at NBC News, Fryer works both in the traditional TV side of the business, and in the streaming world.
He anchors the morning hours of NBC News NOW, the network’s fast-growing streaming platform. He’s also the feature anchor of “Saturday TODAY,” where he hosts PopStart and other segments on the weekend show. His reporting is featured regularly on TODAY, NBC Nightly News and MSNBC.
Fryer joined the network in 2013 and spent seven years as a Los Angeles-based correspondent before moving to New York in 2020.
At NBC, Fryer also teaches writing classes within the network and developed a storytelling course for NBCU Academy, a multiplatform training and development program. He is a faculty member of the NPPA Advanced Storytelling Workshop, a weeklong annual event hosted by the National Press Photographers Association.
Prior to joining NBC, Fryer reported for several local stations including KING-TV in Seattle, KARE-TV in Minneapolis and WTVF-TV in Nashville. Early in his career, he also worked at WKYT-TV in Lexington, Ky. and WBAY-TV in Green Bay, Wis.
Upon graduating from Medill, Fryer received the Gary Cummings Memorial Award.
During his career, he has been honored with four national Edward R. Murrow Awards, including one for writing. Further, he has won 19 regional Emmys, 11 regional Murrows, two National Headliners and three Sigma Delta Chi Awards. At the network level, he has been nominated for four national Emmys. In 2022, he was named “Journalist of the Year” by the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists (NLGJA) and won a GLAAD Media Award for his reporting on HIV/AIDS.
Goode serves as the chief communications and social impact officer of BMO where she leads communications, media relations, government affairs and community engagement.
Prior to joining BMO, Goode served leadership roles for companies including American Express, Prudential Financial, Kellogg Company, Northwestern Mutual and Blue Shield of California. She has helped organizations through milestones such as Y2K, global mergers and a vaccine rollout for California. As a corporate executive, she has been recognized as one of the Most Influential Women and among the Top 100 Most Influential Black Executives in Corporate America by Savoy magazine and as an Outstanding Woman in Marketing and Communications by Ebony magazine.
Goode started her career as a journalist for the Grand Rapids Press and earned induction into the PR Week Hall of Fame for her work in strategic communications. She also was named Communicator of the Year for the International Association of Business Communicators.
Goode has championed diversity in PR through her work in the Page Society, a professional association for the highest ranking leaders in the field. She served as a member of the board for many years, led diversity programs and mentored women and people of color who are now leading communications for global organizations.
Goode leverages her expertise to help organizations manage reputation through board service. She serves as a corporate director for Providence Health Plan and sits on several nonprofit boards, including the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which is one of the largest awards for women authors in North America.
Lazerow is an entrepreneur who co-founded Buddy Media, a software company that was acquired by Salesforce.com for $745 million, where he served as chief strategy officer. He has invested in more than 100 early-stage companies, including Facebook, Scopely and Liquid Death.
Lazerow has received awards and honors, including the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from Ernst & Young, Fortune Magazine’s 40 Under 40, Crain’s New York 40 Under 40, #1 on the Silicon Alley 100, and the Ad Age Digital A-List.
Currently Lazerow is a co-founder and general partner of Velvet Sea Ventures, a multi-stage venture capital firm that provides seed-to-growth stage capital investments and strategic support.
As a philanthropist, he and his wife Kass established the Kass and Michael Lazerow Family Foundation and were recognized with the Game Changer Award by Cycle for Survival for their leadership in helping to raise more than $350 million for breakthrough cancer research programs. The couple was also awarded the Leader of the Future Award by the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute.
Lazerow is a long-time member of Medill’s Board of Advisers.
Tarde is the chairman and editor-in-chief of Golf Digest and global head of golf strategy and content for Warner Bros. Discovery. Tarde became an intern at Golf Digest in 1977 and was named editor in 1984 and is now the longest serving chief editor in media.
Tarde was given a Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association for his journalism on discrimination in private clubs. He also received lifetime achievement awards from the PGA of America, Augusta National Golf Club, the National Golf Foundation and the Metropolitan (N.Y.) Golf Association. He earned nine first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, including for best column four times in the five years between 2018 to 2023.
The Jerry Tarde Courage Award in his name is given annually by the African American Golf Expo to an industry leader for commitment to people of color in golf. Tarde serves as a national trustee of The First Tee and is on the board of Planet Word, a literacy museum in Washington, D.C.
Zepeda is senior vice president, Consumer Connections, Insights and Strategy for Moet Hennessy USA. He joined Moet Hennessy as vice president for Belvedere Vodka in 2014, and subsequently held some strategy and transformation roles both in marketing and enterprise-wide focused embedding the 2030 Strategy for the US market.
Prior to Moet Hennessy, he was vice president of Marketing for Havaianas, leading the expansion of the Brazilian brand in the US.
He previously held several marketing roles at PepsiCo over a span of 10 years where he led marketing for Diet Pepsi, Starbucks Frappuccino Ready-to-Drink, and customer marketing for the Foodservice division. He served as chair of Adelante, PepsiCo’s LatinX employee resource group in the US.
Earlier in his career, Zepeda held consulting positions at Ernst & Young’s Customer Connections practice and at Peppers and Rogers Group.
Zepeda a board member of ANA’s Educational Foundation and an advisory board member of Fashion Institute of Technology’s global marketing program.
Reprinted from Pitchfork.com
Photo credit: Casey Mitchell
Steve Albini, an icon of indie rock as both a producer and performer, died on Tuesday, May 7, of a heart attack, staff at his recording studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed to Pitchfork. As well as fronting underground rock lynchpins including Shellac and Big Black, Albini was a legend of the recording studio, though he preferred the term “engineer” to “producer.” He recorded Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, and countless more classic albums, and remained an outspoken critic of exploitative music industry practices until his final years. Shellac were preparing to tour their first album in a decade, To All Trains, which is scheduled for release next week. Steve Albini was 61 years old.
Despite his insistence that he would work with any artist who paid his fee, Albini’s catalog as a self-described audio engineer encompasses a swath of alternative rock that is practically a genre unto itself. After early work on Surfer Rosa, Slint’s Tweez, and the Breeders’ Pod, he became synonymous with brutal, live-sounding analog production that carried palpable raw energy. His unparalleled résumé in the late 1980s and 1990s includes the Jesus Lizard’s influential early albums, the Wedding Present’s Seamonsters, Brainiac’s Hissing Prigs in Static Couture, and records by Low, Dirty Three, Helmet, Boss Hog, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Hum, Superchunk, and dozens more. His influence rang through to the next generations of rock, punk, and metal at home and abroad, many of whom he went on to produce—the likes of Mogwai, Mclusky, Cloud Nothings, Mono, Ty Segall, and Sunn O))). He also recorded enduring greats of the singer-songwriter canon: Joanna Newsom’s Ys, Nina Nastasia’s early records, and much of the Jason Molina catalog among them.
Albini was born in Pasadena, California, and lived a peripatetic childhood before his family settled in Missoula, Montana. As a teenager, his discovery of Ramones transformed what he described, to Jeremy Gordon for The Guardian, as a “normal Montana childhood” into an altogether wilder entity. In the subsequent years, while studying journalism in Illinois, he was drawn into the Chicago punk scene that his music would come to both defy and define. Albini spent his days at the record store Wax Trax, buying every record that “looked interesting” and talking to “everybody with a funny haircut,” he told NPR.
“It was an extremely active, very fertile scene where everybody was participating on every level,” Albini said of Chicago’s music scene. “The community that I joined when I came to Chicago enabled me to continue on with a life in music. I didn’t do this by myself. I did this as a participant in a scene, in a community, in a culture, and when I see somebody extracting from that rather than participating in it as a peer, it makes me think less of that person.… My participation in all of this is going to come to an end at some point. The only thing that I can say for myself is that, along the way, it was a cool thing that I participated in, and on the way out, I want to make sure that I don’t take it with me.”
He began recording as Big Black in the early 1980s, channeling antisocial, sometimes violent themes through buzzsaw riffs and histrionic barks, grunts, and whelps, at first backed only by a drum machine (which remained a constant, pounding presence) and soon joined by Naked Raygun’s Jeff Pezzati and Santiago Durango; Dave Riley replaced Pezzati on bass for the band’s two landmark studio albums, Atomizer and Songs About Fucking. In his spare time, Albini would pen screeds in the 1980s zine Matter, admonishing bands in neighboring scenes and cementing the firebrand reputation that established him as an eminent rock grouch and refusenik.
After Big Black, Albini formed the short-lived Rapeman—a name he came to regret, despite the sardonic intent—before founding Shellac in the early 1990s, with Bob Weston and Todd Trainer. After a string of EPs through his longtime home of Touch and Go and Drag City, the band extensively toured (including an all-but-residency at Primavera Sound, the only music festival Albini was happy to play) and released five beloved albums: 1994’s At Action Park, 1998’s Terraform, 2000’s 1000 Hurts, 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound, and 2014’s Dude Incredible.
Albini has long been admired for sticking to his principles and questioning music industry standards, especially in the recording studio. He never took royalties from records on which he worked—including Nirvana’s In Utero, which has sold over 15 million copies—despite that being industry custom, and he kept his day rates low, especially for a producer with his pedigree. At Electrical Audio, his recording studio where he and staff members helped lay bricks in the construction process, Albini was famous for handing artists a yellow legal pad on the first day and instructing them to map out a written description of every song they were going to record. This was his way of avoiding future miscommunications and guaranteeing that artists maximized the in-studio time for which they paid. “The recording part is the part that matters to me—that I’m making a document that records a piece of our culture, the life’s work of the musicians that are hiring me,” he told The Guardian. “I take that part very seriously. I want the music to outlive all of us.”
Several bands have recounted experiences when Albini was behind the board reading a book or playing Scrabble during their recording sessions. As Albini explained it, this method helped keep his senses sharp and widened his perspective. “When I first started making records I would sit in front of the console concentrating on the music every second. I found out the hard way that I tended to fiddle with things unnecessarily and records ended up sounding tweaked and weird. I developed a couple of techniques to avoid this,” he explained in a Reddit AMA. “This has proven to be a really good threshold, so that if anything sounds weird or someone says something you immediately give it your full attention and your concentration hasn’t been ruined by staring at the speakers and straining all day.”
Throughout his career, Albini courted controversy through provocative band names (Rapeman, Run N***er Run), song titles ( “Pray I Don’t Kill You F***ot,” “My Black Ass”), and offhand statements (“I want to strangle Odd Future”). While he refused to apologize for his choice in names and jokes, in Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life, Albini made it clear that he believed his real stances on race, gender, LGBTQ rights, and politics were obvious. “I have less respect for the man who bullies his girlfriend and calls her ‘Ms’ than a guy who treats women reasonably and respectfully and calls them ‘Yo! Bitch,’” Albini told Azerrad. “The point of all this is to change the way you live your life, not the way you speak.”
Later in life, however, Albini repeatedly apologized for his past controversies, realizing that intent and moral clarity went only so far. “A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself,” Albini wrote on X in 2021. “If anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit *mistaken* notion that things were getting better. I’m overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit. Believe me, I’ve met my share of punishers at gigs and I sympathize with anybody who isn’t me but still had to suffer them.” He talked in depth about his regrets with The Guardian, MEL Magazine, and others.
Amid all of his ongoing work, Albini was a remarkable poker player. In 2022, he won a World Series of Poker gold bracelet after beating 773 other players in the $1,500 entry H.O.R.S.E. competition for a huge prize of $196,089. While most players dressed in button-up shirts and plain tees, Albini wore a furry, white hat shaped like a bear and a red Jack O’ Nuts shirt, saying the Athens noise-rock musicians “bring me luck.” He won another WSOP gold bracelet in 2018 for beating 310 players in seven card stud to the tune of $105,629. Back then, he was wearing a Cocaine Piss shirt during the big win. He had a massive grin on his face in the photos documenting both wins.
When asked how his career would be regarded if he ever retired, Albini told The Guardian, “I don’t give a shit. I’m doing it, and that’s what matters to me—the fact that I get to keep doing it. That’s the whole basis of it. I was doing it yesterday, and I’m gonna do it tomorrow, and I’m gonna carry on doing it.”