About Us

Simone Coxe is a native Californian committed to journalism as a means to create a better world. She is a director at the National Trust for Local News and Human Rights Watch and serves on the advisory board of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Previously, she spent seventeen years as a Director at Internews, and eleven years on the KQED board. Professionally, Simone co-founded Blanc & Otus, a public relations firm serving the technology industry, and served as its CEO from 1985-2000.

Chris Boskin is a highly respected veteran of magazine publishing, with a career that includes senior positions with Worth Media, The New Yorker Magazine, Hearst Corporation, East West Network, and Knapp Communications. She was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2008 to chair the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and currently serves as an advisor to Tech4GS. She has served on the boards of NPR, Internews, College Track, the Gladstone Institutes and Higher Ground.

David Lesher is a co-founder of CalMatters and a veteran California journalist with more than four decades of experience. He launched the organization in 2015 and served as Editor/CEO until 2018, then as Editor-in-Chief until 2023. In 2024, he led the launch of Digital Democracy, a platform that uses artificial intelligence and public data to track California’s politicians, before retiring in January 2026.

Earlier in his career, Dave was a political writer, Capitol reporter and assistant national editor for presidential campaigns at the Los Angeles Times. He also has served as Editor of California Journal magazine, as California Director for the New America Foundation and as Director of Government Affairs at the Public Policy Institute of California.

John Boland is president emeritus of KQED public media, where was the organization’s president & chief executive officer for nine years before retiring in 2019. Boland now serves as a director for CalMatters and on the Green Music Center board of advisors at Sonoma State University after having chaired both boards. He’s also the former vice chair of the Commonwealth Club World Affairs board of governors. A media executive and journalist, Boland led the reinvention of public media to serve the rapidly changing needs of the American public in the digital age. He served for four years as the first chief content officer of the national Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) between two stints at KQED. Prior to his tenure at PBS, Boland held several executive positions at KQED for more than a decade, including executive vice president and chief operating officer, and vice president of marketing, development and communications. He also created the role of chief content officer at KQED in 2002 — the first such position in public media. Boland began his multi-faceted media career as an award-winning daily newspaper reporter and editor in his native New Jersey. He has been a newspaper publisher and owner, a senior executive with two major international marketing and communications firms, and publisher of San Francisco Focus (now San Francisco magazine). Boland and his partner, James Carroll, divide their time between San Francisco and Dos Reis Ranch in Sebastopol, California.

Hema Sareen Mohan brings more than 20 years of experience in the nonprofit and public sectors. Her areas of expertise and focus include education policy, juvenile justice, and police reform. For a decade, she worked in the California State Senate and County of Santa Clara. While in the State Senate, she worked on the landmark legislation to change the kindergarten entry age and create a new grade known as transitional kindergarten in California public schools. Hema’s nonprofit experience includes seven years at the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based nonprofit policy and research organization, where she designed and directed a training program for school-based police officers to use positive behavior support techniques with students, and worked on an alternative-to-detention program for immigrants in deportation proceedings. Hema is also a published poet and was most recently a finalist for the San Mateo County Poet Laureate.

She serves on the boards of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula, Stanford University’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, and the Child & Family Institute. Hema holds a BA in political science from Hunter College and an MPA from Columbia University.

Dean Baquet leads the Local Investigations Fellowship at The New York Times, where he was formerly the executive editor. He also served as editor of the Los Angeles Times and was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and his hometown paper, the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1988 along with two colleagues for coverage of city council corruption in Chicago.

Christy Chin, an advocate of social entrepreneurship and high-impact philanthropy, was a partner at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation for more than a decade. There, she was instrumental in growing the Foundation’s pipeline, supporting the portfolio and stewarding donor partners, while serving on the boards of many of the organizations it supports. She previously worked at the Skoll Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Bedrock Capital Partners and Norwest Venture Capital and at a venture-backed company, The Frontier Group. Chin is currently on the boards of Santa Cruz Local and The Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County.. She received her MBA from the Harvard Business School and holds a BA in history from Colgate University.

Janet Clayton was most recently the senior vice president of corporate communications for Southern California Edison and its parent company Edison International. Prior to joining Edison, Clayton was president of ThinkCure, a community-based nonprofit that raises funds for cancer research and is the official charity of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Prior to ThinkCure, Clayton had a distinguished career at the Los Angeles Times as a key member of the newspaper’s leadership team. She held numerous positions, including editor of the editorial pages, where she determined the Times’ official opinions, and California section editor, where she managed the largest news staff at the newspaper. Clayton has received many accolades for excellence in her profession, including recognition as the editor of two Pulitzer Prize-winning series. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California.

Robert Hernandez is a journalism professor at USC’s Annenberg school who explores the intersection of technology and journalism. He and his students create innovative, award-winning journalism with technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality and wearables. He was previously a news producer and director of development at The Seattle Times.

Brian Jaffe is the founder and CEO of the California Cottage Company, an affordable housing venture. He was previously the CEO of VOCA, a civic-engagement technology platform, and is a former board member of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Flora Family Foundation.

Jeffrey S. Klein has had a 40 year career in the media world as a business executive, lawyer and writer. He co-founded 101communications, a multimedia business publisher and event producer that later became 1105 Media, where he now serves as Executive Chairman. He spent 15 years with the Los Angeles Times as a senior executive and started his career there as the newsroom lawyer. He also was CEO of California Community Newspapers. He wrote a regular consumer law column for the LA Times and a business column for Folio Magazine, which named him one of the forty most influential people in the industry. He has taught graduate level media courses at USC and Columbia University and served as Executive in Residence at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. He was Chairman of MEND, an anti-poverty nonprofit, and now sits on the Board of Trustees of Claremont McKenna College, his alma mater.

Jack Mosbacher is a partner at Watchfire Ventures who also toured with Train as a professional musician, published in Foreign Affairs and The Washington Quarterly as a journalist and played baseball at Stanford University. He serves on the advisory council at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the NextGen Board at the Hoover Institution.

Leo Wolinsky has a long and illustrious career spanning more than 30 years at the Los Angeles Times, where he served as a correspondent, City Editor, California Political Editor and Deputy Chief of the State Capitol Bureau. He also served as Executive, Managing and Associate Editor at the paper. Wolinsky directed the Times’ coverage of the Los Angeles Riots and Northridge Earthquake, reporting that earned the newspaper two Pulitzer Prizes. He has since served as Editor of Daily Variety and now consults with media companies on a wide range of issues.

Nicole Wong specializes in assisting high-growth technology companies to develop international privacy, content, and regulatory strategies. She previously served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama Administration, focused on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to her time in government, Nicole was Google’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, and Twitter’s Legal Director for Products. She frequently speaks on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the U.S. Congress.

Nicole serves on the boards of the Mozilla Foundation, which promotes the open internet; the Filecoin Foundation, an independent organization that stewards the growth of Filecoin and related technologies for a decentralized web; the Open Technology Fund, an independent non-profit working to advance global internet freedom; and CalMatters, a non-partisan, non-profit news organization. She also currently serves as an advisor to Insight Partners, Tech Talent Project, Trust & Safety Professional Association, Albright Stonebridge Group, Future of Privacy Forum, and WITNESS.