New Date: Dick Tofel To Headline InDepthNH.Org's 10th Anniversary Oct. 22

By Nancy West, InDepth NH

Go to Eventbrite for tickets: https://tinyurl.com/pdthhhw5

The New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism is thrilled to invite you to the party celebrating InDepthNH.org's 10th anniversary Oct. 22 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the McAuliffe/Shepard Discovery Center in Concord. This is a new date and new speaker. Author Gloria Norris will join us at a new date in the future.

It will be all about us and you and the future of news in New Hampshire with special guest speaker Dick Tofel, former president of ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news outlet, a meet and greet with our writers, friends and board members, cocktails and beverages for sale, free bumper stickers, lots of fun, a few foibles, a skit, and appetizers. Trust me, news people know how to party.

DICK TOFEL

Dick Tofel was the founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until September 2021. As president, he had responsibility for all of ProPublica’s non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources.

During the period of Tofel’s business leadership, ProPublica published stories that won seven Pulitzer Prizes, seven National Magazine Awards, five Peabody Awards, three Emmy Awards and eleven George Polk Awards, among other honors. Also during this time, ProPublica grew from an initial staff of just over 20 to more than 160, and raised more than $225 million from other than its founding funders.

Tofel is he author of the Second Rough Draft newsletter on Substack. He is also an Instructor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he led a faculty seminar on “The Pandemic, the Press, and Public Health” and teaches a course on “Engaging with the Press.”

Tofel was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, with responsibility for its international editions and U.S. special editions, and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper, vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company, and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones. Just prior to ProPublica, he served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation, and earlier as president and chief operating officer of the International Freedom Center, a museum and cultural center that was planned for the World Trade Center site.

He serves on the board/advisory board of the American Journalism Project, the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, the Center for News, Technology & Innovation, The Dial, Kubist, New York Focus, Outrider Foundation, Retro Report, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Center for Media and Democracy in Israel. He also serves as a member of the Communications Coalition of the National Academy of Medicine Commission on Investment Imperatives for a Healthy Nation.

Tofel is a recipient (with Paul Steiger) of the 2021 Kiplinger Award for Contributions to Journalism from the National Press Foundation, and earlier received the 2020 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Newsletter Journalism for the ProPublica Newsletter “Not Shutting Up,” and the 2019 Newmark Journalism Award from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

He is the author of “Engaging with the Press: A Guide for Perplexed Readers and Sources” (2024) “Elements of Nonprofit News Management” (2022); “Not Shutting Up: A Year of Reflections on Journalism” (2020); “‘A Federal Offense of the Highest Order’: The True Story of How the Joint Chiefs Spied on Nixon, And How He Covered It Up” (2019); “Speaking Truth in Power: Lessons for Our Sorry Politics from Our Inspiring History” (2018); “Home Run Revolution: Babe Ruth in His Time, 1919-1920” (2015); “Non-Profit Journalism: Issues Around Impact” (2013); “Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future” (2012); “Eight Weeks in Washington, 1861: Abraham Lincoln and the Hazards of Transition” (2011); “Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism” (2009); “Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address” (2005); “Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind” (2004); and “A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939” (2002).

Tofel is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School (masters in public policy).

Also speaking will be Steve Taylor, a lifelong New Hampshire resident, an independent scholar, farmer, journalist, and longtime public official. Steve operates a dairy, maple syrup, and cheese-making enterprise in Meriden Village with his sons. He has been a newspaper reporter and editor and served for 25 years as New Hampshire’s agriculture commissioner. After seeing the need for in-depth reporting in New Hampshire, he joined our board of directors. Steve published his memoir, Stephen Howard Taylor: Recollections of a life in newspapering, farming, and public service.

Get tickets here: https://tinyurl.com/pdthhhw5

Former NH Commissioner of the Department of Resources and Economic Development

George Bald is the former NH Commissioner of the Department of Resources and Economic Development. He has a long history of public service in New Hampshire and is a member of our board of directors. He was elected the youngest mayor of the City of Somersworth in 1978 at the age of 27. After leaving office in 1982, he was hired to be the Economic Development Director for the City of Rochester and served until 1992. He then served as the Director of Economic Development for the Pease Development Authority.

Gov. Jeanne Shaheen appointed him NH Commissioner of the Department of Resources and Economic Development and was reappointed by Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and later Gov. John Lynch.

A Navy veteran, he has served on the Board of Directors of Granite Bank, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, and the Pease Development Authority.

Nancy West founded the nonprofit New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism in 2015. West is the executive editor of the center’s news website InDepthNH.org. West has won many awards for reporting during her 30 plus years at the New Hampshire Union Leader and at InDepthNH.org. She has taught investigative journalism at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting’s summer program for pre-college students at Boston University. In 2023, she received the Michael Donoghue Freedom of Information Award given by the New England First Amendment Coalition. West is passionate about government transparency and finding a sustainable path for local news in New Hampshire.

The Big Night

I plan to talk about how InDepthNH.org started from nothing and in the last year had over 1.4 million individual website readers and now has 14,500 subscribers to our free newsletter, which is published five times a week.

We share our stories with all news outlets in the state and estimate upwards of 600,000 readers in print and online on those websites so altogether we estimate about 2 million unique readers.

We host interns from Keene State College, Southern NH University and University of New Hampshire.

In other words we are making it bigtime and have our board, reporters, columnists, readers and funders to thank for it. That's you so please come celebrate.

Also please send me a sentence or two about why you read inDepthNH.org and I will add them in promoting this event. Email to nancywestnews@gmail.com. And please ask your friends to sign up for our free newsletter, share our stories on social media, and come party Oct. 22.

I am really looking forward to meeting you all.

Thanks Nancy West

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.