ADVISORY BOARD for the Department of Journalism

Juan Gonzales

With a career in journalism that dates back to 1970, Gonzales is currently a publisher and an instructor.

Founder/Editor of El Tecolote, a monthly, bilingual newspaper published since 1970 in San Francisco's Mission District, he has continued his goal to provide relevant coverage on the real issues that affect the neighborhood. Through El Tecolote, Gonzales has attempted to highlight the popular culture that exists in the Latino community, which often time is neglected by the local dailies.

In 2000, El Tecolote celebrated its 30th anniversary. For those years of service Gonzales was honored by the Society of Professional Journalists with its "Distinguished Service Award." Similarly, he was received a "Heroes of Excellence" award by KGO-TV.

Currently, Gonzales is also President of Accion Latina, a non-profit Mission District organization that provides educational and cultural services to Latinos. Through his association with Accion Latina, he founded in 1980 Encuentro del Canto Popular, a yearly Latin American folk music festival held in the Mission District.

Gonzales is the sole full-time instructor in the Department of Journalism where he teaches five classes per semester and serves as adviser to the campus newspaper, The Guardsman, and the campus magazine, etc. At one time, Gonzales served as Department Chair of journalism for 10 years. He is a member of the Journalism Association of Community Colleges, the San Francisco Newspaper Association, the Community Press Consortium, and the New California Media Association.

From 1998-2000, Gonzales served as Northern California President of the Journalism Association of Community Colleges.

Gonzales has an AA degree in journalism from San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California., a BA degree in journalism from San Francisco State University, and an MA degree in mass communications from Stanford University.

At one time Gonzales was a full-time general assignment reporter for United Press International/S.F. bureau (1970) and Associated Press/S.F. bureau (1985).

In 1970, Gonzales founded publishing collective called Espina del Norte Publishing. Four years later, he was awarded the "Carey McWilliams" Medal for publishing service to the Latino community.

In 1983 Gonzales was honored by the National Association of Third World Journalists for distinguished service to the Latino community. A year later, he was invited by the association to represent the group at an International Conference of Latin American Journalists held in Havana, Cuba.

From 1970-1985 Gonzales was an instructor at San Francisco State University in the Department of La Raza Studies. He designed and taught their media-related curriculum. On two separate occasions, he also served as Department Chair for La Raza Studies. During this period, he also instructed inmates at Vacaville State Prison on the fundamentals of creative writing.

Because of his wide range of experiences, Gonzales served on numerous panels and guest lectured on such topics as the history of Spanish-language publishing, how to start your own newspaper, media coverage and ethnic communities, career opportunities in the media, media advocacy, media access, etc.

Gonzales has also been a contributing writer for Quill, In These Times, The San Joaquin Progressor, and Nuestro. He also co-published a book entitled "Strike," a documentary of the student strike at San Francisco State that took place from 1968-1970.

She has been a picture editor for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1998. Before coming to San Francisco, Hennessy was a Knight Fellow at Ohio University, where she received a Masters in Journalism.

Before entering graduate school, Hennessy was a picture editor at the White House, under the Clinton Administration. Prior to that, her staff positions included director of photography for the Washingtonian Magazine in Washington, D.C. and a picture editor for USA Today.

Among her photographic projects are essays on Soviet women during the fall of communism, published by the San Francisco Examiner Magazine and humanitarian medical missions to Vietnam, Romania and Gaza. Additionally, she was a picture editor for a photographic book, The Mission, published by Time/Warner.

Hennessy has been a past lecturer at the International Center for Photography in New York, taught picture editing at Ohio University and is currently teaching at San Francisco State University. She received her Bachelor's degree in photography from Arizona State University.

A content editor with Wired News, has been an editor and writer with Internet news sites almost as long as there has been news on the Web. After 15 years as a newspaper reporter and three as a book/magazine editor, Rochmis was hired in 1995 as employee No. 5 with SF Gate, the online service of the San Francisco Chronicle and KRON-TV. There, he helped conceive of and administer the tone and attitude of one of the first news sites on the Web.

Rochmis also helped launch BayInsider.com, a San Francisco website, where he was hired as senior content producer in 1997.

Rochmis came to Wired News, an online news site dedicated to modern technology, the new economy, Internet politics and culture, in July 1999.

As a newspaper reporter, Rochmis covered sports, news, and business, and was the Oakland Tribune's beat reporter for the San Francisco 49ers from 1985-90. He began his journalism career with the old Berkeley Gazette/Richmond Independent, where he worked for six years, before joining the Tribune for nine years.

He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from UC-Berkeley and a master's degree in sports fitness and management from the University of San Francisco.

Teaches courses in Public Relations and Newspaper Design at City College of San Francisco. He is a feature copy editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he helps edit, design and paginate the daily Datebook and Pink sections.

Graham, a former City College student and editor of the Guardsman, has taught Journalism part-time at City for 12 years. He has worked as an editor at The Chronicle for 16 years, where he has edited the People, Food, Briefing, Home and This World sections. He was one of a handful of editors who edited the late Herb Caen's column. He also regularly edits Jon Carroll and Adair Lara's columns.

Graham has written numerous cover stories for The Chronicle, including pieces for This World, Outdoors, Home, Food, Sunday and the Friday Marin-Sonoma sections. Some of the stories that wrote for the Outdoor section involved bungee jumping out of a hot air balloon, backpacking the 212-mile-long John Muir Trail in the High Sierra, skydiving out of a plane at 15,000 feet and rock climbing in Yosemite.

Before coming to the Chronicle, Graham was editor for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Point Reyes Light newspaper in West Marin. He also worked as managing editor for the California Farm Bureau in Sacramento and the Mountain Messenger newspaper in Sierra and Nevada counties. He was communications coordinator for Northstar ski resort and was a reporter for the Tahoe World newspaper in Tahoe City.

Graham has won several California Newspaper Publisher Association awards for his writing, photography and design work.

In addition to City College, Graham has taught Journalism at the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University and College of Marin. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from San Jose State University.

In addition to his 30 years of professional experience as a Journalist, Graham is married and has four children between the ages of 7 and 23.

She is an award-winning journalist based in San Francisco. A native of Ohio, she attended Princeton University and studied Chinese at National Taiwan University. Upon graduation, she was the first undergraduate to be awarded a fellowship from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, studying ancient Chinese philosophy at Fudan University in Shanghai in 1985-86. She later returned to China to administer an academic program, the first program to allow American students to live in the homes of Chinese villagers. She earned an MBA with a specialty in international trade and an MA in Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1992.

While earning her graduate degrees, she taught second-year Mandarin at Berkeley and wrote freelance articles for the Far Eastern Economic Review, China Business Review, and the Oakland Tribune. Her translation of Peng Xiaolian's Random Thoughts was selected Best Screenplay at the Locarno Film Festival.

A staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle for seven years, Burdman was nominated by her paper for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for "Bitter Voyage," a series of articles on the smuggling of Chinese immigrants into the United States. The series won several awards, including the prestigious Livingston Award for young journalists.

In 1995, Burdman again traveled to China to cover the U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing. In covering immigration, Chinese affairs, and, most recently, education, she has written extensively about racial issues. Her cover story for Lingua Franca magazine about the University of California's rollback of affirmative action was a finalist for the American Association of University Professors' Award for Excellence in Coverage of Higher Education.

Since becoming an independent journalist, Burdman has written articles for Crosstalk, Black Issues in Higher Education, and Foundation News & Commentary. She has also served as a consultant for the Wildflowers Institute, the San Francisco Foundation, and two documentary film projects, in addition to translating the text for two Chinese photographers' books.

He has been a photojournalist for the San Francisco Chronicle for 22 years. Like most staff shooters for a major metropolitan paper, he covered everything from fires to football, shootings to weather, earthquakes to celebrities in my daily assignments.

Larson has received numerous awards and his works have been included in eight books. But his most satisfying photography has been the documentary work undertaken in the past few years -- stories developed on my own.

It is through his documentary work that he has met people who have inspired him and given his work a new passion, people of unwavering spirit and determination despite, in some cases, the most horrific situations.

Larson's documentary work of the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings resulted in being named a 1989 Pulitzer Prize finalist. It also won him the highest honor in the Associated Press Sweepstakes award from the news executive council of California and Nevada, and was the heart of his portfolio that earned him the California Press Photographer of the Year for 1989. Larson was able to document their struggles even today, nearly 50 years after the bombings, because he won a grant through the Hibakusha Travel Grant Program, the first photojournalist to ever win that grant. That story inspired him to do a photo story on people who are allergic to the world, a condition known as environmental illness.

After spending a year on the project, Larson was named a finalist twice for the Eugene E. Smith World Understanding Award, an international grant for documentary photographers. That photo story, along with a series documenting life on the toughest streets in San Francisco, the Tenderloin, once again won him the title California Press Photographer of the year for 1990.

Another award-winning series Larson did followed a year in the life of a woman who had Alzheimer's disease, and the husband who refused to turn her over to a nursing home but was eventually forced to. That story was particularly touching for him because his own grandmother, suffering from the same disease, had just left her home for a convalescent home.

While the recognition and awards Larson received for his photography have been nice, they are, of course, not the reason he got into photojournalism nor why he continues to do what he does. The stories Larson has documented and hopes to continue documenting are those that might make a difference in our lives -- even if it does no more than get one person to think about something he or she might never have cared to think about before.

Larson's first introduction to photojournalism was through a neighbor in his suburban Chicago home, a sports editor for United Press International who let a wide-eyed youth watch his sports heroes from the sidelines. The seed was planted by him and grew under the guidance of a 45-year veteran of United Press International in San Francisco who saw some of Larson's potential.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in radio and television from San Francisco State University in 1975 and completing his military service during the Vietnam era, Larson began working as a stringer for UPI.