January 18, 2023 — Prison Journalism Project (PJP), a national initiative that trains incarcerated writers to be journalists and publishes their stories,today announced that it has appointed four new members to its Board of Directors. The new directors bring decades of professional experience across disciplines, including extensive media and legal expertise, and will contribute to the strategic direction of the organization as it grow its platform and programming across the country.

“Our Board has been instrumental in guiding the strategic focus of PJP over the last year. We are honored to welcome a new cohort of directors who bring complementary experience and insights to our existing Board as we look forward to growing our organization and the reach of our reporters,” said Yukari Kane, co-founder of PJP.

“We are eager to work alongside these accomplished and passionate leaders who shares our vision for bringing transparency to the criminal justice system by elevating the reporting of journalists on the inside,” said Shaheen Pasha, co-founder of PJP.

New members of PJP’s Board of Directors are listed below, along with their brief biographies:

Lawrence Bartley
Lawrence Bartley is the founder and director of “News Inside,” the print publication of The Marshall Project which is distributed in hundreds of prisons and jails throughout the United States. News Inside is the recipient of the 2020 Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media. Lawrence was a member of the teams behind “The Zo,” winner of the 2020 Oline Journalism Award for “Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling” and “What Do We Really Know About the Politics of People Behind Bars?” which was an honorable mention recipient for the 2020 Phillip Meyers Awards. He is also an accomplished public speaker and has provided multimedia content for CNN, PBS, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC and more.

Emily Galvin-Almanza
Emily Galvin-Almanza is the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, a new model of collaborative public defense designed to empower public defenders nationwide. Launched in 2018, PFJ has now eliminated over 4,000 years of incarceration and grown from two sites to over 20 locations around the nation. Prior to founding PFJ, Emily fought for clients inside the LA County Public Defender, Santa Clara County Public Defender, and Bronx Defenders, and also served as one of the first attorneys fighting for release of life-sentenced people with the Stanford Three Strikes Project. Emily clerked for the Honorable Thelton Henderson of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, and is a graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Law School, where she earned the Deborah Rhode Prize for her work in the public interest. In 2017, she was named one of the American Bar Association’s Top 40 Young Lawyers. She believes that everyone is entitled not just to equal justice, but to equal mercy.

Cristi Hegranes
Cristi Hegranes is the CEO of Global Press and the Publisher of Global Press Journal. She founded Global Press in 2006 to change the face of international journalism by building women-led news bureaus in some of the world’s least-covered places. Today, Global Press operates more than 40 independent news bureaus. Cristi created an industry-leading Duty of Care program to provide for the physical, emotional, digital and legal security of its journalists. The program was named one of Fast Company Magazine’s World Changing Ideas in 2022, won the 2020 Chester M. Pierce Human Rights Prize from the American Psychiatric Association and was honored by SOS International in 2021. Cristi holds a master’s degree in journalism from New York University and a bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University. She is an Emerson Collective Dial Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow and was the Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Stanford University. She is the recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists Journalism Innovation Prize, the Jefferson Award for Public Service and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, among others.

Lynn Oberlander
Lynn Oberlander is a leading media attorney and advocate for journalists, currently of counsel with the law firm of Ballard Spahr LLP. Previously, she was a senior vice president and associate general counsel, media, for Univision Communications Inc., from 2018 through 2020, while also serving as executive vice president and general counsel at Univision’s subsidiary, Gizmodo Media Group, where she oversaw the legal operations of one of the nation’s largest digital news companies, including the websites Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Deadspin, The Root and Splinter. From 2014 through March 2017, she was the general counsel, media operations for First Look Media Works, the publisher of national security website The Intercept and documentary film project, Field of Vision. She founded and led the company’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, which provides funding for cases in support of the First Amendment and other press freedoms. From 2006 until 2014, she was the general counsel of The New Yorker, where she also wrote for newyorker.com on media law topics. Earlier in her career, she spent five years each at Forbes and NBC. She is a frequent speaker on freedom of expression and media law topics and gave testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on “Secrecy Orders and Prosecuting Leaks: Potential Legislative Responses to Deter Prosecutorial Abuse of Power.” Lynn is a graduate of Yale and Columbia Law School, and she teaches graduate courses in media law and media ethics at The New School in New York. She is the former board chair of the Media Law Resource Center as well as the New York Bar Association’s Communications and Media Law Committee.

To see PJP’s complete Board of Directors, click here.

ABOUT PRISON JOURNALISM PROJECT

Prison Journalism Project is a national, independent, nonpartisan initiative that trains incarcerated writers in the tools of journalism and helps them reach an outside audience via their own publication as well as through partnerships with mainstream media organizations.

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