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Committees
Government Relations Committee

SPJ's Government Relations Committee will assist the organization with tracking and supporting legislation that will broaden First Amendment and open government efforts that benefit journalists and the public.

Government Relations Committee chair

Al Cross
Director Institute for
Rural Journalism & Community Issues
School of Journalism & Telecommunications
122 Grehan Bldg.
University of Kentucky
Lexington KY 40506
Work: (859) 257-3744
E-mail
Bio (click to expand) Al Cross is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky, and an assistant professor in UK’s School of Journalism and Telecommunications. He reported for The Courier-Journal for 26 years, the last 15 percent as chief political writer, and continues to write a twice-monthly political column for the Louisville newspaper. He was national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001-02, and is chairman of SPJ’s Government Relations Committee, a member of the Ethics Committee and a director of SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi Foundation. His awards include a share of the Pulitzer Prize won by The C-J’s staff for general news reporting in 1989, for coverage of the nation’s deadliest bus and drunk-driving crash. He is a longtime panelist on Kentucky Educational Television's “Comment on Kentucky” and has been a contributor to several books on Kentucky and politics. He grew up in Albany, Ky., is a graduate of Western Kentucky University, and worked at newspapers in Monticello, Leitchfield and Russellville before establishing The Courier-Journal news bureau at Somerset, which later moved to Bardstown. He and his wife Patti have lived in Frankfort since 1987.

Government Relations Committee Members

George Daniels
Assistant Professor
University of Alabama
Box 870172
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
(205) 348-8618
E-mail
Bio (click to expand) Now in his second term as a campus adviser at-large on the SPJ National Board, George L. Daniels is a former chair of the SPJ Journalism Education Committee. As a graduate student, Daniels participated in the University of Georgia’s SPJ Campus Chapter.

But, his first experience with SPJ came when he received a scholarship from the Washington DC Chapter of what was then Sigma Delta Chi (SDX) in the early 1990s. Daniels was a 2006 SPJ Diversity Leadership Fellow and 2007 Scripps Institute Fellow.

Daniels is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama’s College of Communication and Information Sciences. He joined the UA faculty in 2003 after completing his master's and Ph.D. degrees at The University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Before moving into the academic arena, Daniels worked as a news producer at WTVR-TV in Richmond, Va., WLWT-TV in Cincinnati, Ohio and WXIA-TV in Atlanta. He is a cum laude graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC.

Frank Gibson

Chris Gunty

RonNell Andersen Jones

Julie Kay
(954) 303-3384
E-mail
Bio (click to expand) Julie Kay is a freelance writer who writes for the Miami Herald, the New York Post, the Daily Business Review, the South Florida Business Journal, ABA dsJournal and others. She also serves as the Florida consultant for C-SPAN. Former Florida bureau chief for the National Law Journal and staff writer at the Miami Herald, Kay has won more than 30 local, regional and national journalism awards. She has been president of the South Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists since 2006 and was 2009 chair of the national group's Legal Defense Fund.

Bill McCloskey
4709 Overbrook Road
Bethesda, MD 20816
E-mail
Bio (click to expand) Bill McCloskey, currently at large director of the Society of Professional Journalists is also a member of the Executive Committee, Bylaws Committee and the Finance Committee. He is the retired Washington, D.C.-based Director of Media Relations for AT&T, formerly BellSouth Corp.

In 2008 he was awarded the Wells Key, SPJ's highest honor for a volunteer.

Before joining BellSouth in 1987, Bill worked for 11 years with The Associated Press in Washington.

Bill's professional career started in 1961, when, as a high school junior, he took a summer newsroom job at Metromedia's WIP Radio in Philadelphia. He remained with Metromedia in Philadelphia until he was drafted into the Army upon graduation from Villanova University in 1966.

Ironically, the Army assigned him to the information office of the 1st Signal Brigade in Vietnam where he wrote press releases about the Army's telephone system.

Following his tour of duty, he was assigned by Metromedia to set up a news department for WASH FM in Washington. From 1968 until 1975, he worked as news director, network correspondent and TV news producer and writer for Metromedia in Washington.

He is past president of the D.C. Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and was the Society’s Region 2 director. He has been recognized three times with SPJ’s “President’s Award” for distinguished service to the Society.

Steve Taylor
Adjunct Professor
George Mason University
E-mail
Bio (click to expand) Steve Taylor, adjunct professor of communication at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., is a freelance writer, video producer and media relations consultant based in Arlington, Va. For twelve years Taylor was a correspondent for ABC News. He covered the White House as a correspondent for Unistar Radio Network and Satellite News Channel and also did White House reporting for National Journal’s CongressDaily and the PBS NewsHour. Taylor also has reported for CNN, CBS Radio and Mutual/NBC Radio. He has covered Congress, the Supreme Court, federal agencies and the last nine presidential campaigns. He was the first broadcast reporter to win the Merriman Smith Award for Presidential News Coverage from the White House Correspondents Association. For his reporting from New York on 9/11, he shared ABC’s Peabody and DuPont-Columbia Awards.

Taylor was a contributing writer to two books published in 2009: Latinos And The Nation’s Future, edited by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, and Weathering Storms: Human Resources In Difficult Times, published by the Society for Human Resource Management. For five years he was host of Technogenesis, a Comcast television program about innovations in science and engineering. Taylor has a degree in economics from the University of Virginia.