Staff
Anne Galloway
Founder, Editor in Chief
Contact
Office: 802.225.6224
Google phone: 802.222.6086
Mobile: 802.595.9159
Email: agalloway@vtdigger.org
Anne Galloway is the founder of VTDigger.org. She has worked as a reporter and editor in Vermont for 17 years. Before she began devoting nearly every waking hour to the management of VTD and coverage of the Vermont Legislature, the governor and state government, Galloway served as the editor of the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus. She began her career in newspapering as a pre-med-student-turned-literature major at the University of Kentucky, when her first feature story was published in the Kentucky Kernel. She moved to her husband’s home state, Vermont, in 1988 and took a job as a staff writer for the Hardwick Gazette and then the Barton Chronicle. For many years, Galloway was a contributing writer for Seven Days Newspaper and a visual arts reviewer for the Times Argus. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, Vermont Life and City Pages (Minneapolis). She is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors. Galloway and her husband have two adult children. They live in East Hardwick.
Cate Chant
Editor
Contact
Office: 802.225.6224
Email: cchant@vtdigger.org
Cate Chant is a part-time editor for VTDigger. Her professional life has included various aspects of publishing, including graphic arts, writing and editing. She has lived off and on in Vermont; her latest return was in 2002 after 11 years in western Massachusetts. She had her start in journalism as a reporter at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass., and was a copy editor there for many years. She was a western Massachusetts stringer for The Boston Globe for 4½ years. Most recently, she was a copy editor for the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, where she worked many a Friday and Saturday night with Anne Galloway. She has a B.A. in journalism from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She lives in Northfield with her husband, Steve Belitsos, and their twins, Luke and Libby.
Alan Panebaker
Reporter
Contact
Office: 802.225.6224
Google phone: 802.222.6085
Mobile: 541.359.6036
Email: apanebaker@vtdigger.org
Alan Panebaker is a staff writer for VTDigger.org. He covers health care and energy issues. Alan graduated from the University of Montana School of Journalism in 2005 and cut his teeth reporting for the Ashland Daily Tidings and Mail Tribune newspapers in Southern Oregon where he covered education and the environment. A dedicated whitewater kayaker and backcountry skier, he later wrote a weekly outdoors column for the Anchorage Press in Anchorage, Alaska, and continues to publish freelance work for Canoe & Kayak magazine. Alan took a three-year hiatus from journalism to attend Vermont Law School. After passing the bar, he decided to return to his journalism roots and start chasing stories again. He lives in Montpelier.
Michael Knight
Sponsorship Director
Contact
Office: 802.225.6224
Google phone: 802.222.6087
Mobile: 802.272.7302
Email: mknight@vtdigger.org
Michael Knight is the sponsorship director for VTDigger.org. He has more than 10 years experience in developing multi-media marketing strategies for a wide variety of clients. Michael graduated from Johnson State College with a degree in Business and Marketing. He is a member of the Barre Rotary club where he served as club president 2005-06, currently holds a director position on the club’s board and is a member of the International Chess Fellowship of Rotarians. He is also serving on the Green Mountain United Way board and is part of their marketing committee. Michael and his wife, Melinda, have twin daughters and live in Barre Town.
Paul Berlejung
Office Manager
Contact
Office: 802.225.6224
Email: pberlejung@vtdigger.org
Paul Berlejung, our business/office manager, comes to VTDigger.org after a 35-year legal career, the last 24 as a civilian attorney for the U.S. Army. From activities as mundane as answering the phone, to filing required paper work with the State of Vermont, he’s responsible for making the office run smoothly. Self- described as big city kids, Berlejung (from Louisville, Ky.) and his wife, Mary, (from Brooklyn, N.Y.) moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to their off-grid property in Groton in 2006. Since then he’s been involved in multiple community activities including establishing the Groton senior/community meal site, and successful grant writing that has brought more than $150,000 to the town and other local entities.
Freelance contributors
Terry J. Allen
Reporter, Photographer
Terry J. Allen is a veteran investigative reporter/editor who has covered local and international politics, health and science issues, and worked as a war correspondent for outlets including the Boston Globe, Times Argus, Harper’s, the Nation.com, Salon.com, Huffington Post, and New Scientist. She has been an editor at Amnesty International, In These Times, and Corpwatch.com. The New York Times has published her photographs and Amnesty International and the U.S. Senate have used them to document human rights abuses. Photos from Iraq were exhibited in a one-woman show in New York City. She has been a researcher for films including Academy Award winner Fahrenheit 911 and Oscar nominated Trouble the Water, and for books including The Impeachment of George W. Bush by former Rep. Elizabeth Hotzman, D-NY. She currently lives in East Montpelier and can be contacted at tallen@igc.org or through www.terryjallen.com.
Susan Bush
Reporter
Susan Bush began her journalism career during the early 1980s as an assignment reporter for the Massachusetts-based daily newspaper the North Adams Transcript and later as a county reporter for the Rawlins Daily Times in Rawlins, Wyoming. She has covered politics, education, crime and breaking news at the Berkshire Eagle and Brattleboro Reformer daily newspapers, and the weekly newspaper, the Advocate. Bush has written youth-focused articles published in the nationally-distributed Listen magazine. She is a former editor of iBerkshires.com, a Massachusetts based online news source. She lives in Pownal.
Mel Huff
Reporter
Mel Huff grew up in western Nebraska where her family had a wheat farm. She graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in English but with more credits in history and languages. During a summer university work camp in the Peruvian Andes, she developed a lifelong interest in eradicating poverty. She traveled widely in Latin America, helped monitor the Salvadoran election after the end of the civil war and in 1995 returned to Peru to write about the aftermath of the guerrilla conflict. Before a midlife career change, she earned an MAT at Antioch-Putney and taught writing in high school and college. Mel worked as a reporter and editor at The Brownsville Herald (Texas) for seven years, and in 2000 won first place in the community service division at the Texas AP Managing Editors convention. She also won several statewide prizes for outstanding continuing coverage of education. In 2006, she joined the staff of the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, where she worked until 2009. She has depth of experience in wide range of journalism genres including investigative reporting, special projects, features, profiles and magazine stories, with a focus on health care and social issues. She is a member of the Association of Health Care Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors.
Carl Etnier
Reporter
Carl Etnier hosts the talk radio shows Equal Time Radio on WDEV, Waterbury and Relocalizing Vermont on WGDR, Plainfield and WGDH, Hardwick. He writes a column on Transition Towns in Vermont Commons and blogs at the newspaper’s web site. Carl began regular newspaper writing and reporting with a column in the Sunday Times Argus and Rutland Herald in 2008. His media work started when he left a consulting career to raise awareness about the choices Vermont faces as world oil production reaches its limits.
Carl also works as a part of the Transition Town movement and serves on local food and energy-related committees, as well as the East Montpelier Select Board.
Carl considers himself a professional generalist, having continually worked both sides of the line between science and technology on one hand and social policy and sustainability on the other. That’s led to a B.Sc. in botany and crop ecology, an M.A. in liberal education, and Ph.D. studies in decision-making process that consider sustainability aspects of wastewater treatment. He’s worked in academia, at non-profits, for municipal government, and in the private sector as a water and wastewater consultant. He is sometimes mistaken for an engineer, but really he has just hung out with engineers a lot.
After growing up in Wisconsin, Carl lived in six states and three countries (Japan, Sweden, and Norway) before settling in Vermont starting in 1998. He speaks Swedish and Norwegian, plus broken Spanish.
Carl lives in East Montpelier with Céilí the fast-running dog, Mizu the water-loving cat, and five hens a-laying. He’s happy to live in easy bicycling distance of events in Montpelier, from which the 700-foot climb home gives plenty of time to mull over what just happened.
Greg Guma
Reporter
Greg Guma is a longtime Vermont journalist. Starting as a Bennington Banner reporter in 1968, he was the editor of the Vanguard Press from 1978 to 1982, and published a syndicated column in the 1980s and 90s. From the mid-90s to 2004 he edited Toward Freedom, then a print magazine covering global affairs, and organized one the first Independent Media conferences, held in Burlington in 2000. In 2004, he co-founded Vermont Guardian with Shay Totten. Two years later he became CEO of Pacifica Radio. He writes about media and society on his blog, Maverick Media.
Dennis Jensen
Columnist
Dennis Jensen retired from the Rutland Herald in 2010 after 33 years with the newspaper. He continues to serve as the outdoor editor for the Herald and the Montpelier-Barre Times Argus. Married to Kathleen, they have three sons and six grandchildren. An avid deer and turkey hunter, angler and nature-lover, the 63-year–old Castleton resident built his own log home in 1980 from hemlock trees he dropped on his 20 acres of land. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1966, volunteered for the paratroopers and served in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division in 1967 and ’68. He currently serves on the board of directors of the New England Outdoor Writers Association.
Jon Margolis
Reporter/columnist
Jon Margolis, author of The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, left the Chicago Tribune early in 1995 after 23 years as Washington correspondent, sports writer, correspondent-at-large and general columnist. Margolis spent most of his Tribune years in the Washington Bureau as the newspaper’s chief national political correspondent. In 1988, he was one of the journalists asking questions of Senators Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle in their televised vice presidential debate. Before joining the Tribune in 1973, Margolis had been the Albany Bureau Chief for Newsday. He was the first reporter on the scene of the Attica prison rebellion in 1971, and spent the entire first night inside the prisoner-held “D” yard. Earlier, Margolis was a reporter for the Bergen Record in Hackensack, N.J.; the Miami Herald and the Concord Monitor (N.H.). In addition to The Last Innocent Year, published by William Morrow in 1999, he is the author of How To Fool Fish With Feathers: An Incompleat Guide to Fly Fishing (Simon and Schuster, 1991) and The Quotable Bob Dole — Witty, Wise and Otherwise, (Avon Books, 1995). He also wrote two chapters of Howard Dean: A citizens Guide to the Man Who Would be President (Steerforth, 2003). A native of New Jersey, Margolis graduated from Oberlin College in 1962. He served in the US Army.
Andrew Nemethy
Reporter
Veteran journalist, editor, writer and essayist Andrew Nemethy has spent more than three decades following his muse, nose for news, eclectic interests and passion for the public’s interest from his home in Calais, close to the state capital. A shy egotist, he’s obligated to note he’s an award-winning reporter and writer and a John J. McCloy Journalism Fellow. His stories have appeared on the cover of magazines from Yankee to Travel & Leisure and in numerous national newspapers. He is also one of Vermont Life’s most prolific authors and author of Travel Vermont. His Vermont media background includes three stints with the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus as both writer and editor. A world traveler born in Austria, he has a master’s degree from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and is a Vietnam veteran and avid outdoor enthusiast. He is currently working on two non-fiction book projects.
Kate Robinson
Reporter
Kate Robinson originated and produced Vermont Public Radio’s Camel’s Hump Radio series from 1999 to 2001. She is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism, was a reporter for the Greenwich Time (Conn.), the Jersey Journal and the New York Post, the assistant managing editor for The World Press Review, and a senior editor and producer for Prodigy Services’ online news service until moving to Vermont in 1996. Her freelance pieces have appeared in Family Circle and other national magazines and she is the author of two books, the most recent a biography of J. Richardson Dilworth, the head of the Rockefeller family offices.
Dirk Van Susteren
Reporter
Dirk Van Susteren is a freelance writer and editor, who has 30 years experience in Vermont journalism. For years he was the editor of Vermont’s Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus, assigning stories dealing with the environment, agriculture, politics, energy, health care and a host of other topics important to Vermonters. He assembled teams of writers and photographers to produce books for the Herald and Times Argus, including A Vermont Century: Photographs and Essays from the Green Mountain State and Howard Dean: A Citizen’s Guide to the Man Who Would Be President. During his career Van Susteren has been the publisher of a weekly newspaper, The Suburban List in Essex Junction; an editor at the Providence Journal (R.I.); and a writer for United Press International. His freelance stories have appeared in various publications, including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Northern Woodlands magazine, Saltscapes of Nova Scotia and AMC Outdoors. Van Susteren has taught writing at Community College of Vermont and in the University of Vermont Summer Writing Program. He is a native of Appleton, WI. and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and his wife Marialisa Calta live in Calais.
