Meet Our Board
Executive Leadership
Kym Meyer
Immediate Past President
Kym Meyer is a Senior Attorney and Government Accountability Lead at the Southern Environmental Law Center. Kym works both inside and out of the courtroom to advocate on a number of matters including climate change, government access and accountability, and environmental justice.
Robyn Tomlin
President
Robyn Tomlin is McClatchy’s newest Vice President of Local News, and formerly McClatchy Southeast regional editor and the executive editor of The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun in Raleigh and Durham, N.C. A graduate of University of North Carolina, Tomlin returned to N.C in 2018 after serving as VP/Managing Editor at The Dallas Morning News. Prior to that, she served as vice president and chief digital officer at Pew Research Center and as founding editor of Digital First Media’s Project Thunderdome in New York City.
Pauletta Brown Bracy
Treasurer
Pauletta Brown Bracy serves as Director of the Office of University Accreditation at North Carolina Central University where she is also Professor of Library Science in the School of Library and Information Sciences. She is a past president of the North Carolina Library Association and a recipient of its Distinguished Service Award.
Jessica Gisclair
Secretary
Professor Jessica Gisclair is a 2020 Fulbright U.S. Scholar to China. She serves as the Faculty-in-Residence Advisor to the International Living Learning Community in the Global Neighborhood at Elon University. Jessica served as department chair of the largest academic department for nine years. Her current research explores topics such as the role of media in a global context and ethical responsibilities of news media.
Brooks Fuller
Director
Brooks Fuller serves as director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition and assistant professor of journalism at Elon. He also researches and writes on topics related to freedom of speech, unprotected speech, political extremism, national security, and media ethics.
Board Members
Taylor Batten
Board Member
Taylor Batten is the managing editor of the Charlotte Observer. Taylor came to the Observer in 1995 as a business reporter and has held a series of reporting, editing and management roles since, including a decade as the paper's editorial page editor. He and his wife, Lauren, have three children.
John Bussian
Board Member
John Bussian, principal of Bussian Law Firm, has litigated libel and open government issues, as well as subpoenas directed to newsrooms, courtroom and court records access disputes, and circulation, advertising, and intellectual property matters in state and federal courts across the country.
Eric David
Board Member
Eric David is a partner at Brooks Pierce LLP. His practice focuses on business litigation, constitutional litigation, and media and communications law. After nine years in education, Eric earned a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication and a law degree from UNC Chapel Hill. While in law school, he served as editor-in-chief of the First Amendment Law Review. He lives in downtown Raleigh with his two sons.
Calvin Hall
Board Member
Calvin L. Hall is the department chair in the Department of Mass Communication at North Carolina Central University in Durham, N.C. Born in Asheville, N.C., Calvin is also a former high school and college student media adviser and has served as a member of the board of trustees of the North Carolina Humanities Council and as a member of the board of directors for Carolina Public Press.
Monica Hill
Board Member
Monica Hill serves as director of the N.C. Scholastic Media Association. Under her tenure, the association launched the Carolina Sports Journalism Camp, sponsored the 2012 Hazelwood Symposium and was instrumental in the development of the Chuck Stone Program for Diversity in Education and Media.
Phil Lucey
Board Member
Phil Lucey is the executive director of the North Carolina Press Association. NCPA represents newspapers across the state and has been supporting the public’s right to know and the interests of newspapers since 1873. Lucey joined NCPA in 2016. Prior to NCPA Lucey was executive director of the New Mexico Press Association from 2010-2016 and before that the advertising director of the New England Newspaper Association from 2004-2010.
Amanda Martin
Board Member
Amanda Martin is a communications lawyer, representing traditional, social media and corporate communicators on libel and privacy, internet, intellectual property and other speech-based related concerns. She is general counsel to the N.C. Press Association and, for more than 20 years, she’s routinely counseled reporters, editors and news directors about avoiding libel suits, gaining access to closed government meetings and records and resisting subpoenas.
Rick Mercier
Board Member
Rick Mercier has served in local government for over a decade as the Town of Garner’s communications manager. Prior to that, he was a print journalist for more than 15 years. His reporting took him from sprawling refugee camps overseas to quaint Main Streets in small-town North Carolina. He lives with his family in Clayton.
Annette Privette Keller
Board Member
Annette Privette Keller is a native of North Carolina and has worked for a number of local governments. Before, joining the local government realm she served as Editor of the Mooresville Tribune. She is currently the Director of Communications for the City of Kannapolis. She is active in her community and serves on a number of non-profit and professional boards, locally, at the state level and nationally.
Cherie Speller
Board Member
Cherie Speller is a journalism graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked more than 30 years as a professional print journalist in North Carolina, in Greensboro, Fayetteville and Greenville, before moving to higher education. She directs student media programs in Pirate Media 1 at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C.
Ashley Talley
Board Member
Ashley Talley is enterprise executive producer for WRAL News. Before joining WRAL, she served as news director at WMBF, the NBC affiliate in Myrtle Beach for four and a half years. Prior to that, she spent 10 years in North Carolina working in newsrooms in Charlotte, New Bern and Wilmington.