WNHH Leadership
Paul Bass
Online Journalism Project Executive Director
pauljbass@gmail.com
Harry Droz and Babz Rawls-Ivy
WNHH Station Manager and Morning Host Extraordinaire
harrydroz@gmail.com and lovebabz@gmail.com
Community Advisory Board
Our community advisory board convenes biannually to brainstorm ways WNHH can better serve our communities. Our members include Shafiq Abdussabur, Lucy Gellman, Markeisha Ricks, Douglas Hausladen, Angel Castro, Caprice Mendez-Taylor, Ife Gardin, Andrew Grant, Kay Holness, Michael Harris, Carlos Resto, Betsy Kim, Gemma Lumpkin, and Norma Rodriguez-Reyes. Meeting times are posted on the New Haven Independent’s website. Read our most recent minutes here.
online journalism project governing board
Paul Bass (pauljbass@gmail.com) is the executive director of The Online Journalism Project. Bass has been a leading reporter and editor in Connecticut for over 40 years. Bass has won dozens of national and regional awards for investigative, news, business, feature, and opinion writing and reporting. He worked as an editor and investigative reporter for the New Haven Advocate from 1989 – 2004. He is the co-author, with co-author Douglas W. Rae, of Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, & The Redemption of a Killer (2006, Basic Books) about the 1969 murder of a Black Panther in New Haven and the resulting trials and FBI revelations surrounding the case. Thousands of Bass’s articles about Connecticut are in a dedicated archive housed at the Manuscripts & Archives section of Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library. Paul edits the New Haven Independent.
Michelle Chihara (michelle@thisblueangel.com) has been a writer, editor and journalist since 1996. She worked as an editor for MotherJones.com, the daily site for the investigative news magazine, for the dot.com Tripod Inc, and as a staff writer at two alternative weeklies, the New Haven Advocate and the Boston Phoenix. A Yale graduate, she received her MFA in Creative Writing at UC Irvine in 2006, and her PhD in English Literature at UC Irvine in 2012. Her work has appeared in Studies in American Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, The Santa Monica Review, Mother Jones, The Boston Globe, and Bloomberg.com, among others. She currently teaches creative nonfiction writing and contemporary American literature as an English professor at Whittier College.
Gemma Joseph Lumpkin (gemmalumpkin@yahoo.com) is chief executive officer of High Performance Education Group, which helps schools analyze data and improve student performance. She is a former Vice President of the CT Academy for Education in Math, Science and Technology in Middletown, CT and a former public affairs director of Fox 61 television in Hartford. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, she grew up in New Haven, where she still lives. She earned her MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Norma Rodriguez-Reyes (norma@lavozhispanact.com) runs and co-owns the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz Hispana. She took over the paper in 1998 when it verged on bankruptcy. Under her direction, the newspaper has grown into the state’s largest-circulation Spanish-language weekly.
Read our latest 990 tax form here and audit here.
Diversity statement
The New Haven Independent and WNHH seek to represent, engage with and honor the diverse communities that make up and define the communities we cover. You can view our employee report here, which illustrates how we uphold the diversity of backgrounds, identities and perspectives that make up New Haven and its neighbors within our own site and station.