SPJ Florida Pro Nominating Slate 2022-2023
The SPJ Florida Professional Chapter’s annual election will be held is scheduled for Monday, July 25. Members of SPJ Florida will be emailed a digital ballot to vote, with voting closing at Midnight. Meet the candidates:
PRESIDENT Michael Koretzky is editor of Debt.com and SPJ’s Region 3 coordinator. He was a reporter for the Sun Sentinel, Florida Times-Union, and Athens Banner Herald Daily News before creating and selling two magazines, one to the Tribune Company and the other to the one-armed heir of the Listerine fortune. After both failed, he became managing editor of the world’s largest jazz magazine and a designer and copy editor for the National Enquirer, Star, and Globe tabloids. For the past two decades, he’s also advised the student newspaper at Florida Atlantic University, first part-time and then volunteer.
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Wesley Wright was a professional reporter in three states (Florida, Colorado, Virginia) prior to becoming a student media administrator at his alma mater, Florida Atlantic University. He helps run the SPJ Race & Gender Hotline and ReNews Project, which seeks to revive student media organizations at historically black colleges and universities nationwide.
VICE PRESIDENT FOR MEMBERSHIP Michele Boyet is a past president of SPJ Florida and a longtime board member before and since. She won SPJ’s national Robert D.G. Lewis First Amendment Award and co-founded the First Amendment Free Food Festival, which has been hosted around the country.
VICE PRESIDENT FOR PROGRAMMING Rachael Joyner has served on the SPJ Florida board and was the inaugural editor for Will Write For Food, which brought college students from around the country to a homeless shelter, where they took over the shelter’s newspaper. She’s also a former Sun Sentinel reporter.
TREASURER Joe Pye is the associate editor of the personal finance news and consumer debt solutions site Debt.com. In his spare time, he runs the award-winning craft beer blog, BrowardBeer.com. In 2018, he graduated from Florida Atlantic University with a degree in multimedia journalism. While attending FAU, Pye served as editor-in-chief of the award-winning student-run newspaper the University Press. This is his first year on the board.
SECRETARY Gillian Manning is a staff writer at Debt.com and a former editor of the University Press, FAU’s student newspaper. She’s also SPJ’s assistant coordinator for Region 3 and a freelancer for The Palm Beach Post and South Florida Gay News.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS (contested) Brandon Ballenger is a former SPJ Florida board member who led SPJ’s first drone-journalism training workshops and won an SPJ Foundation grant to travel the southeast United States to teach best practices. He’s currently projects editor for Money Talks News. Emily Bloch is an education and youth culture reporter for The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Florida. She’s spent her career working at newspapers and magazines across the state spotlighting community news and inequities. She served as president of SPJ Florida for two terms, leading the group to back-to-back Chapter of the Year accolades. Bloch also serves on SPJ’s national board as an at-large director.
Filippo Ferretti is an Italian Emmy winner journalist, news reporter and anchor at Univision Tampa and Orlando. He is the first Italian born American citizen to work as an on air journalist in Spanish broadcast in the United States. He began his professional career back in 2002 at Mediaset as anchor and reporter. He worked in more than 20 countries as a professional journalist. His professional performance has led him to make information and write for more than 15 different newspapers and magazines in several countries. He graduated in 2004 from the University of Florence in broadcast communication and journalism. In 2006 he completed his master’s degree at Iulm University in Milan in television journalism. In 2008 he obtained his second master’s degree in journalism and communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. He has stood out since 2010 as a journalist correspondent from the United States for Italy television and international Spanish-language networks such as Life TV and TVE and anchor of the weekend news. He worked at WXTV Univision 41 as a news anchor and reporter. Ferretti is a member of the National Hispanic Association of Journalists, and he in 2018 and 2019 he won the state award of the Florida Society of Professional Journalists. He is also broadcast and TV studio professor at University of Tampa.
Andrew Fraieli is Editor-in-Chief of Florida’s largest street newspaper, the Homeless Voice, as well as Community Editor of a West Metro Denver newspaper, the Clear Creek Courant. He’s covered homelessness, housing and systemic social issues across Florida, as well as in New York and Denver. He’s also written for South Florida Gay News, Colorado Community Media, and the Denver Voice.
Kristen Grau is a copywriter for the tax and accounting firm DiMercurio Advisors based in Orlando. Grau studied journalism at FAU and served as the student newspaper’s editor-in-chief in 2020. She has been published in MSN, TCPalm and South Florida Gay News, among other publications. She has served on SPJ Florida’s board since 2019.
Christiana Lilly is an award-winning journalist based out of South Florida, covering the gamut in content from social injustice, community news, people doing extraordinary things, and Florida’s restaurant and bar scene. A full-time freelance journalist, her byline can be found in South Florida Gay News, Shondaland, Teen Vogue, Venice magazine, Boca magazine, Fort Lauderdale magazine and more. She served as the chapter’s president for two years, winning Chapter of the Year during her tenure.
Giuseppe “Joe” Sabella works for the Bradenton Herald and the residents of Manatee County as an education reporter. He joined SPJ Florida as a member of the board and the scholarship committee in 2020. Sabella also served SPJ as a historian and social chair during his time at the University of Florida, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He interned at the Florida Times-Union and the Gainesville Sun before working at the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia as a crime reporter. Throughout the years, Sabella was honored to accept first-place awards from the West Virginia Press Association, the Florida Press Club and the Florida Society of News Editors. This is Sabella’s second year on the board.
STUDENT DIRECTOR Kendall Little is editor of the University Press, FAU’s student newspaper, and a freelancer for The Palm Beach Post.