Five new members join RSF USA Board of Advisors

Reporters Without Borders, Inc. (RSF USA) is the American affiliate of the Paris-based NGO Reporters sans frontières, and is governed by a Board of Directors led by President Elizabeth “Liz” Colton, a veteran journalist and scholar at the Warren Wilson College and UNITAR. The Board of Advisors acts in an advisory capacity and has no legal or fiduciary responsibility. 

Craig Forman is managing general partner at NextNews Ventures and past CEO at The McClatchy Co. He is a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist and entrepreneur whose media, technology and telecommunications career includes senior roles at Time Warner and CNN, Dow Jones, and Yahoo. Forman is former vice chair of the News Media Association. He is also a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent and Tokyo Bureau Chief.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro is an award-winning journalist, co-host of The Interview from the New York Times Magazine, and an on-air contributor to CNN. Before joining The New York Times in 2022, Garcia-Navarro spent 17 years with National Public Radio (NPR), where she became the first Latina to lead a magazine show and served as an international correspondent across Latin America and the Middle East. Her international and domestic reporting has won several prestigious journalism accolades, including the Edward R. Murrow, Gracie, DuPont, and Peabody Awards.

Adam Clayton Powell III joins RSF USA as the former Director of Washington Programs at the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy (CCLP) at the University of Southern California (USC), where he led its initiatives on election cybersecurity, engineering, law, and public policy. Powell currently coordinates CCLP’s programming in Washington, D.C., such as monthly public forums on public diplomacy, national security, and the future of communications. Before his relocation to Washington in 2010, Powell served in other roles at USC, including as Vice Provost for Globalization and as Director of the USC Integrated Media Systems Center. Powell also spent 16 years of his early career at CBS News and CBS-owned television and radio stations in New York City. His work has additionally appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, CNN, and PBS NewsHour. Powell is also the author of “Reinventing Local News: Connecting Communities through New Technologies” (Figueroa Press, 2005) and a co-author of “Lethargy ’96: How the Media Covered a Listless Campaign” (Freedom Forum, 1997).

Ben Rhodes is a writer, political commentator, and national security analyst. He currently co-hosts the podcast Pod Save the World, serves as a contributor for MSNBC, and chairs National Security Action, an advocacy organization he co-founded with Jake Sullivan in 2018. Rhodes is also a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama after serving his administration from 2009 to2017 as a speechwriter and Deputy National Security Advisor. Rhodes managed the President’s national security communications and public diplomacy, notably leading the negotiations with Cuba that led to the restoration of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuban governments in 2015. Rhodes is also the author of New York Times bestsellers “After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made,” and “The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House.” His work has been published in outlets such as The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs. 

Dr. Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Schiffrin earned her Ph.D. from the University of Navarra after writing her dissertation on the solutions to online mis/disinformation. She serves as the editor of both “Global Muckraking” (New Press 2014) and “Africa Muckraking” (Jacana 2016), which collate investigative journalism dating back over 150 years. Schiffrin has also edited three volumes on media freedom, including “Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms and Governments Control the News” (Columbia University Press 2021). Recently, she has concentrated on the role of government policies, platform remuneration policies, and philanthropy in supporting journalism globally. Schiffrin brings 18 years of experience serving on various boards associated with the Open Society Foundation. 

These five new members join an already formidable group on the Board of Advisors of RSF USA, a 501(C)(3) affiliated with the Paris-based NGO Reporters sans frontières : Maryam Banikarim, Delphine Halgand, Bill McCarren, Peter Price, Marty Schenker, Vivian Schiller, Brian Storm, Roxanne Taylor, and Thor Valdmanis.