Alumni Magazine Group

by Hope Katz Gibbs
The Gazette / University of Pennsylvania

October 11, 2006 was the day New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle’s small airplane crashed into the 40th floor of an apartment building in Manhattan—and a pivotal moment in the advance of The New York Times into the digital age.

Rather than dispatching print reporters and photographers, drawing up a story list for the next day’s paper, and posting a blurb on the website, a video unit was sent out first, and journalism’s venerable “Gray Lady” broke the story online.

“The coverage was faster, richer, and deeper than anything we’ve done before online,” recalled Martin Nisenholtz, Annenberg School of Communication Class of ’79, the senior vice president of digital operations at The New York Times Company, in a recent talk at the Annenberg School for Communication. “Within a few hours we were offering slideshows, audio, video, pictures, a multimedia graphic so remarkable that it drew more than 100 compliments from readers.”

Since February 2005, Nisenholtz has overseen the strategy, development, operations, and management of the Times Company’s digital properties, and says: “I’m not sure that our new, digital journalism will ever really replace the extraordinary package that is the printed newspaper,” he said. “The more important strategic point is that as participants in this rapidly changing landscape, we imagine new possibilities and prepare to recognize the sparks that lead to big fires and fuel them when they ignite.”

Click on “Gray Lady Goes Digital” to Read Entire Article.

by Hope Katz Gibbs
George Washington University Magazine

It’s dusk on a November evening in downtown Washington DC, and while most 20somethings are preparing for a night on the town a dozen Asian Americans are sitting on the floor of a rehearsal room at the Kennedy Center.

“We are preparing for a January performance, and there’s no time to lose,” says dancer Stacy Topazian, referring to the “Passages From the journey,” a 60-minute work that centers on the Asian immigrant experience. The program will make its debut on January 20-21.

She turns to talk to Dana Tai Soon Burgess, the 27-year-old founder of Moving Forward: Asian-American Contemporary Dance Company. Dressed in his signature black turtleneck and black pants, Burgess has the aura of a Zen master. His choreographing, like his words, are calm and deliberate.

“We use modem dance movements such as arabesques, leg lifts, jumps, and leaps as a way to express the subject matter,” he says. “We also use some traditional East Asian movements, but mostly we create a vocabulary through dance which communicates a story line to the audience.”

Click on “Dancing to Survive” link to Read Entire Article.

by Hope Katz Gibbs
Auburn magazine
Photo by Steve Barrett

Jim Bennett, CEO of the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority, always planned to attend Auburn University. As a teen, he made sure he had the grades. Surely he had the determination. The only question was what would he study?

At 16 he was struck by inspiration—or perhaps it was fate—when he took a summer job cutting grass at the Birmingham Airport. “It was fascinating to work around all those airplanes,” he recalls.

“It wasn't that I wanted to be a pilot. It's that I got addicted to the noise and excitement, and even the smell of jet fuel. I knew then that working around airports was what I wanted to do with my life.”

So at 18, Bennett enrolled in Auburn's aviation management program, and after graduation in 1978 embarked on a career that has taken him far from home—but never far from the tarmac.

Click on the “Into Thin Air” to Read Entire Article.

by Hope Katz Gibbs
The Baylor Line
Photo of Nancy Dorn © Katherine Lambert

GEORGE W. BUSH OBVIOUSLY BELIEVES IN CONTINUITY. During his years as the governor of Texas, he tapped several Baylor alumni to hold key positions on his staff. And when he became the forty-third President of the United States in 2001, a handful of them were among those selected to follow him to Washington, D.C. What is it like to work in the White House? Pin on your security pass and prepare yourself for a tour of the executive branch’s corridors as these Baylor alums share their stories.

NANCY DORN, Class of 1981 (pictured here)
Assistant to Vice President Richard Cheney

JOHN HOWARD, Class of 1985
Senior associate director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)

DON WILLETT, Class of 1988
Director of law and policy for the newly formed White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI)

TOM PRATT, Class of 1981
Speechwriter, White House Office of Lettered Messages

Click on “White House Insiders” link to Read Entire Article.

by Hope Katz Gibbs
University of Virginia alumni magazine

AS A FOURTH-YEAR LAWN resident in 1985, Mary Kate Grant (now Mary Kate Cary) had no idea that in a few years she’d be working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Her plan was to join the Foreign Service, but she ended up heading home to Washington, D.C., where she landed a position in the Capitol Hill office of Hamilton Fish, a Republican congressman from New York. The, next year she became a script runner at “This Week with David Brinkley,” which led to a spot as a reporter with “Hotline,” a daily news service for politics.

“I would sometimes work 18-hour shifts, go home, sleep for a while, then go back to work,” Cary says, noting that after covering the 1988 Democratic National Convention, she was beat. "My doctor threatened to hospitalize me for exhaustion if I didn’t slow down.”

She began looking for another position and made a few calls, including one to the 1988 Bush-Quayle Campaign. They offered her a job. The day she started was at the Republican Convention that nominated George Bush.

Click on “A Passion for Anonymity” to Read Entire Article.

by Hope Katz Gibbs
University of Texas alumni magazine

Keep an eye on Protocall Communications, the brainchild of UT grad Ellen Pestorius Kleinknecht and her husband, Scott. You may never meet them in person, but you will probably give them a call. An 800-call, that is.

In 1986, Ellen Pestorius was a University of Texas graduate getting ready to start her first job. She had landed a spot as a marketing representative at the Fortune 500 defense electronics company Computing Devices International in Washington, D.C.

After a year, though, she yearned for more schooling. Although her days in the business school at UT taught her well, she felt she needed an MBA to really soar in the business world. So, she convinced her company to pay for graduate school, and she signed up for the night program at The George Washington University. Lightening struck.

As Ellen was searching for a topic to research in her technical entrepreneur class, she came across more than information for a class project.

Click on “Following Protocall” to Read Entire Article.

by Hope Katz Gibbs
Temple University, Temple Review

THE ESCALATING INCIDENCE OF DISGRUNTLED ex-employees returning to the workplace with a shotgun in tow is one of a number of high-priority policy and research subjects for John Firman, MA CAS ’78, and Jerome Needle, BA CAS ’60.

And many of the nation’s top cops are tuned in to what their research will uncover at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), an independent professional organization headquartered in Alexandria, Va.

Most of America’s 13,000 police chiefs are members of the IACP, which provides training courses and seminars regionally on topics such as school violence, domestic abuse, weapons safety, and community policing; administers testing for recruits; provides executive search and placement for police chiefs; and, most importantly, disseminates current criminal justice policy and research information.

Firman is coordinator for research and analysis at the IACP, and Needle is director of programs and research. “We identify law enforcement issues,” says Firman. “We do research to understand those issues. And when that is accomplished, we get the word out."

Click on “The Crimebusters” link to Read Entire Article.

by Hope Katz Gibbs
Georgetown University Magazine

ROBERT GIAIMO (B’73) WAS JUST A freshman at Georgetown when hunger got the best of him. His craving for hot food during 2 a.m. study sessions led him to open his first restaurant, a Blimpie’s sub shop franchise, at 19 years old.

More than 25 years later, the founder of the Silver Diner restaurant chain has 10 restaurants that create a 1950's dining atmosphere, including jukeboxes and milkshakes.

Giaimo hopes to extend his chain to every main street in America. Thanks to a 1996 cash infusion from George Naddaff—the multimillionaire franchising whiz who helped turn Boston Chicken (now Boston Market) into a national chain—Giaimo may get his wish.

After one meal at the Silver Diner, Naddaff invested $16.2 million.

Click on "The Heart and Soul of Dining" link to Read Entire Article.

by Hope Katz Gibbs
Duke University magazine

With an undergraduate degree in art history, Tony Mazlish (Class of ’86) didn't set out to be in the back business. He fell into it, quite literally. While moving into a group house after graduation, he jumped to the ground from the bed of a Ryder truck while holding a boxed television set.

“I heard something go snap,” says Mazlish, noting it didn't really hurt at first. "It started as a twinge, but the pain kept getting worse and worse. Within six months, I had gone to several doctors, but none of them could really help me.”

He kept searching for ways to ease the pain, but found few. So he started doing his own research, traveling to “Back Designs” in San Francisco and the “Better Back Store” in Denver, in addition to similar shops in New Jersey and Philadelphia.

Mazlish then put together a business plan to create a similar—but more original—store, and started looking for investors. By late 1993, he had gathered $184,000 from 12 investors and opened his first Healthy Back Store in Washington, D.C. the following year.

Click on “Back in Health” to Read Entire Article.