AAJA Leaders Take on the Search for a New Executive Director, Committee Appointed
Aug 19
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The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) announced Aug. 14 that it appointed a search committee to lead the search for a new executive director.
AAJA national president Sharon Chan appointed me to the search committee, which also includes former AAJA national president Mae Cheng, current AAJA national treasurer Candace Heckman, former AAJA national vice president for broadcast Randall Yip and veteran journalism recruiter Joe Grimm.
The responsibility of choosing a new executive director belongs to each of us. We invite your ideas about how the position should be structured, how AAJA should be run and, of course, your ideas about who might fill this vital role. This critical juncture is the right time for you to stand up and lean into the process. Please send your ideas to aajasearch@gmail.com.
“This group brings together diverse perspectives, values and experiences of AAJA’s members,” said National President Sharon Chan. “Thank you to all of them for taking on this task.”
The committee’s work will begin immediately following the AAJA National Convention in Boston this week.
Mae Cheng is a former AAJA and UNITY president and is executive editor of amNewYork , a Newsday publication. As AAJA president, Cheng led the organization through transformative change, establishing the AAJA National Endowment. Cheng is also a McCormick Foundation Change Leadership Fellow named by the Poynter Institute. She was the AAJA National Convention Chair in New York in 2000.
Randall Yip has served as AAJA’s vice president for broadcast and led efforts to increase the number of Asian American men in broadcast journalism, launching an Asian American Male Broadcasters task force and mentor program. He works as a senior producer at ABC7/KGO-TV in San Francisco. Yip was the winner of ELP’s Outstanding Leadership Award in 2006 and AAJA’s Member of the Year in 2005.
Candace Heckman is AAJA’s treasurer. A former breaking news editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Heckman is a multiplatform journalist with first-hand experience of how to serve AAJA members in the midst of seismic shifts in the journalism landscape. Based in Seattle, Heckman is a graduate of AAJA’s Executive Leadership Program and the Maynard Institute’s Media Academy at Nieman Foundation.
Keith Kamisugi is an AAJA associate member and director of communications at the Equal Justice Society. Kamisugi worked as a public relations consultant for the national office and numerous AAJA conventions and led the communications team at the 2004 UNITY convention. He serves on several nonprofit boards, including Chinese for Affirmative Action, Asian Law Caucus, SF Japantown Foundation and APA for Progress and on the advisory board for Netroots Nation. He received AAJA’s Member of the Year Award in 2004.
Joe Grimm is an AAJA member and visiting editor-in-residence at Michigan State University. A former newsroom recruiter at the Detroit Free Press, Grimm has mentored hundreds of journalists in his career, and received AAJA’s Leadership in Diversity Award in 2005. An early innovator in recruiting online, Grimm now runs the Ask the Recruiter blog at the Poynter Institute and has been inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame.
