The votes have been tallied and the 2024 election results are in. In a return to member-elected officers, Jon Wile will serve as the Society of News Design’s President. Alex Fong and Yuri Victor round out the officer slate as Vice President and Secretary/Treasurer.
Five new Directors were elected to SND’s Board of Directors: Beto Alvarez, Allison Hong, Martina Ibáñez-Baldor, TK Sajeev Kumar and Rebecca Pazos. All newly elected officers and directors will serve 2-year terms.
Rounding out the Board are Antonio Cucho and Dalit Shalom, who will served the second year of their term, and current President, Ryan Hildebrandt who will serve as Past-President.
Please join us in thanking departing board members Tara McCarty, Marianne Bahl, and past-president Becky Markovitz. In 2021, reeling from the pandemic and years of membership decline, SND members voted to reboot it’s leadership structure and governance. McCarty and Markovitz were elected to the new iteration of SND’s Board. Their leadership, hard work and dedication to SND played a critical role in restructuring the organization and bringing it back to steady ground.
MEET THE OFFICERS
Jon Wile
President
Jon Wile is VP/Design at American City Business Journals in Charlotte, N.C. Jon oversees design for 40 business journals across editorial, advertising, events, marketing, product, and UX. He created and manages the News Design Desk and Business Design Desk, a pair of centralized design teams that have more than 50 designers across the U.S. Previously at ACBJ, Jon served as VP/Content as well as Creative Director, a role in which he redesigned all 40 papers and web sites. Before joining ACBJ in 2012, Jon worked in a variety of design and leadership roles at The Washington Post for seven years. He’s also worked at The Plain Dealer and Detroit Free Press. He’s a graduate of Kent State University, with a degree in newspaper journalism. Jon resides in Charlotte with his wife, Kristen, and their sons, J.J. and Teddy. He enjoys drinking/collecting bourbon, playing golf, watching Ohio State football and cooking.
Alex Fong
Vice President
Alex K. Fong is the deputy creative director for design at the San Francisco Chronicle and oversees a multidisciplinary team of designers, graphic artists, graphics reporters and developers. His more than 15 years of experience in the news industry has included leadership roles in newsrooms in the United States and overseas. In 2012, he collaborated on the redesign of some 80 daily print newspapers for Digital First Media, including the Los Angeles Daily News and the El Paso Times. During a four-year stint in China, Alex advocated for greater rigor in the practice of visual journalism and led the award-winning redesign of the Shanghai Star. Alex has mentored journalism students at the City College of San Francisco (where he was once a student) and currently serves on the journalism department’s advisory board. He is currently a member of SND’s Board of Directors. Alex is a musician in his spare time. He founded the post-punk band The Paper Tigers while living in Beijing. He builds his own audio electronics and has studied audio engineering and production privately at a recording studio near Oakland’s Jack London Square.
Yuri Victor
Secretary/Treasurer
Yuri Victor is a senior editor at The Atlantic and current secretary/treasurer for The Society for News Design. He co-founded Vox.com and has worked with The New York Times and The Washington Post. He lives in New York.
MEET THE DIRECTORS
Beto Alvarez
Director
Beto Alvarez is a deputy news editor for the Los Angeles Times. Before that, he served as digital creative director at The San Diego Union-Tribune. Beto has worked in journalism for more than 25 years, beginning his career at The Dallas Morning News where he worked as a graphic artist and illustrator. He then spent eight years at The Philadelphia Inquirer as a graphic artist, illustrator and designer. Throughout his career, he has been recognized with numerous awards from The Society of News Design, Society of Professional Journalism, PRINT magazine, and Malofiej Awards for Infographics. He has also been the recipient of four regional Emmy Awards. Beto was born and raised in Texas, moving throughout the state as a youth. He currently lives in San Diego with his wife, Tiffany, their two children and two yappy dogs. He has also played bass guitar in a bunch of rock and roll outfits and is a lifelong skateboarding enthusiast..
Antonio Cucho
Director
Antonio Cucho Gamboa, Peruvian web developer and web designer. Antonio currently works at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in the Editorial and Product team since 2018. Previously at Data and Investigation and Data Graphics team of Univision News (2016-2018, Miami, FL, U S.), News Apps Developer of Ojo Publico (2014-2016, Lima, Peru) and Web Developer of La Republica Digital (2011-2013, Lima, Peru)
Antonio works and volunteers for different news media outlets around the globe. As a hacktivist, he led and helped to organize groups of data literacy and civic technology focused on working with the journalists community in Latin America with the School of Data, Open Data Peru and Hacks/Hackers.
Allison Hong
Director
Allison Hong is a deputy design director at the Los Angeles Times. Before joining The Times in 2014, she was a page designer and Dow Jones News Fund copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She was born in L.A. but grew up in Guangzhou, China.
Martina Ibáñez-Baldor
Director
Martina Ibáñez-Baldor is a design director for Latino Initiatives at the Los Angeles Times. In this role she is focused on creating a new vertical that will explore Latino culture and identity. She also serves as the art director for @latimesplants and the Latinx Files newsletter. Since joining the Times in 2015, she has worked across sections including A1, California, Business, Op-Ed and features. She was the art director for the Food section from 2019-2021. She has worked on special projects such as The Chicano Moratorium 50 years later and the Día de Muertos digital altar. Before joining The Times, Ibáñez-Baldor worked for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Milwaukee Magazine. She has a degree in journalism and Spanish from Marquette University. She was born in Toronto to immigrants from South American and raised in Milwaukee, WI.
TK Sajeev Kumar
Director
TK Sajeev Kumar is the Deputy Editor/Visual Editor of Kerala Kaumudi, one of the oldest and leading Malayalam newspapers in Kerala, India. He is also the founder and director of Asia’s first non-profit newspaper design website, www.newspaperdesign.in, for which he has conducted five international newspaper design competitions. TK has previously served as an SND regional director (Asia-South Pacific) and as a jury member for competitions by the Society of News Design and WAN-IFRA. He has published four books, including one on news design
Rebecca Pazos
Director
Rebecca is a proud mum of one and is dedicated to telling compassionate, human-centered data stories. She currently works at The Straits Times as Data Visualisation Editor. She has worked with a team of developers, designers and reporters in Singapore for over eight years. She has a Bachelors in Communication (Journalism) from Griffith University, Australia and a Masters in visual storytelling from the University of Girona, Spain. Her team’s work has received multiple awards at SND’s best in digital design competition including 1 Gold, and multiple Silvers. Her individual portfolio has been awarded a Silver in 2020 and Bronze in 2023. She was awarded the inaugural Singapore Press Club’s Young Rising Star Digital Journalist of the Year award in 2022. She was also shortlisted in 2021 for the Sigma Data Journalism Awards. She cares deeply about upskilling people from all walks of life to become digital creators and has grassroot connections to community organisations such as Hacks/Hackers Singapore, Data Viz Sg, and Data Viz Society and beyond.
Dalit Shalom
Director
Dalit Shalom is a Design Lead at The New York Times where she guides the creation of new formats, spaces and tools that advance storytelling. Her work lives at the heart of editorial, research, ideation, and prototyping, and she believes in design as a vehicle for helping people understand and navigate complexities. In her current role, she leads a team that focuses on Trust and Credibility, interfacing with multiple desks and teams across the newsroom, and working closely with the Masthead to define key moments to help clarify The Times’ journalism to readers. She is also the co-chair of the Women’s Network, NYT’s largest ERG.
Previously, Dalit’s work included consulting and bringing projects to life for NASA, This American Life, and The New York Public Library, to name a few. She holds a BDes from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and a Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU.
In addition to her current role at The New York Times, Dalit teaches design thinking classes at Tandon School of Engineering NYU and at the Columbia School of Journalism. She is also an alum of the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program (’22).