General Information

Jessica joined The Poynter Institute in 2005 with more than 25 years of experience in journalism and corporate communications. As Marketing Director, she is a member of the Institute’s strategic planning team and is responsible for the promotion of curricular programs and public events. Jessica began her career in radio news, working on-air in Philadelphia before becoming the marketing director for a large retail development group in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1996, she moved with her family to Tampa and continued to work as a corporate marketing director for five years.

Butch Ward is Senior Faculty at The Poynter Institute. During his 27-year career as a journalist at The Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore News-American, Butch played a variety of roles, including managing editor at both newspapers.

Howard I. Finberg is the director of partnerships and alliances at The Poynter Institute. In this role Finberg looks for new training partners, oversees the business side of the Institute’s e-learning site and handles the business development aspects of Poynter’s international teaching. He also looks at new revenue opportunities, mostly related to Poynter training. Previously Finberg was responsible for the creation of Poynter’s e-learning project, News University. NewsU (www.newsu.org) launched in 2005 and has more than 220,000 users in 225 countries, accessing more than 300 training modules.

Vicki Krueger is manager at Poynter’s News University. She has spent more than 20 years as a copy editor at newspapers and other publications and is the author of Cleaning Your Copy – a self-directed module that consistently is ranked as one of the most popular at Poynter’s News University.

She has helped produce “Best Newspaper Writing,” the annual collection of the ASNE Distinguished Writing Award winners and finalists, as well as other Poynter publications.