New Center board chair Marianne Szegedy-Maszak WASHINGTON, D.C., July 8, 2008 — The Center for Public Integrity’s Board of Directors has elected Marianne Szegedy-Maszak as its new board chair. Szegedy-Maszak, a former contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, has more than 20 years of journalism experience and has served on the Center’s board since 1996. She will succeed former board chair Geneva Overholser, who became the new director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication on July 1.

During the Center’s June board meeting in Washington, the board added two new members — Sheila Coronel, the director of The Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Bevis Longstreth, chairman of the board of directors of the Fund for Independence in Journalism. Current board members Joanne Fischer, a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report, and Bruce Finzen, a partner with the law firm Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi in Washington, D.C., were respectively elected board vice chair and secretary-treasurer.

“Marianne is an award-winning journalist with enormous experience and talent. The Center is fortunate to have her as its new board chair,” said Center Executive Director Bill Buzenberg. “I’m proud that the Center has such an amazing and professional board. I welcome all of the new members, and value the insights and leadership abilities they bring to help advance the Center’s mission as one of the premier nonprofit investigative journalism organizations in the world.”

Szegedy-Maszak’s journalism career has included covering the collapse of communism, the Republican Revolution, 9/11, and social policy for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Newsweek, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Psychology Today, and Newsday. She is a winner of the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship.

“For nearly 20 years the Center has been a leader in investigative reporting and an innovator in nonprofit journalism,” said Szegedy-Maszak. “Today, with news rooms and their investigative reporting staffs shrinking across the country, the work of the Center has never been more important both nationally and internationally. I am thrilled to work with Bill Buzenberg and the Center’s superb staff and board to ensure that the Center continues its great tradition of independence, innovation, transparency, nonpartisan, no-stones-unturned investigative journalism.”

Szegedy-Maszak joined U.S. News & World Report as a senior writer in 2000, covering behavioral health issues, including psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience involving stories on military mental health, the trauma of 9/11, adult and child ADD, children’s mental illness, and cancer. She was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times health section. Prior to U.S. News & World Report, she was a reporter at the New York Post, an editor at Congressional Quarterly and a professor of journalism at American University’s School of Communication. She was also the founding editor of the Center’s award-winning newsletter, The Public i.

In addition to writing an award-winning chapter for a book on Sigmund Freud and modern neuroscience, Szegedy-Maszak won the top journalism and media awards from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the National Mental Health Association, and the American Psychoanalytic Association.

A graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University’s School of Journalism, where she won a Pulitzer Traveling fellowship, she is now writing a historical memoir for Spiegel & Grau, a division of the Doubleday Group and an imprint of Random House.