Reporters

ECONOMY EDITOR
George Howland is the former News Editor of KCMU, the Stranger, and the Seattle Weekly. In addition to his work for the Olympia Newswire, George works part-time for the Seattle Channel.

EDUCATION EDITOR
Margie Slovan has been a full-time journalist since 2002, when she became editor of the South Seattle Star, a scrappy biweekly which covered education, crime, land use and politics in Seattle’s south end. The Star was named Best Neighborhood Newspaper twice under Margie’s editorship by Seattle Weekly, and the Society for Professional Journalists invited her participation in an editorial panel entitled Big Ideas for Small Newsrooms.

Margie got her taste for state politics when she covered transportation and government for the Daily Journal of Commerce, where her beat included the local ports.

Margie began her journalism career in radio covering environmental issues, health policy and Northern Ireland as a freelancer for Marketplace, NPR, Monitor Radio, Northwest Public Affairs Network and KUOW-FM. Margie has also written for many mainstream magazines including Washington Law & Politics and Seattle Magazine, as well as for Rethinking Schools and Teaching Tolerance, both educational journals.

Margie has been honored by SPJ for an article she wrote on the Innocence Project for Washington Law & Politics. Last year she received a scholarship from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to attend a seminar on business reporting.

Margie lives in Seattle’s south end with her husband, daughter and crazy poodle. She has a B.A. in communications from the Evergreen State College and is a recent graduate of TheFilmSchool in Seattle. She directs plays and videos in her spare time.

SOCIAL SERVICES EDITOR & REPORTERS
The Olympia Newswire has teamed up with Real Change to provide the Newswire’s coverage of social services issues during the 2010 legislative session, with a particular focus on health care, senior and disabled services, welfare, and affordable housing.

Real Change, founded in 1994, is Seattle’s award-winning weekly community newspaper. In accord with its non-profit mission, the paper provides an immediate work opportunity for more than 400 low-wage earners, who sell 18,000 papers each week. An active leader in the street newspaper movement worldwide, Real Change helped found and contributes to the Street News Service.

Adam Hyla has been Real Change’s Editor for ten years, and serves as the Newswire’s Social Services Editor. He managed the Real Change’s expansion to weekly publication in 2005 — the same year it was honored by the Seattle Weekly as Best Grassroots Media Outlet. As part of this transition, it hired two reporters and broadened its coverage to issues of social, economic and environmental justice.

Rosette Royale, Real Change’s Assistant Editor, won four regional awards and an honorable mention from SPJ last year, plus the national Sigma Delta Chi award and the North American Sreet Newspaper Association Best Series award for his three-part “The Man Who Stood on the Bridge.”

Cydney Gillis, a Real Change reporter, has more than two decades’ experience in community journalism, covering business and the arts at regional weekly and daily newspapers in the Seattle area since 1987. Her news reporting on people displaced by Hurricane Katrina won second place in the 2007 Western Washington Society of Professional Journalists annual contest.