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DAWN E. GARCIA

Dawn Garcia is the managing director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, an ambitious program focused on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. Garcia was a reporter and editor at West Coast newspapers for 18 years, including the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle, where she wrote about politics, immigration and legal affairs. She is a past president of the Journalism & Women Symposium, a national nonprofit organization of women journalists and journalism educators.

She was a member of four Pulitzer Prize juries in journalism and also served two terms on the Accrediting Committee of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and on the California First Amendment Coalition board. She has conducted workshops for new editors for the California Society of Newspaper Editors, spoken at numerous journalism conferences for organizations including the Journalism & Women Symposium, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists.

She earned a master’s degree in liberal arts at Stanford, writing her dissertation on the evolution of Spanish-language media in California and earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Oregon. She was a 1991-92 Stanford Knight Fellow, where she studied U.S.-Mexico relations. She has taught journalism courses at San Francisco State University, Hayward State University and was a lecturer in Stanford’s Graduate Journalism Program. She is a board member of the Institute for Justice & Journalism, a nonprofit that seeks to improve media coverage of social justice issues by training journalists, funding reporting projects and developing digital tools.

In 1996, at the San Jose Mercury-News, she edited a series by reporter Gary Webb called "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," which became one of the most talked-about stories of the year. The conclusions Webb drew from his reporting--on the links between a gang of Nicaraguan drug dealers, CIA-backed counterrevolutionaries, and the spread of crack in California-- drew unparalleled criticism from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, according to an article in the Columbia Journalism Review. The criticism was focused not on the reporting, which was actually very good at its core, but on the conclusions drawn from the reporting. Some media observers think the "Dark Alliance" series helped reveal an important part of U.S. history that had been largely ignored by the American media. Two years after the series ran, a CIA Inspector General's report acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drug runners while supporting the contras. The criticism de-railed Webb's journalism career, and his Dec. 10, 2004 death was ruled a suicide.

A film called "Kill the Messenger," based on the story of Webb's investigation, is set for an Oct. 2014 release. In the film, the character called Dawn Garcia is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.