Donna Shaw,long a neughborhood resident, was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the Chestnut Hill Local. And it is hard to imagine a person more eminently qualified.

Shaw, 69, is an experienced and decorated journalist, with skills that will be extremely useful to the Local. She and her family have lived in Chestnut Hill for 37 years, and have been members of the CHCA and Local subscribers for pretty much that whole time.

Shaw retired in June of this year after 17 years of teaching journalism at the College of New Jersey's Department of Journalism and Professional Writing, where she is now a professor emeritus. From August, 1979, until they went out of business in February, 1982, Shaw was a reporter and features editor supervising a staff of writers for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, which in earlier years was one of the largest circulation daily newspapers in the country. 

And from August, 1982, to December, 1999, Shaw was a business reporter and later a business editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which nominated her three times for a Pulitzer Prize, twice for health reporting.

So after all that hard work and dedication (and there is much more for which there is not enough space here), why not now just lie on a beach in the Caribbean and play shuffleboard on a cruise ship? “I ran for the board,” Shaw explained last week, “because now that I'm retired, I have more time to give back to my community.

“I hope I can be useful to the Local as it continues its path in print and digital. I feel strongly about the Local because it's such a precious resource, and this community is so lucky to have it. Too many other places, from small towns to large cities, have lost their newspapers in recent years, and it's had a devastating effect on the public's ability to stay informed.”

Shaw has an MS degree in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow, and bachelor's degrees in English and Journalism from Penn State University; and she was a Fellow in Biotechnology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Fellow in Biotechnology at the University of Maryland's Knight Center for Specialized Journalism.

Shaw earned one of her Pulitzer Prize nominations at the Inquirer as part of a team that wrote about global drug trafficking. The other two times were for a series she wrote about how and why hemophiliacs in the U.S. and worldwide were infected with hepatitis and HIV due to contaminated blood products. This was also the subject of a book she co-wrote a few years ago. 

“To me,” she said, “those stories were by far the most significant I ever worked on because thousands of people with hemophilia were affected. Most of them died, a lot of them as children or teens, and their families demanded to know why. In fact, this remains an ongoing legal and political scandal in some other countries. Recently, for example, I've been helping reporters in Germany and the UK report on it. I'm also honored that the Smithsonian Institution asked me to donate my stories and research materials for its collection.”

Shaw has also written countless articles for scholarly and academic publications. And she was a regional editor for the WebMC Corp., an internet-based news outlet, and an Editor-in-chief of Global “e” Business for the GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceutical Corp.

Regarding her college teaching, when asked if her methods have changed over the years, Shaw said that because students are now so technologically savvy, she sees a need to teach them how to take advantage of those resources while still holding firm to the ethics and principles of quality journalism.

“But technology is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it makes it possible for journalists to access a larger audience and use interactive, visual and data tools like never before,” she said. “On the other hand, the audience seems to think that all of this information should be free, which has pretty much destroyed the news industry's business model, resulting in hundreds of newspapers going out of business. That poses a huge danger for democracy as we know it … So yeah, if you get the idea that I'm passionate about this subject, I definitely am!”

Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com