This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
The Notebook is pleased to announce that award-winning newspaper editor Charlotte Hall has agreed to join our leadership board.
After a long career in daily journalism, Hall retired in 2010 as editor and senior vice president of the Orlando Sentinel in Florida. Before that, she was managing editor at Newsday on Long Island, N.Y.
She also worked as a top news editor at the Boston Herald–American, Washington Star and The Record of Hackensack, N.J.
Originally from northern Virginia near Washington, D.C, Hall and her husband moved to the Philadelphia area to be near their son and his family. For 13 years, she has been on the board of trustees of her alma mater, Kalamazoo College in Michigan. She has served as president of the American Society of News Editors and been a Pulitzer juror, among other posts.
Recruiting Hall for the board is part of The Notebook’s ongoing effort to maintain high journalistic standards as it covers education issues affecting Philadelphia while holding true to its mission of promoting "equity and excellence" in the city’s schools. Hall is the first lifelong journalist to serve on the Notebook board. Other board members have primarily come from the worlds of education and activism.
Hall said that she sees The Notebook and nonprofit publications like it as important contributors to maintaining journalistic excellence in a turbulent newspaper business environment.
"The Notebook is one of the most successful nonprofit news sources in the country, widely respected by journalists," Hall said. "It plays an essential role in engaging citizens in Philadelphia’s No. 1 issue: improving public schools."
She added that she has "always loved community journalism, especially watchdog reporting that gives voice to the ‘little guy.’ I want to use my passion and my experience as a journalist to help The Notebook sustain and strengthen its service to the people of Philadelphia."
As young journalists in the 1970s, Hall and Notebook contributing editor Dale Mezzacappa worked together on the Ridgewood Newspapers, a chain of weeklies in northern New Jersey, and later at The Record.
The Notebook leadership board, which now has 11 members, oversees the work and overall direction of the organization as well as providing fundraising support.