Connie Schultz

Connie Schultz

is a nationally  syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. She is also a regular essayist for Parade Magazine.

Schultz has also been honored for her feature writing. Her series, "The Burden of Innocence," told the story of Michael Green, imprisoned for 13 years for a rape he did not commit. The week after her series ran, the real rapist turned himself in after reading the stories. The series won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Social Justice Reporting, the National Headliner Award's Best of Show, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and won journalism awards from Harvard and Columbia universities.

In 2004, Schultz won the Batten Medal, which honors "a body of journalistic work that reflects compassion, courage, humanity and a deep concern for the underdog."     

Schultz is also a fellow with the Vietnam Reporting Project. Her 2011 series, "Unfinished Business," explored the long-term impact of Agent Orange in the U.S., and in Vietnam. Recently, the series won the Associated Press Managing Editors Journalism Excellence Award in International Perspective.

Schultz also writes occasional commentary for The New York Times and the Washington Post. She is the author of two books: Life Happens - And Other Unavoidable Truths, a collection of essays, and ...and His Lovely Wife, about her husband Sherrod Brown's 2006 race for the U.S. Senate. She is currently working on a novel about a working-class Ohio family.

Schultz and Brown live in Cleveland and have four grown children, two grandsons and a granddaughter.   

Stan Bullard has been a member of SPJ's Cleveland Pro chapter since 1987, but was in the habit of attending chapter programs and workshops for a decade before that, he recalled. In fact, it was an SPJ regional workshop in the early 1980s that got him started as a business reporter, convincing him to switch from covering crime and politics for Sun Newspapers, which was his first job after completing his journalism degree at Kent State.   

Stan Bullard

Bullard said he first got the idea of newspapering as a career as a junior in high school, and tried it out as editor of The Tatler, the school newspaper at the former West Tech High School in Cleveland.

At Kent State, he majored in journalism and English and  worked for the Daily Kent Stater. "I was part of a crew of students that included Michael Heaton who started an alternative newspaper on campus called The Inner Angle," he recalled.  

After graduation, Bullard was working for Sun Newspapers when the aforementioned SPJ workshop in the 1980s got him started on "a circuitous path that led to Crain's Cleveland Business," he said. In one year, he worked in corporate communications for Alcan Aluminum for six months, leaving when they moved the headquarters from Cleveland, then freelanced for Crain's Cleveland Business, Cleveland and trade magazines. In late 1985 he joined the Urban Center, a think tank on urban issues at Cleveland State University. In February of 1986, he joined Crain's as a staff member, and he has been there ever since.   

At Crain's, he has covered business angles on federal, state and local government; real estate and related industries; small business; law and utilities. Since 2000, his beat has been real estate and related industries. He has also freelanced for regional and national trade magazines, and has appeared on local and international TV programs as a journalist-commenter. 

Since 1988, Bullard has received more than 20 local and national awards from journalism organizations, including SPJ, the Press Club and the American Association of Area Business Publications. Of those, 12 were firsts or bests in competitions.

Bullard joined the board of Cleveland's SPJ chapter around 1990, and was president in 1994. Before that, he served as vice-president and programming chair, a skill he has used to organize many programs through the years. 

He also chaired the chapter's Project Watchdog committee, its open public records committee and its membership committee, and he served on the committee for the Phillip W. Porter Scholarship regularly from 1990 to 2002.  

Bullard has also helped to organize both national and regional SPJ conventions in Cleveland.  

"SPJ activities have been a terrific part of my social life and professional development while I have been with Crain's Cleveland Business," he said. "At local, regional and national programs, I met inspiring journalists and made many friends. Moreover, I learned countless ways to do better journalism that I have tried to use in my daily pursuits at the newspaper and now on newspaper's website." 

Stan and his wife, Marcia, have two grown children, Douglas Bullard of Orlando, Fla., and Jennie Bullard of Westlake, Ohio.