Advisory Board

John Arthur

John Arthur came to The Californian in 2010 after more more than 35 years of newspaper work in Northern and Southern California. John worked in the Bay Area -- in the East Bay community of Pittsburg and in San Francisco, at the San Francisco Examiner, from 1973 until 1985. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1986. During his 23 years at The Times, John held a variety of management and editing positions. He was Managing Editor of the newspaper's Orange County edition, an assistant editor on the National Desk, Editor of the San Fernando Valley Edition, Managing Editor of the newspaper (twice), page one editor and Executive Editor. At The Times, John was involved in coverage of several stories that won Pulitzer Prizes, including the riots following the Rodney King verdict, the North Hollywood shootout and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. John's wife, Anne Eggebroten, lived for several years in Bakersfield and is a 1966 graduate of East Bakersfield High School.  John and his wife are 1970 graduates of Stanford University. They have three adult daughters.

Janet Clayton

Janet Clayton is senior vice president, corporate communications, of Edison International, a generator and distributor of electric power and an investor in energy assets.  At Edison International, Janet directs internal and external communications, corporate and brand positioning, community relations and philanthropic programs.  A native of Los Angeles, she had a distinguished 30-year career at the Los Angeles Times. She was a reporter; editor of the editorial pages, where she determined the Times' official opinions; California editor, where she ran the largest news staff; and a key member of the paper's leadership team. She also won numerous accolades for excellence in her profession, including recognition as the editor of two Pulitzer-prize winning series. Since 2008 she has been president of ThinkCure, the Los Angeles Dodgers' charitable foundation. She has won numerous awards from the Association of Op-Ed Editors and California News Press Association.

Julian Do

Julian has been director of Southern California for New America Media (NAM) - a national association of ethnic media - since 1999. In this position, he oversees the development and management of media training, fellowship programs, and ad campaigns with the ethnic media community throughout Southern California, the largest ethnic media market in the country. Since the summer of 2008, Do has been spearheading NAM's Digital Divide Program to develop three online ethnic media networks, called Beez projects, in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and San Jose. The main goal of each local network of online ethnic media is to generate news and information about ethnic communities in each locale and make the content accessible through a collaborative online hub site. Prior to joining NAM, Do spent nearly a decade in Southeast Asia as an investment manager at Bangkok-based Frontier Fund Management and director of the San Francisco-based East Meets West's rural development program in the central region of Vietnam. Before these stints, he was a reporter for the Pacific News Service in California and worked with small farmers in the mountain regions of Jamaica as a Peace Corps volunteer. Do is a graduate of Sacramento State and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Raul Ramirez

Raul Ramirez has led KQED Public Radio’s news and public affairs work since 1991, when he became the station’s News Director. He has worked as reporter for The Miami Herald and The Washington Post, and as a reporter and editor for the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner, where he was editor of the paper's Investigative Team. He is former president of the board of the Center for Investigative Reporting and has won numerous awards for local, national and international reporting, including a Thomas Storke award from the World Affairs Council of Northern California for his reporting on a family's journey from rural Guandong Province in China to the San Francisco area, and a 1989 Penney-Missouri award as a co-editor of the San Francisco Examiner's unique series on "Gay in America." He has received a career achievement award from the Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California for his print and broadcast work. He is a former fellow in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii's Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and was a fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. He has taught journalism courses at San Francisco State University since 1983. He also has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and has been a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute in Media Studies, where he was an ethics fellow. He has served on visiting on-site evaluation teams for the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications at universities in Kentucky, Ohio, California, New Mexico, Georgia, Utah and Washington, D.C.

Pedro Rojas

Pedro Rojas, former executive editor of La Opinión, is a journalist with more than 32 years of experience in the newspaper business. He was previously Executive Editor for El Diario/La Prensa in New York, and before that worked 27 years for El Nuevo Día in Puerto Rico, six of them as the Managing Editor. He is a member of The California Endowment Health Journalism Advisory Board, and is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Melanie Sill

Melanie Sill is executive-in-residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.  She previously was editor and senior vice president of The Sacramento Bee, California’s state capital daily.  Until 2011 she supervised the news and opinion operations of The Bee’s print and digital publications. Melanie joined The Bee in 2007 after nearly 25 years at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., most recently as executive editor and senior vice president. As projects editor, she directed the 1995 series “Boss Hog,” by reporters Joby Warrick and Pat Stith, which won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for public service. She holds a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Sill is a member of the American Society of News Editors national board, the Poynter National Advisory Board and the California First Amendment Coalition board of directors. She is an advisory board member for California Watch, a nonprofit investigative newsroom operated by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Sill grew up in Waipahu, Hawaii, and is married to Bennett Groshong, a software developer and electrical engineer.

Jonathan Weber

Jonathan is West Coast bureau chief for Thompson Reuters, having been appointed to that post in 2011. He previously was Editor-in-Chief and founding editor of The Bay Citizen.  Prior to that he served as CEO and editor-in-chief of New West Publishing, the Missoula, Montana-based media company that he founded in 2005. New West’s flagship product is NewWest.Net, an award-winning local and regional online publication about the Rocky Mountain West. Before launching New West Publishing, Jonathan was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Industry Standard, the highly-regarded San Francisco-based newsweekly that chronicled the dot-com boom of the late 1990’s. The Industry Standard earned many awards and plaudits for its no-nonsense coverage of the Internet revolution. Prior to the Industry Standard, Weber served eight years as a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, including three years as the Silicon Valley correspondent. Weber began his journalism career with Fairchild Publications, and served in that company’s Paris bureau, among other assignments. He was part of the launch team for Geneva-based World Link magazine, a publication of the World Economic Forum. Weber earned a B.A in Philosophy from Wesleyan University.