SPJ/LA Announces Newly Elected Board Members and 2021 Officers
The Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has elected five members to serve on the group’s 15-member board. Each will serve a three-year term.
SPJ/LA members re-elected four board incumbents: Ashanti Blaize-Hopkins, Frank Mottek, Richard Saxton and Roberta Wax. In addition, the membership elected the chapter’s newest board member, Xavier Higgs. Please read more about them below.
Last week, the SPJ/LA board also established its slate of officers for 2021. The board elected David Zahniser, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, to serve a second year as president. Ashanti Blaize-Hopkins, a journalism professor at Santa Monica College, will return as vice president.
Courthouse News Service reporter Nathan Solis will continue his service as secretary and Elizabeth Marcellino, a City News Service reporter, will remain as treasurer.
More about the newly elected board members:
Ashanti Blaize-Hopkins is a full-time journalism professor at Santa Monica College and an Emmy
Award-winning journalist, producer and public relations expert. She has worked as a TV news anchor, reporter and producer in television markets in Florida, Texas and Nevada, and produced branded video content for several national companies. Before coming to SMC as an Associate Professor, she was the Assistant Director of Student Media at Loyola Marymount University, also having taught journalism courses at LMU, UCLA Extension, USC and Richland College, as an adjunct professor. Ashanti has been a member of the SPJ/LA Board since 2017 and she currently serves as the board’s Vice President and chair of the Distinguished Journalists Awards Committee.
Xavier Higgs is a Los Angeles digital journalist covering education, social issues and politics. He has more than 35 years’ experience as a writer and photojournalist. His photographs, videos and articles have appeared in several Los Angeles newspapers as well as national magazines and digital sites. He was a photojournalist for WTVJ, WPLG TV Miami and WJXT TV Jacksonville, Florida. Additionally, he recently co-produced a bio documentary “Louder Than Rock” and photographed the cover of Terrence Roberts’ book “Lessons From Little Rock.” He resides in Los Angeles. He was born in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He is a graduate of the Florida A&M University’s School of Journalism and a member of SBJ, SBJ/LA, National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and NABJ – Los Angeles.
Frank Mottek is the voice of business news in Los Angeles. He is the Senior Money Anchor on CBS all-news station KNX 1070 Newsradio anchoring the morning drive business updates. He also hosts Mottek On Money at 11 a.m. Saturdays and 8 p.m. Sundays on KNX. Mottek On Money is also a podcast. Frank is an award-winning broadcaster with more than 30 years of experience in radio and television news, including KCAL-9, CBS-2, and KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles and The Nightly Business Report on PBS. In 2016, he received the Distinguished Journalist Award from the Los Angeles Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Richard Saxton has enjoyed an active 14 years on the SPJ/LA Board, organizing many events including the popular Megamixer, and has served on numerous committees, most recently the banquet committee, and the past three years has been the Scholarship Committee Chair responsible for selecting student award recipients. His five decades in journalism include 22 years on television as both a financial news anchor and sportscaster. In Southern California, Richard anchored on KGTV, FNN, and KWHY, the business channel in Los Angeles, where he was also chief editor. Richard also worked as the Bloomberg Radio reporter on KFWB and Contributing Editor at Edmunds.com. He is currently a freelancer and an automotive multimedia journalist.
Roberta Wax, a former reporter with United Press International, is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the L.A. Times, Westways, Emmy, Los Angeles, UCLA Magazine, Animation and others. She teaches nonfiction writing through UCLA Extension’s Writer's Program. Roberta, a recipient of SPJ’s national Howard S. Dubin Outstanding Pro Chapter Member award, has been on the SPJ board longer than she wants to admit, serving as president, vice president, secretary, and banquet chair. She has also served on various national SPJ committees and has been a speaker at several conferences, some of which she helped organize.
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