September 27, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – LifeSiteNews is produced by a courageous, competent and principled team of journalists and other staff, most of whom work full-time at this task. They know how to investigate stories, analyze the implications and professionally write an original report that will be the most help to you.
However, they have basic personal and family financial needs that must be met as they undertake their LifeSiteNews work. No one, I can assure you, is paid a lot, but they all work as though they are paid the highest salaries. Their motivation is their love for life, family and God.
This team is one of the major reasons why our quarterly fundraising campaigns must be successful. I have to be able to pay all of these staff a living wage for the hours and hours of intense work that they do for this mission, so they can at least pay their bills and feed their families. 10 out of the 14 total staff are in the photo below.
Hilary White, our Rome reporter who has just completed her chemotherapy treatments after being diagnosed with cancer (fortunately her prognosis is very good), Jeanne Smits, our correspondent based in Paris and US reporters Jeremy Kryn and Chrissie Dhanagom could not make the Barry’s Bay meeting and are the ones missing from the photo.
The photo was taken at our recent annual planning weekend in the tiny Canadian hamlet of Barry’s Bay, Ontario. The meeting was one of the infrequent, but necessary occasions where all the LifeSiteNews staff from different nations were able to spend some time together, exchanging ideas and thrashing out the best strategies for meeting our mission goals. Next year, we plan to rotate the meeting to the vicinity of our Front Royal, Virginia office.
Three staff, Caitlin Bowers, Peter Smith and Rebecca Millette have recently moved on and three new staff have been hired to replace them. Let me introduce the newcomers to you.
1. Jeremy Kryn, our new LSN U.S. journalist who lives and works from North Carolina, has worked for various news agencies and is skilled in the Italian, Polish and Spanish languages – a real asset for an international news service such a LifeSiteNews. Jeremy earned a Doctorate in communications from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, Italy, as well as a Masters from North Carolina State University.
2. Peter Baklinski, our new LSN Canadian journalist, is a son of veteran LSN journalist Ted Baklinski. Peter returned last month from a few years stint in Australia, working on a doctorate at the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne. He has also earned a Masters, specializing in marriage and the family, from the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Australia and is a graduate from Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California. Peter and his wife Erin are the parents of 4 children.
3. Our new and enthusiastic development manager works out of our Front Royal, Virginia office alongside U.S. coordinator Matt Anderson. After accepting his new position, Jon and his wife Marie and their two children moved to Front Royal last month from New Hampshire. In addition to his previous work in fundraising and development, Jon earned a Masters degree from The Notre Dame Graduate School in Alexandria, VA and is a graduate of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida.
We are really excited about having these three wonderful young men on our team!
The rest of our current team are similarly impressive with their education and writing and research abilities.
Ted Baklinski, John Jalsevac, John-Henry Westen, Matthew Anderson, Chrissie Dhanagom and myself are the other team members who are married with children.
In addition to the above staff, we are assisted by long-time webmaster Harvey Armoogan in Canada and the newer team of three website experts from Transmodern Media in New York State, as well as Deny Dieleman, Margaret van Dyk, Bernadette Jalsevac and Chris Wilson who handle some of our Canadian division administrative tasks at the Campaign Life Coalition offices in Toronto.
As I hope you see from the above, LifeSiteNews is not a slap-it-together, cut and paste type of news service. We take this work very seriously and try to give you first-rate original news reports that are the fruit of excellent research, interviews, fact-checking, craftsmanship and careful attention to presenting the most significant implications of each story.
And we are never afraid to go out on a limb and report crucial but difficult stories that many others will not or cannot report. Investigative reporting is our specialty.
That is just a brief sketch of the most prominent persons involved in putting out LifeSiteNews. We also have a lot of collaborators in different countries who work closely with us; we regularly, personally meet with the most prominent pro-life, pro-family leaders in North America and elsewhere to figure out what and how we should be reporting on the life and family issues.
To do all this, and much more that has not been mentioned, LifeSiteNews needs your on-going financial support.
For the Culture of Life,
Steve Jalsevac
Managing Director
LifeSiteNews.com
P.S. The reality is, without you help we cannot do any of this work. Will you join the LifeSiteNews team by supporting our Fall Campaign today?
U.S. and International Donors
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Canadian donors
(Click here to donate today)
Call our office at (888) 678-6008 x. 923 between 9:00 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST.
To donate by mail, print out and fill in one of our Adobe Acrobat PDF format mail-in forms (Click here).. Then mail it with your check, money order, or credit card information to the address below. Please note that you can set up an automatic recurring donation using your bank account or credit card by indicating your intention to do so on the check or mail-in form.
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