America Amplified: Advisory Board
Meet our board
Joy Mayer
Joy Mayer is the founder and executive director of Trusting News, a project that studies how people decide what news to trust and helps journalists and the public understand each other. She and her team train newsrooms on strategies for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust. She launched Trusting News in 2016 after a 20-year career in newsrooms and as a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Email: joy@trustingnews.org
Gail Thomas Strong
Gail Thomas Strong serves as the Vice President for Community Engagement at WFYI Public Media, leading a team who work in engagement news, family engagement, volunteer management and overall station community engagement. Their combined efforts support journalism, local and national programming initiatives, PBS Ready to Learn and station operations.
Email: gstrong@wfyi.org
Max Resnik
Max Resnik is a news product leader and educator building local news infrastructure. As the Director of Network Services for the Documenters Network at City Bureau, Max works with civic and media organizations across the country to equip community members to document and amplify important local information from public meetings.
Email: max@citybureau.org
Andrew DeVigal
Andrew DeVigal holds the endowed chair in journalism innovation and civic engagement and is the director of the Agora Journalism Center, the forum for the future of local news and civic health, at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism & Communication. The center energizes research, teaching, and learning to foster pathways for public participation and transform how communicators and journalists inform and relate with their communities. A constant connector and bridge builder, DeVigal’s leadership at the school has led to industry-recognized initiatives such as Gather, a platform to support community-minded journalists, and the Doers Gathering, a toolkit to drive community-driven solutions addressing pressing local issues. Before joining the UofO, DeVigal was the multimedia editor at The New York Times, where he directed the multimedia team and conceived and produced ground-breaking story forms and processes that continue to shape the industry today.
Email: adevigal@uoregon.edu
Andrea Tudhope
Andrea Tudhope is news editor for the Nashville Banner — an independent nonprofit newsroom she helped launch in March 2024 — where she launched and also oversees a weekly interview podcast. An award-winning multimedia journalist, Andrea spent the past decade working in public radio, from reporter to newscaster to editor. As part of the founding leadership team for America Amplified, a national public media community engagement initiative, she launched a national talk show and co-wrote and edited a playbook on community-powered journalism. In 2022, she launched WPLN’s first-ever daily show, This Is Nashville, where she was executive producer. Under her leadership, the innovative, community-engaged show earned local, state, regional and national awards in its first and second years on air.
Email: andreatudhope@gmail.com
Donna Vestal
Donna Vestal, now retired, was America Amplified’s original Executive Director. In 2020, she led this national effort to bring community engagement into reporting on the 2020 presidential election. And, as it turned out, advising on how to engage local communities during a pandemic.
Vestal served as director of content strategy for KCUR 89.3, Kansas City’s public radio station and NPR affiliate, from 2013 through 2019. She also was the founding editor of Harvest Public Media, a reporting collaboration of public media stations across the Midwest devoted to agriculture and food issues.
A newspaper veteran, Vestal worked 18 years as an assistant business editor for The Kansas City Star, where she directed small business, retail, development, workplace and health care. She started her career in the trade press, serving as news editor for The Packer, a weekly newspaper covering the fruit and vegetable industry.
Vestal has a journalism degree from the University of Missouri and an MBA from the University of Kansas.
Email: donna.vestal@gmail.com