C-HIT Contributors

Our Editor

Lynne DeLucia is the editor and co-founder of the Connecticut Health Investigative Team, an in-depth news website focusing on issues of health, safety.   Prior to launching C-HIT.org in December 2010, Lynne worked at the Hartford Courant for 17 years, holding the positions of assistant bureau chief, bureau chief, state editor and an assistant managing editor. Lynne was the supervising editor of the Courant’s team coverage of the Connecticut lottery shootings, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. Before joining the Courant, Lynne worked at the New Haven Register as a reporter and city editor. Lynne is a board member of the New England First Amendment Coalition. In 2014, Lynne was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists CT Chapter Hall of Fame and also received the Judith Vance Weld Brown Spirit Of Journalism Award from the New England Society of News Editors.

Our writers:

Cara Rosner is a freelance writer whose work can be found in publications throughout Connecticut. Her journalism career began in 2001 and she has been a writer and editor at the New Haven Register, as well as a writer at the Journal Inquirer and Hartford Business Journal. She also has worked as communications manager at United Way of Greater New Haven, where she specialized in developing web and social media content for the nonprofit. She serves on the board of the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists. Contact: caramrosner at gmail.com.

Jenifer Frank has been a news editor and reporter for many years, at the Hartford Courant, The Day, and at the news website The CT Mirror. Most of her career has been at the Courant, where she held many positions, including politics editor, news editor and editor of the Sunday magazine, Northeast. In 2005, after the publication of three special issues by Northeast about Connecticut’s role in slavery, Random House/Ballantine published “Complicity,” which explored the North’s involvement in slavery and for which she was editor and coauthor. Contact: jbfrank4 at gmail.com.

Peggy McCarthy is a freelance reporter and writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and a variety of other newspapers, magazines and radio stations.  She taught journalism at the University of Connecticut and was a State Capitol reporter for the Bridgeport Post and Telegram. Contact: pegwrite at comcast.net.

Kate Farrish is an assistant professor of journalism at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut. She is also a freelance writer for the Connecticut Health Investigative Team and an instructor at C-HIT.org’s summer journalism workshops for high school students. She spent 23 years at the Hartford Courant, where she was a higher education writer, bureau chief and city editor and won state and national awards. From 2009 to 2019, she taught newswriting at the University of Connecticut. She received a journalism degree with honors from UConn in 1983 and a master’s degree in digital communications, with a focus in journalism innovation, in 2018 from the online Communications@Syracuse program at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Contact: katefarrish@gmail.com.

Colleen Shaddox is a freelance writer who frequently covers health and medicine. Her work has been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, BBC, Miller-McCune, The Christian Science Monitor and may other venues. Her writing has won awards from the National Newspaper Association, Catholic Press Association and University of Missouri.  Contact: colleen at qsilver.com.

Susan Campbell is the author of Connecticut of “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl,” which won the 2010 Connecticut Book Award for memoirs, and she’s the author of the biography, “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker,” due out in 2013 from Wesleyan University Press. She is a former columnist at the Hartford Courant, where her work was recognized by the National Women’s Political Caucus, New England Associated Press News Executives, the Society for Professional Journalists, the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, among others. Her column about the shootings at lottery headquarters in March 1998 was part of The Courant’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage. Contact: slcampbell417 at gmail.com.

Sujata Srinivasan is an award-winning independent journalist whose reporting has been featured by WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio; the Indian edition of Forbes, where she was a freelance U.S. correspondent; Forbes.com; the Hartford Courant; Hartford Business Journal; and Houston Chronicle’s small business site chron.com. She is a regular contributor to Crain’s Connecticut. Sujata began her career nearly 20 years ago in India as an independent contributor to Business India, a leading national magazine, and went on to work as a beat reporter for the Economic Times, India’s largest English-language business daily. She then became a correspondent and subsequently the interim chief of bureau at CNBC India-TV 18, and later served as the editor of Connecticut Business Magazine, where she assigned and edited award-winning work; a contributing editor at the Connecticut Economic Resource Center Inc., and a senior financial editor at Ness Technologies for the Chicago investment firm Thomas White International. Email: sujatasrinivasan97@gmail.com / Web: www.sujatasrinivasan.com

Adam Wisnieski is a freelance reporter based in Wethersfield, CT. Articles on government, politics, criminal justice and public health have appeared in a variety of newspapers, magazines and online publications including CBS News, The Hartford Courant, WNYC, Re/Code, City Limits, City & State and The Crime Report. His work has been recognized by the New York Press Association, Local Media Association and Suburban Newspapers of America.

Christine Woodside has been writing about people’s clashes with the environment in New England for twenty years. She’s written for newspapers, magazines, and websites and edits the adventure and science journal Appalachia. She also writes about environmental history. Her book on the origins of the Little House pioneer stories (Libertarians on the Prairie) came out in 2016. She is earning a master’s degree in history. She lives in Deep River. Email: christine.woodside@gmail.com

Our co-founder

Lisa Chedekel, senior writer and co-founder of C-HIT, died in January 2018.  She was an award-winning investigative reporter who wrote for the Hartford Courant for 15 years, covering a wide range of beats, from politics to healthcare. In 1999, she was among a team of reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting. In 2002, she was among a handful of U.S. journalists who visited Saudi Arabia in the year after 9/11 to report on the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. More recently, she co-authored a series on mental health in the military that won a George Polk Award, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, and was a 2007 finalist for the Pulitzer in Investigative Reporting. Before writing for The Courant, she was a staff writer and columnist for the New Haven Register.

Alumni contributors:

Grant Smith is an award-winning data journalist and was the data reporter the Memphis Commercial Appeal for six years before moving to the NYC area in 2014. He taught a web development course at the University of Memphis for four years, and now teaches interactive journalism courses at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He also occasionally freelances for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Contact: grantsmith04 at gmail.com.

Theresa Sullivan Barger, who spent nearly 20 years as a staff writer for The Hartford Courant, is an award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Yankee, Yale Public Health, The Conference Board, CFO.com, NSBE Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer and other magazines, newspapers and websites. Contact: Theresa at TheresaSulllivanBarger.com.

Barbara Puffer is a college professor and award-winning writer and communications consultant.  She began her career as a Hartford Times and New Haven Register reporter.  An accredited business communicator, she spent 25 years in corporate communications.  She has been writing and consulting since 1998 for clients in industry, health care, insurance,  and non-profit organizations.  An adjunct associate professor and communications course chairperson for University of Maryland University College since 2002, she received the 2011 Faculty Recognition Award. She is a International Association of Business Communicators Fellow. Contact: barbara at pufferpr.com.

Rochelle Sharpe is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with more than 25 years of experience. Now a freelance writer in Brookline, MA, she’s worked as a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and USA Today. She was a reporter in Washington, D.C. for 13 years, writing extensively about health, labor and various social issues.  A pioneer database journalist, she has used computers to show
how the nation’s medical examiners failed to detect child abuse murders. She’s a graduate of Yale University, and has written stories that have led to Congressional hearings and been discussed on Oprah and David Letterman.

Jennifer Kaylin has worked for many years as a reporter and editor at a variety of newspapers and magazines. She was an Emmy-winning investigative producer at WTNH-TV, the ABC affiliate in New Haven, and provided coverage from New York City of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Most recently she worked as the Web editor at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Tom Puleo is an adjunct professor of Communication at Central Connecticut State University and a former veteran Hartford Courant reporter who won several sate and regional awards for his coverage of state prisons, politics, and sports.

Our Designers

Adam Schweigert is the former director of technology with the Investigative News Network. He also runs Media Toybox, a Columbus, Ohio based digital consultancy specializing in news and media companies and previously served as director of strategy for Mindset Digital, a Columbus, Ohio based firm providing social media training and strategic consulting to Fortune 500 companies and institutions of higher education. Before that he worked in public media for eight years heading up digital efforts at NPR/PBS member stations WOSU Public Media in Columbus, Ohio and Indiana Public Media in Bloomington, Indiana. He was born in Akron, Ohio, lives in Columbus, Ohio and tweets @aschweig.