Board of Directors

Jed Davis, who serves as president of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, grew up in New York City, where he practiced law for seven years after graduating from Yale Law School. He served as a lawyer in the U.S. Navy Reserve JAG Corps.

In 1971, Davis moved to an old farm in Fayette, where he still lives and where he helped raise three wonderful children. He has served as town manager of Fayette and Readfield. He has been in a law partnership, in Augusta, with Jim Mitchell since 1976. Recently, Mitchell’s wife, Libby, joined them.

Committed to issues of social justice, Davis was a founder of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine in 1985, and still serves on its board; is chairman of the board of the Augusta Boys & Girls Club for Teens; is chairman of Fayette’s Planning Board; and he served for a number of years on the board of Spurwink Services. He is proud to be on the board of this important organization.

Doug Warren grew up in Brunswick, attended Brunswick High School and graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree in English.

He spent 32 years in the newspaper business as a writer and editor at The Portland Press Herald, The Miami Herald and The Boston Globe, where he worked for 21 years. He also taught journalism and advised the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, at the University of Texas at Austin.

Doug and his wife, Pam Berry, a small business owner and professional photographer, have two children, Emma and Jackson. He spends much of the year at their home on Orr’s Island and also resides in Austin.

Laura McCandlish grew up in Richmond, Virginia, but always loved Maine, as her father’s family has come to Belgrade Lakes since the 1950s. She studied abroad in China as an English major at Davidson College, taught high school literature to new immigrants in the Bronx and then attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Laura reported for the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. and then at The Baltimore Sun, where she most enjoyed co-directing a high school journalism program and penning cookbook reviews and personal essays. She established herself as a food journalist and public radio host then living in Corvallis, Ore., immersing herself in back-to-the-land farms writing for The Oregonian and NPR’s “Kitchen Window” column. Of late, Laura is channeling her promotional writing and networking skills into hyper-local PR/community outreach work, lining up food for the annual “Booked for the Night” bash at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick and curating local experiences. She’s worked in Maine classrooms as a teaching artist with the Telling Room and facilitated a Narrative 4 bridge-building story exchange she hopes to do with more students.

Laura happily settled in Brunswick, almost a decade ago with her husband, Dan Stone, a Bowdoin College behavioral economist whose research focuses on the media and political polarization, and their two sons, Theo and Emmet, who love reading the local newspaper and The Week Junior.

(Photo by Malorrie Nadeau/She of the Flowers.)

Connie Sage Conner got her start in journalism at the (Syracuse) Herald-Journal and for 17 years held multiple editing positions at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk-Virginia Beach. She also was communications director for Landmark Communications, the Pilot’s parent company, and recruited journalists for Landmark’s newspapers.

She is a graduate of Old Dominion University where she received the Outstanding Scholar Award from the College of Arts and Letters. Connie was a journalism fellow at Oxford University, where she studied glasnost and perestroika in Russia, which at the time was a developing democracy. She is the author of “Frank Batten: The Untold Story of the Founder of The Weather Channel.”

Connie and her husband, Philip Conner, moved from Charleston, South Carolina to Harpswell where they are both active in the community.