Ken Martin, founder, editor and publisher: Ken got interested in journalism while a career officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. After serving more than 20 years on active duty he moved to Austin in 1978 to earn a humanities degree with a minor in journalism at the University of Texas. Today Ken may be the only living journalist who has worked full-time for publications located in the three major counties of the Austin metropolitan area: Travis, Williamson and Hays. He has been a reporter and editor in the tri-county area since 1981, including associate editor of Third Coast magazine (1981-84), managing editor of the Dripping Springs Dispatch (1984-85), and political editor of the Williamson County Sun (1986-89). His aggressive reporting twice garnered first-place national awards for investigative reporting. Both of those projects resulted in criminal prosecutions.

In launching The Austin Bulldog, Ken is returning to his roots in investigative reporting, covering both the public and private sectors. He will be working with a team of outstanding freelance journalists, many of whom he has collaborated with on hard-hitting projects in the past, including coverage of toxic chemicals used by local high-tech companies, unsafe hospital conditions, toxic homes, global warming Part 1 and Part 2, illegal immigration, agricultural chemicals posing risks to neighbors, domestic violence, sexual abuse, regional planning, and race relations.

Ken was an investigative reporter for the Austin Business Journal 1989-1990 and served as editor 1990-1994, a period in which the newspaper won numerous awards for journalistic excellence. In 1995, he started the In Fact weekly newsletter covering Austin City Hall and local politics. Beginning in 1998, while still publishing In Fact, he also owned and edited Texas Public Utility News for 13 months, producing a twice-monthly newsletter covering the Texas Public Utility Commission. In 1999, Ken began publishing the In Fact newsletter five days a week, making In Fact Daily Austin's first online newsletter. Meanwhile, in 1997, Rebecca Melançon and Ken founded The Good Life magazine, which he edited for more than 11 years. The magazine published numerous special reports, including five in 2008 alone, before ceasing publication in January 2009 due to the economy.

See Ken's selected bibliography

baker-rogerRoger Baker started in high school about 1960 by supporting integration, and later by opposing the Vietnam war as a campus activist. He dropped out of UT to hang out and became a sort of marginal existence of slacker and policy wonk, published amateur scientist, and scholarly reformer. He frequently writes for The Rag Blog on topics centered on science, economics, energy and transportation and elsewhere, such as Energy Bulletin. He is a founding and advisory member of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. Locally he is on the boards of the Save our Springs Alliance and the Save Barton Creek Association. He is a card carrying member of the ACLU and Travis County Green Party.

Charles Ryan Boisseau, senior reporter: Charles is a freelance writer and editor based in Austin. A 1985 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin's journalism school, Boisseau has won numerous writing and reporting awards at the San Antonio Light and the Houston Chronicle. As a business reporter at the Houston Chronicle, Boisseau wrote more than a thousand news and feature stories. He also has served as business editor of the New York Times-owned Gainesville (Florida) Sun, columnist and assistant managing editor at LocalBusiness.com, and editor at Stratfor.com, an Austin-based company that provides geopolitical news and intelligence information.

Boisseau was web editor at the Lower Colorado River Authority from 2001 to 2008. He helped lead a team that won a statewide award in 2003 from the Texas chapter of the Public Relations Society of America for best organizational web site.

In July 2009, Boisseau received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing (specializing in the genre of nonfiction) from Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

Karen Branz, senior reporter: Karen earned her journalism degree at the University of Texas and has worked for newspapers, magazines and online newsletters in Texas, Pennsylvania and California. She specializes in reporting on hospitals, physicians and the business of health care.

In 1982 she took her first job in the health care industry, and worked for eight years as a communications specialist and marketing manager for a hospital corporation in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1990, she returned to Austin and spent three years as marketing director for Brackenridge and Children’s Hospitals. She then freelanced for a variety of health care and high-tech companies from 1993 to 2001, and wrote regularly for The Good Life magazine.

In 2001, she joined the American Heart Association Texas Affiliate as vice president of communications. In 2003 she moved to the TMF Health Quality Institute, which is contracted with Medicare to do quality improvement work with Texas hospitals, physicians, nursing homes, and home health agencies. Through her work as communications director for TMF she learned the intricacies of measuring quality in health care and how payment mechanisms influence how care is delivered.

In 2005 she returned to freelancing, and began writing regularly for both The Good Life magazine and for Texas Health Flash, an online newsletter about the business of health care in Texas.

Her extensive knowledge of hospitals, physicians and the payment mechanisms for health care give her a broad understanding of health care and medical delivery systems.

See Karen's selected bibliography

Rob D'Amico is president of the League of Bicycling Voters (LOBV), an Austin-area nonprofit advocacy group promoting better transportation policy, more resources to encourage bicycling and make it safer, and justice for bicyclists. D'Amico was instrumental in organizing bicyclists to defeat an adult bicycle helmet law proposed for the city of Austin in 2006 and later took the helm of LOBV to work on a variety of projects promoting bicycle facilities for city streets and new developments and getting bike-friendly candidates elected to the Austin City Council.

Rob worked as an alternative transportation consultant from 2001-2003 and developed programs and marketing efforts for "commute solutions," encouraging bicycling, ride sharing, transit and teleworking. A longtime writer and former journalist, he recently has penned several articles about archaeology and on bicycling, including a recent look at the infamous Austin "Bicycle Thief" for The Austin Chronicle and several articles on bike culture and programs for the Austin Monthly. And for life balance, he previously wrote car reviews and other features for The Good Life magazine.

D'Amico works as a communications director for Texas AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and commutes in each day by bike. He is married to Rebecca D'Amico and has two children, ages six and eight. He enjoys switching the color designations on paint by numbers, swimming in creeks (when there used to be water in them), stirring drinks with beef jerky, and listening to The Gourds on steamy summer nights.

Ian Dille is a freelance journalist for a variety of local, regional, and national publications. His areas of interest and expertise include health and fitness, travel, environmental and social issues. However, he’ll report on just about anything, given the opportunity (bring on the muckraking). After graduating from the University of Texas School of Journalism in 2003, Ian pursued bicycle racing full-time and succeeded in signing a professional contract in 2005. However, injury and adulthood conspired to end Ian’s cycling career, prompting him to put his journalism degree to use. His current stable of publications includes Bicycling, National Geographic Adventure, the Texas Observer, and the Austin American-Statesman.

A veteran journalist, Senior Reporter Gwen Gibson worked as a general assignment reporter in her early career for UPI, The New York Daily News and the New York Herald Tribune, covering everything from police beats to the White House. In more recent years, Gibson has freelanced for other national newspapers and magazines, including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, the Washingtonian  and the AARP Magazine and website.

Her specialties over the years have included national and local politics as well as arts and entertainment and humor pieces.  Since moving to Austin from Washington, D.C., in 2006, she has contributed regularly to local and national magazines. 

Gibson is the author of three books and a member of ASCAP.

William "Bill" McCann, senior reporter: Bill is a freelance writer and editor with 40 years of experience as a professional communicator, including journalist and public information officer. He retired in 2007 from the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), where he had been manager of corporate communications for 15 years. Previously, he held writing positions at the Austin Business Journal and the Austin American-Statesman and was science writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper. He also was owner-editor of a national newsletter on energy in Washington, D.C., where he covered the U.S. Congress and federal agencies on a wide range of energy issues, including energy conservation, solar energy, and emerging technologies.

As a newspaper journalist, he has covered a variety of major stories related to science, energy and the environment, including the Apollo moon launches, endangered species, nuclear power plants, solar power, hazardous waste dumps, climate change, and the degradation of the nation’s air and water.  His work has received numerous awards from such diverse organizations as the International Association of Business Communicators, Keep Texas Beautiful, the Sierra Club and the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

Kathy Mitchell, senior reporter: Kathy is a freelance writer in Austin who has published work in The Good Life magazine, The Austin Chronicle, and the Austin Business Journal. In addition, she writes and edits investigative reports for the nonprofit Consumers Union of the United States on a wide range of topics, including sub-prime mortgage lending, the manufactured housing market, health care policy, and much more. After years of experience filing open records requests at the city and state level, then reporting on the results, she championed the need for far greater openness at the city. Today, she works primarily on the Internet, blogging for Consumers Union and managing its advocacy web content.

See Kathy's article "How safe is your hospital?"

Pamela Oldham, senior reporter: Pamela is a full-time, professional freelance writer who returned to Texas in late 2006 after living and working in the Washington, DC area for many years. Now based in Round Rock, Pamela is a versatile writer with many topic interests, including family issues, child well-being, parenting, business and marketing, history, the arts, education, and travel. Oldham's feature-length articles have appeared in national and regional outlets ranging from The Washington Post, MSN.com, and Family Circle to Virginia Living, Loudoun (Virginia) Business, élan, and DM News, the national newsweekly for the direct marketing industry. She writes an advice and information column aimed at parents of teenagers and young adults for the award-winning online parenting site, Mommasaid.net.

Oldham is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Legacy of Abraham Lincoln (Alpha Books/Penguin USAe), which unlike the thousands of books published since Abraham Lincoln's death in 1865, focuses primarily on his relevance to our lives today. Education, family issues, and the well-being of children are long-standing interests. Oldham is a 2003 CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) media fellow in child abuse, family and social issues, and was a finalist for a year-long Casey Journalism Fellowship in Child and Family Policy.

Rob Patterson, senior reporter: Rob started writing professionally in 1976 as a music journalist and has since expanded his range to cover news, politics, film, food, media, features, books, travel, trade magazine journalism and more. As a syndicated entertainment writer for United Media (United Features/Newspaper Enterprises Association) from 1977 to 1983 his articles appeared in hundreds of daily papers. His work has also been featured in scores of national magazines and alternative newsweeklies as well as such web publications as Salon, The Huffington Post and Blurt.

From 1991 to 1995 he was senior editor at The Austin Chronicle, editing its music and politics sections, and later senior writer. In the late 1990s he was radio columnist for the Austin-American Statesman and contributed music, film and food reviews and stories as well as general interest features, and also edited Experience Austin, the city’s official visitors magazine. He has written major stories about such local subjects as former Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle’s investigation of Tom DeLay, Austin’s city-owned electric utility, the construction of Austin City Hall and the Whole Foods Market flagship store and corporate headquarters. As an entertainment journalist he has interviewed such notables as Tom Cruise, Bob Marley, David Bowie, George Strait and Willie Nelson, as well as hundreds of musical artists, actors, authors and film directors. He currently writes two politically oriented entertainment columns for The Progressive Populist and is a regular contributor to Texas Music magazine.

Patterson has also worked in the music business doing publicity for such musical artists as Ozzy Osbourne, produced albums, run and done marketing for independent record labels, worked as a tour manager, and done sales and panels planning for South By Southwest. When he grows up, he hopes to become an architecture critic.

Greg M. Schwartz, senior reporter: Greg holds a master's degree in journalism and mass communication from Kent State University. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Greg spent most of his adult life in San Francisco and Los Angeles before departing the Golden State in the fall of 2008 for a reporting opportunity in the Lone Star State as a staff writer for the San Antonio Current. San Antone and Greg did not agree however, and he relocated to Austin in September 2009. Greg has reported for the Cleveland Free Times, Akron Beacon Journal, East Bay Express, KPFA Evening News and more. He is also a freelance music writer for PopMatters.com and Bullz-Eye.com.

Shelley Seale, senior reporter: Shelley is an author and freelance journalist in Austin, who writes frequently about human rights issues. Her 2009 book, The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India, tells the story of many children of that country who have been trafficked, orphaned or live on the streets. Shelley has also written for CNN, National Geographic, the Austin Business Journal and the Seattle Times, among others.

She can be reached at www.shelleyseale.com.

Chris Searles is an Austin native. In a previous lifetime he played drums and percussion for luminaries like Shawn Colvin, Mitch Watkins, the Flatlanders, and Twang Twang Shockaboom, earning two Grammy nominations along the way. In 2005 Chris changed gears and started GoodCommonSense.net, a small online sustainable living store, and began creating and producing events such as The Sustainable Shopper's Ball, The University of Texas Sustainable Business Summit, and Austin's Green 4th of July.

Most recently, Chris has taken a deep dive into writing about Austin's electricity planning, inspired by the people, process, and prospect of building broader community engagement around climate leadership at this critical time in human history.