St. Lawrence University’s Board of Trustees has elected Nicholas G. Penniman V ’92 as a new term member. Penniman will serve for a period of six years beginning on July 1.
Nick Penniman is a nonprofit executive and journalist who is the founder and CEO of Issue One, an organization whose mission is to strengthen American democracy. Issue One focuses its programs on election protection, congressional reform and fighting disinformation. It hosts the National Council on Election Integrity, a bipartisan group of 40 high-profile Americans, and the ReFormers Caucus, which consists of 200 former members of Congress, roughly half Republicans and half Democrats.
Previously, Penniman was executive director of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, which he founded with Arianna Huffington in 2009. Supported by large foundations and The Huffington Post, the operation established a multi-media newsroom of award-winning journalists. It was profiled in media publications, including the American Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Before that, he founded the American News Project, an early venture into online video journalism, served as the Washington director of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the publisher of The Washington Monthly magazine, an editor of The American Prospect, editor of the Lincoln Journal, and associate editor of the Missouri Historical Society.
In 2016, Penniman co-authored Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy And What We Can Do About It, which received accolades from Democratic and Republican politicians and columnists.
Penniman has appeared on and been featured by most major media outlets. He has served on multiple nonprofit boards and advisory boards, including the Homeless Empowerment Project, which publishes Spare Change News, OpenSecrets, the Roosevelt Institution and Represent.us.
He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended the St. Louis Country Day School. He received a B.A. in philosophy from St. Lawrence University, where he served on the student senate, was an adviser to the board of trustees, and started multiple student groups.
