THE NEW YORK FINANCIAL WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC.

OFFICERS/GOVERNORS/ASSOCIATE REPRESENTATIVES
2010-2011

Officers:          
President: Conway Gittens, Reuters
Vice President: Imogen Rose-Smith, Institutional Investor
Treas.: Richard Wilner, New York Post
Secy-Asst Treas: Pierre Paulden, Bloomberg 

Board of Governors:
Jan Alexander, Freelance
Dan Colarusso, Bloomberg
Josh Friedlander, AR
David Graubard, Standard & Poor's
Sheila Mullan, Market News International              
Barry Rehfeld, Freelance
Britt Tunick, AR
Terry Wooten, Kitco News

Nominated as Associate Representatives: 
George Auerbach, George Auerbach PR, Retired
Steve Govoni, Lord Abbett
Paramjit Mahli, SCG Legal PR Network

2008 President's Blog

Governor: Jan Alexander is a freelance writer and editor who covers global economics, corporate strategy and wealth management. Her articles have appeared in Forbes Woman, CBS BNET, Institutional Investor, Private Wealth,  the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek International, Money,  the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Harvard Management Communication Letter. She is currently working on the development team for a new financial talk show. As a features editor at Worth from 2003 to 2009 she oversaw the magazine’s coverage of the financial crisis and the economic outlook under Obama. She has a masters in International Affairs from  Columbia University and has worked in Asia and taught a survey course in Chinese civilization at CUNY Brooklyn College, in addition to publishing a novel about business and political intrigue in China. 

Associate Repesentative: George Auerbach joined the Financial Writers in 1952 and was on stage in the Follies from then until 2006. After a long stint as a reporter in the business news department at the New York Times from 1948 to 1963, he joined a financial PR agency and in 1971 set up his own financial PR firm. He retired in 1997. George served as NYFWA VP in 1962-63 and was the Follies’ first producer in 1988.

Governor: Josh Friedlander is the Online Editor of AR: Absolute Return
+ Alpha, a print and online source of data, news and analysis on the
hedge fund industry. He previously reported on hedge funds, private
equity and Wall Street brokerage firms for Investment Dealers' Digest
and Institutional Investor News. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in
History from Connecticut College. He served as a Governor of the NYFWA
from 2006 through 2008, and as President for 2009-2010.

Associate Representative:Steve Govoni is a Senior Financial Writer-Market Analyst with Lord Abbett, one of the oldest money management firms in the United States. He joined the NYFWA in 1986, served on the board from 1991 to 1993, and performed in seven Follies productions. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications and Columbia University’s Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics & Business Journalism, he has worked as a supervisory analyst for Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Lehman Brothers. Before moving to Wall Street, he was executive editor of Financial World, a story editor at The New York Times, and senior editor at Corporate Finance magazines. While freelancing for numerous national publications, he was a contributing editor to CFO and Plan Sponsor magazines. As a newspaper reporter, he received a number of prizes, including a Deadline Award for exposing the fraudulent collapse of trucking companies in New York in New Jersey.  As President of the Connecticut Center for Patient Safety, he received a public service award for raising awareness and protecting the rights of victims and survivors of medical malpractice.  Since rejoining the NYFWA board in 2006, Steve has served on several committees and photographed numerous association events, including the Follies.

President: Conway G. Gittens has been a member of the NYFWA since 2003 after being "star struck" at the Annual Follies Dinner several years before. He became a member of the Board of Directors in 2006. After graduating magna cum laude from Long Island University, Conway joined Reuters Television in 1997. During his decade long career he has reported live from the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYMEX. His reports now focus on the growing eco-business environment as well as his much-loved beat covering the financialmarkets.

Governor: David Graubard writes on both business and financial markets. He is currently the U.S. Senior Financial Writer for Creditflux Ltd., a London-based credit trading and investing magazine with more tha 40 percent of its readership in the United States. Previously David was a senior writer on such publications as International Financing Review, Institutional Investor, Euroweek and two newswires. David started the first real-time securitization wire service in the Asia-Pacific, based out of Hong Kong, for McCarthy Crisanti & Maffie (now Informa Global Markets). He also launched Thomson's IFR Markets real-time structured credit research service. Practicing the craft of business, David was a credit derivatives trader at GFI Group, an analyst at Moody’s and The Bank of New York Mellon. David is married to Yukiko Graubard and lives in Park Slope.

Governor: Zachery Kouwe writes about finance and Wall Street, primarily for DealBook, the New York Times financial blog that is updated continuously throughout the day. He also covers general Wall Street topics such as hedge funds, mergers and acquisitions, private equity and investment banking for the business section of the paper. Based in New York, Zach joined The Times in 2008. He earned a master's degree in journalism at the University of Colorado and a B.A. in economics at Hamilton College. Before joining The Times, Mr. Kouwe served as The New York Post's chief mergers and acquisitions reporter from 2005 to 2008.  He has recently covered several white-collar criminal cases including Bernard L. Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme, the trial of two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers and the insider trading investigation centered on the Galleon Group and Raj Rajaratnam.

Associate Representative: Paramjit L. Mahli is a former journalist who has worked with several news organizations including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Financial Post, CNN, CNNfn and The Journal of Commerce. She made the transition to public relations while waiting for her green card and has won clients honorable mentions for PR campaigns she has executed. Today, though focusing primarily on legal public relations with award-winning SCG Legal PR Network, she has remained actively involved with the New York Financial Writers (starting with the Financial Follies in 2002) and the New York Press Club. She is also a member of Waterkeeper Alliance and the Bronte Society in UK.

Governor: Sheila Mullan is a senior bond reporter at Market News International. She has also worked as a freelance writer at the New York Times and New York Post's Sunday business news sections, and as an IPO reporter at IFR magazine in New York and Hong Kong, and a bond analyst at Standard & Poor's MMS in Hong Kong. She was president in 2007.

Governor: Barry Rehfeld has been a journalist for 30 years. His freelance articles have appeared in The New York Times, Kiplinger's, Worth, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Playboy and New York. He was the features editor at American Banker, a senior writer at Institutional Investor and a reporter-researcher at Time. He is the founder and editor of the Zero Energy Intelligence.com web site which grew out of a number of freelance stories he wrote for the Times starting in 2005 about developing more energy efficient homes.

Governor: Britt Erica Tunick is at AR. She has been writing about finance for the last decade, most recently for Investment Dealers' Digest where she spent four years covering equities, media and entertainment, technology, the securities exchanges, venture capital and accounting. Her other experience includes a two year stint in London where she reported on European and U.K. startups for EO News and freelanced for Euromoney Magazine, the Sunday Business and the Financial Times. Other positions have included Securities Week, The Bond Buyer and Financial Markets Daily. Britt has a BA in English/Journalism from Pepperdine University and an MA in Public Affairs Reporting from the American University School of Communication. She was the 2006/2007 president of the NYFWA and served as producer for the Financial Follies in 2005, 2006, and 2007. She received the Emil Meier Award in 2008 for outstanding contributions to the Follies.

Governor: Terry Wooten is the editor-in-chief of Kitco News, a division of Kitco Metals in Montreal, Canada. Wooten, currently based in New York, is in charge of developing global news coverage in metals, energy and other commodities for the Kitco Metals Website and for other clients. From 2004 until 2009  Wooten was the Managing Editor/Commodities, Americas for Dow Jones Newswires, directing journalists and editors in North America and South America. Earlier, he was vice president and editor-in-chief of Futures World News, a financial news service, which became OsterDowJones Commodity News in a merger with Dow Jones. He joined Dow Jones Newswires as managing editor in 2004 when the merger was dissolved. Wooten has worked in Kansas City, Chicago and London as an editor, covering financial and commodity markets as well as economic news. He also reported on and directed coverage of Group of Seven meetings, the World Economic Forum, EU finance minister conferences and the 1992 exchange rate mechanism turmoil in Europe. Wooten has been editor of newspapers in Virginia and Mississippi. He also spent eight years with United Press International, covering civil rights, politics, and government in Mississippi, Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina. He studied journalism at the University of Mississippi.