Board of Trustees

The FLCGA provides support and assistance for citizens and investigative journalists working to ensure government accountability and transparency

FLCGA Board of Trustees

Linda Penniman was elected to the Naples City Council in 2014 and served six years, two as Vice Mayor. While on the city council she served as Vice Chair of the Metropolitan Planning Organization for two years and Chair of the Collier County Coastal Advisory Committee. Penniman currently serves on the boards of the CalusaWaterkeeper, Naples Art, WGCU Advisory Committee, and is chairing SMARTGROWTHNOW, a group dedicated to fighting runaway growth. Linda and her husband Nick were in the newspaper business their entire working life, he as publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Don is a retired career journalist who was executive editor of several daily newspapers and related websites in Florida and Colorado. He served on the board of Florida’s First Amendment Foundation for 12 years, chaired it for four years and was among the founders of the state’s Sunshine Sunday observance. He also served on the boards of Colorado’s Freedom of Information Coalition and the National FOIC. He’s a graduate of Yale University and Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

Doug Wiles is a life-long resident of St. Augustine where he has been a risk manager and insurance agent since 1979.  He is a former member and minority leader in the Florida House of Representatives.  Doug is a recipient of the First Amendment Foundation’s Peter Weitzel/Friend of the First Amendment Award for his legislative work to forward and defend Florida’s open government laws.  He is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Florida Army National Guard.  For much of his 25-year military career, he served as a public affairs officer, working closely with local, state and national media.  Doug is a 1974 graduate of the University of Florida with a BS in Journalism, past chair of the Florida Association of Insurance Agents and currently volunteers with a number of state and local non-profit service organizations. Read more.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian who has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Tampa Bay Times and the Washington Post, among others. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books, most recently Dream State, an historical memoir of her Florida family, and Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. She teaches at Florida State University.

Gilbert is the author of three books, most recently Beneath a Ruthless Sun. His previous book, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2013. King has written about race, civil rights, and the death penalty for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and he is a contributor to The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.

For the past few years, Charlotte has been working with Women For a Better Lee, an all-volunteer nonprofit advocacy group she founded in 2018 to bring accountability and transparency to the Lee County, FL government. Prior to that, she was Vice-President, MasterCard International for Global Consumer Affairs; strategic communications consultant, World Health Organization; Executive Director, National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators and first Executive Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. She has served on numerous nonprofit boards and committees, including the Fairfax County Commission on Women, the National Consumers League and the Federal Reserve Consumer Advisory Committee.

Craig Waters is an attorney, former journalist, and retired communications director of the Florida Supreme Court, widely honored for his career-long work in openness and transparency in government. Craig is a two-time winner of the First Amendment Foundation’s Pete Weitzel/Friend of the First Amendment Award and the founding president and retired executive director of the statewide association of court communications professionals, Florida Court Public Information Officers. In 2018, Craig placed all Florida Supreme Court arguments on Facebook Live video, making it the first court in the United States to use this new live broadcast medium.