The organization at the helm of the LGBT media world will now be led in part by a Philadelphia journalist.
PGN editor Sarah Blazucki was elected to the board of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association last week. She will serve as vice president of print and digital media.
Blazucki will serve with newly elected president Michael Triplett, assistant managing editor at Bloomberg BNA. Both will serve two-year terms.
Also confirmed as board members were Matthew Berger, Barbara Dozetos, Sharif Durhams, Laura Kutch, Patty Mattern and Steve Rosen.
The elections were confirmed last Tuesday at a board of directors meeting in Las Vegas that preceded the start of the UNITY 2012 Convention.
NLGJA, which held its convention in Philadelphia last summer, last year voted to join UNITY, an alliance of Hispanic, Asian-American and Native-American journalist associations.
Blazucki began with PGN as a staff writer in 2006 and became editor later that year. She joined NLGJA shortly after and said the local chapter has undergone a transformation since that time.
“The chapter had really gone stagnant for a couple years,” she said. “Nobody was doing anything, the president wasn’t active, there weren’t any events, the members didn’t know one another. So we pretty much rebooted it.”
Helping lead that effort were fellow members Matthew Patton, Chip Alfred and Gary Kramer.
The culmination of the chapter’s recent work was last year’s convention, which brought some 300 conventioneers to the city.
Blazucki has served as treasurer, vice president and president of the Philadelphia chapter, then was elected to the national board as an at-large member.
She said she was eager to continue her NLGJA service at the national level in support of its multifaceted aims.
“It’s important to make sure we have LGBT voices in the mix,” Blazucki said. “A lot of people still aren’t comfortable being out in their newsrooms. It’s certainly gotten better but there are places where it’s still not OK. Until LGBT people have employment protections across the country, NLGJA is going to remain very important. It helps create camaraderie, helps people talk about issues affecting you as an LGBT person and works to make sure our stories get fair and accurate coverage.”
The position Blazucki will hold was most recently titled “vice president of print and new media,” but the switch was made to accommodate the influence of the Internet age on the industry.
Among her goals, Blazucki plans to more fully incorporate the digital-media world into the NLGJA fold.
“Right now a large part of our membership works in online news: That brings in print, broadcast and people who work strictly online. So it pulls in a lot of different areas,” she said. “I think it’s important that we make sure we’re providing resources for all of these folks. There’s definitely outreach we need to do to folks who are doing citizen journalism, making sure they know there’s somewhere they can go to get new skills, and we can foster better reporting on LGBT people.”
Blazucki’s term started Aug. 5.