Debbie Skipper
Managing Editor

Debbie Skipper, a New Mexico native and longtime Mississippi resident, is a 42-year journalism veteran. She was an award-winning reporter, feature writer and editor at The Anniston Star in Anniston, Ala. Before joining the Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Miss., in December 1982, she spent a month in Japan on a Hibakusha Travel Grant from the Hiroshima International Cultural Foundation. After interviewing atomic bomb survivors, their children, and local officials, she reported on their experiences for The Anniston Star and other publications.

At the Clarion Ledger she was an award-winning feature writer and health reporter before moving into editing. She supervised the work of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell that has led to the prosecution and conviction of numerous Klansmen in cold cases from the civil rights era. This work won Mitchell numerous national awards, including recognition as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She was also the editor of "The AIDS Hope: Mississippi’s Despair" series, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize, and "The System” series about the dysfunctional criminal justice system in Hinds County, for which she was honored with the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. She left the Clarion Ledger in January 2019 to join Mitchell at the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.

Ann Marie Cunningham
Reporter in Residence

Ann Marie Cunningham is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Cunningham’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Most recently, she has reported on domestic violence and the trafficking of young Native American women.

Cunningham was an investigator for President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, the only presidential commission with a task force of journalists. She is co-author with The New York Times best-seller “Ryan White: My Own Story,” the autobiography of the boy infected with AIDS who successfully sued for the right to go back to school in Indiana. She was awarded a fellowship from Columbia Teachers College’s Hechinger Institute for Education and the Media and she has been a writer in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and elsewhere.

Ilyssa Daly
Investigative Reporter

Ilyssa Daly is an investigative reporter at the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and Mississippi Spotlight, a local news collaborative. She is a 2022 graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she specialized in investigative reporting at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. At Columbia, Ilyssa received honors from the Stabile Center and won the Fred M. Hechinger Journalism Education Award for her reporting on HIV preventative peer education programs in prisons throughout New York. She got her start in investigative journalism at Sarah Lawrence College, where she began leading investigations into 20+ year old possible cases of wrongful conviction. There, she was a recipient of The Lori Hertzberg Prize for Creativity for her investigative work.

Over the course of her career, Ilyssa has worked as a reporter for her local hometown paper, has freelanced, and has interned at both Cosmopolitan and Seventeen Magazine. She spent over a year interning at The Legal Aid Society, most of which she spent in their Wrongful Conviction Unit, where she assisted in investigations and oversaw the unit’s summer internship program.

Rhonda Schwartz
Board Chairman

Rhonda’s long and distinguished career in American journalism has been recognized with numerous Peabody, Polk, duPont, Edward R. Murrow, Overseas Press Club, IRE and Emmy awards. The longtime Chief Investigative Producer of the ABC News Brian Ross Investigative Team, she is now the Executive Investigative Producer for the Law & Crime Network. Schwartz and her investigative team won 4 duPont Awards, 3 Peabody’s, 4 Polk Awards, the 2014 Harvard Goldsmith Prize and more than a dozen Emmys for work that challenged the powerful and changed laws, uncovered corporate and political corruption, and exposed human rights abuses in the US and abroad.

Mrs. Schwartz lives in New York City.

Ronnie Agnew
Board Member

Until January, Ronnie Agnew served as Executive Director of Mississippi Public Broadcasting. He joined the network in 2011 after a career in the newspaper industry spanning nearly three decades. As executive editor of The Clarion-Ledger, he steered the coverage of the state’s largest newspaper, leading the publication to two Pulitzer Prize finalists and numerous other national awards. He has judged the Pulitzer Prizes four times and is a former diversity chairman for the American Society of News Editors. At MPB, Agnew oversaw radio and television programming and the agency’s legislative, education and digital initiatives.

Agnew holds bachelor’s degrees in Radio/TV and English from the University of Mississippi. He is Vice Chair of the PBS Editorial Standards Review Committee and serves on the PBS Station Services, National Policy Advisory, and Diversity Advisory committees.

He is the father of three children.

Marshall Bush
Board Member

Marshall Bush is an analyst at ExodusPoint Capital Partners, a global investment management company. Originally from Tupelo, MS, he graduated from Dartmouth College in 1996 and has spent the last two decades working on Wall Street as an Analyst and a Portfolio Manager. Mr. Bush is a sixth generation Mississippian. He currently lives in Bedford Hills, NY with his wife and three daughters.

George W. Haywood
Board Member

George W. Haywood has been a private investor since 1998. Haywood previously held leadership roles with: Moore Capital Management (1994 – 1998) and Lehman Brothers (1982 – 1994). Haywood has been an Independent Director of Denny's Corporation since September 2011. He served as an Independent Director of Federal National Mortgage Association (2016 – 2018). Haywood has also held positions with a variety of nonprofit organizations such as St. Albans School, New School University, Mannes College of Music, Public Theater-New York Shakespeare Festival, and Poly Prep School. He is a former member of the Visiting Committee of Harvard College.

Haywood received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from Harvard University (1974) and attended Harvard Law School. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Barbara Laker
Board Member

Barbara Laker is an investigative reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has worked for the Clearwater Sun, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dallas Times-Herald and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, before joining the Philadelphia Daily News in 1993. Ms. Laker has written about everything from murder and corruption to AIDS and child abuse. With Daily News colleague Wendy Ruderman, she won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for their series, “Tainted Justice,” about a rogue narcotics squad in the Philadelphia Police Department. Together, Laker and Ruderman co-authored the book, “BUSTED: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love,” in 2014.

In 2019 she and Inquirer colleagues Wendy Ruderman and Dylan Purcell were 2019 Pulitzer finalists for their series, “Toxic City: Sick Schools.” The series won The Gannett Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism by Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc. (IRE). Laker has also been a finalist for the Goldsmith Investigative Reporting Prize at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.