Our Staff
John Christie is the publisher and also the senior reporter for the Center. Christie is a media executive whose 40-year career includes work in four states as a writer, editor, general manager and publisher for newspapers owned by Tribune Co., Dow Jones and Co. and the Seattle Times Co. In June, 2009, he retired after nine years as the president and publisher of Central Maine Newspapers, which publishes two daily papers, the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel.
He has won numerous awards as a reporter and editor, including twice for best public service reporting in New England from the AP, and he was the primary editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of two Pulitzer Prize finalists. In 2008, a series he edited, “For I was Hungry,” about hunger in Maine, won a number of regional and national awards, including best editorial series from the national Society of Professional Journalists.
Christie was one of the first journalists to serve as a full-time training editor for a newspaper, a position that included coaching writers and editors on their craft and creating and running a news writing program for high school and college minority students.
He is also the editor of four books, including a bestselling book on Hurricane Andrew, which devastated South Florida in 1992. He has spoken on newspaper management and writing in the United States, Europe and South America.
A University of New Hampshire graduate, Christie began his career in Maine as the summer intern in 1968 at the Sanford Tribune. He lives in Hallowell with his wife, Naomi Schalit.
Naomi Schalit is the executive director and senior reporter for the Center. A graduate of Princeton University with a degree in religion and Near Eastern studies, Schalit attended the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California, Berkeley and began her career at the San Jose Mercury News. In the last two decades, she has written for magazines and newspapers around the country, worked as a columnist for the Maine Times and for five years was a reporter and producer at Maine Public Radio. While at MPR, her reports were also featured on National Public Radio, Public Radio International and the CBC.
Schalit won many awards for her radio reporting, including one from Public Radio News Directors, Inc., or PRNDI, for her expose of an historic state conservation deal gone bad.
In between all the reporting, writing and producing, she also took temporary leaves from journalism in 1993 to run her own floorcloth manufacturing studio and almost a decade later, to serve for three years as executive director of a statewide non-profit conservation group.
In April 2005, she joined the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel as Opinion page editor. In 2007, she won first place in the New England AP News Editors’ competition for editorial writing during 2006. She was the recipient of a 2007 Publick Occurrences Award from the New England Newspaper Association, Honorable Mention in the Anna Quindlen Award for 2007, Runner-up in the 2007 Casey Journalism Awards and First Place for editorial writing in the 2007 National Sigma Delta Chi Awards, all for her multi-part editorial series on hunger in Maine, “For I Was Hungry.” That series also earned her the first “Force for Good” award given by Portland non-profit Preble Street.
Schalit has two grown children and lives in Hallowell, Maine, with her husband, John Christie.
Morgan Filbert is the Center’s Engagement Editor, which means he works with our website, handles communications with readers and, because we are such a small 
operation, virtually everything else that we toss at him. He graduated from Mt. Mercy College in 2009 with BA’s in English and History and then served for two years in AmeriCorps, the first in Oregon and the second here in Maine.
Morgan hasn’t won any awards yet, but we’re cutting him some slack since he’s only two years out of college.
Morgan hails from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The third in a line of newspapermen, Morgan’s father and grandfather both worked at the St. Joseph News-Press in Missouri. Morgan grew-up hearing of the virtues and responsibilities of an independent Fourth Estate. He graduated from Mt. Mercy College in 2009 with BA’s in English and History and then served for two years in AmeriCorps.
When not working on the computer Morgan is an Épée fencer, reads paperback fiction and is learning to swim.
Kate McCormick, contributing writer, has worked for about 30 years in print media, beginning with a reporting stint at The Indianapolis Star, from which she moved to a job as a reporter for the Patriot Ledger in Needham and Wellesley, Massachusetts. In 1977, she joined the copy desk of Newsday on Long Island, but almost immediately became a copy editor for the newspaper’s fledgling Queens edition, later called New York Newsday. From 1988 to 1995, she was an op-ed editor for New York Newsday. She later worked for Forbes special interest publications and served two years as associate editor of the Episcopal News Service, based in New York. She is now happily retired in Maine, to which she moved with her partner in 2010. Kate is a journalism graduate of Indiana University and also holds a master of divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York.
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