An accomplished journalist, editor and manager, M. Kathleen Guzda Struck has worked as staff and freelance for some of journalism’s most recognized organizations, embracing online technology early.
She was most recently Managing Editor of the Lowell Sun, working toward the challenging balance of print and online news distribution. In five months, 
social media usage increased 45 percent and continues to climb. The website is cleaner and better organized. Traffic has spiked. Unabashed flaming on the website’s comments board has been doused by registration and moderation, yet reader engagement has increased.
Before Lowell, she served as Special Advisor to the Federal Communications Commission’s “Future of Media” project, which examined the news industry and its transition to digital. She researched local news and the impact that one-third fewer journalists nationwide has had on citizens, communities and democracy when fewer reporters cover courts, schools, environment, city hall, statehouse and other local issues that weave together to govern our lives.
Formerly, she was Newsroom Manager and Study Abroad Editor for GlobalPost.com, working with both the editorial and business sides of this online international news website mentioned by the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, PBS and NPR. Under her editorship, correspondents reported about earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, wartime rape, the Sinofication of Tibet, forest clearing in Cambodia to make Ecstasy for US consumers, and an unlikely new ocean predator: jellyfish. Stories from her desk were among the most heavily trafficked on the site.
She served as Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes for the Department of Defense daily newspaper serving military, staff and diplomats overseas. With a worldwide circulation of 350,000, Stripes covered the perils of war as well as everyday life on military bases. In Japan, prior to that distinction, she served as an editor for NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster.
Her first management position was at age 27 at the Paterson (NJ) News and North Jersey Herald News, where as managing editor she was responsible for a $3.4 million budget and about 60 employees. She was an editor and reporter at the Baltimore Sun before moving overseas, and her byline and photos have appeared in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Newsday, Globe and Mail and other major newspapers. She has written about women’s issues such as contraception and female genital mutilation.
She began her career as a reporter at the Paterson (NJ) News and the Elizabeth (NJ) Daily Journal, where she reported on grimy, congested and ignored north Jersey cities and corrupt politicians, environmental devastation, tabloid-style crime and zoning shell games. She watched panicked mothers throw children to barking firefighters and sat through town council meetings that seemed frozen in time, some of the best training for reporting from anywhere on the globe.
Before many had yet to embrace email, she also started a website — www.writehire.com — under the slogan “Connecting pens with Inc.,” in the nascent years of the Internet (1999) that was meant to match business with communications professionals: writers, editors, designers and photographers. WriteHire was a prescient effort to tap into the magic of the Web and the connections it makes around the globe.
She is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, achieving a bachelor’s of journalism with the help of generous Pell grants and waiting tables. She also worked as the only non-medical person in the surgical, thoracic and burn intensive-care units at the University of Missouri Medical Center.
In 2003-2004, she attended mostly military, defense and leadership courses at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University as the affiliate of a Nieman fellow.
(Lightning photo by NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory)
