185 Nassau Street
110 Stewart Film Theater

Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University

Moderator

Gadi Dechter
Vice President for Communications and Government Affairs, Princeton University

Panelists

John Martin Jones ’64
Retired Editor, The Greeneville (Tenn.) Sun; former co-owner, Jones Media, Inc.

Richard Rampell ’74
Chairman of the Board, WLRN Public Radio (Miami)

Vanessa de la Torre ’04
Chief Content Officer, Connecticut Public Broadcasting 

Matthew Halgren ’09
Associate, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, LLP (San Diego)

Moderator

Gadi Dechter
Vice President for Communications and Government Affairs, Princeton University

Gadi Dechter provides strategic communications and federal relations advice to the president and other senior Princeton University leaders, communicating about and advocating for the priorities of Princeton and higher education more broadly. He oversees the offices of communications and government affairs. Prior to joining Princeton in 2022, he was head of public affairs for APCO Worldwide, a communications consultancy. Before that, he served as senior adviser to the White House National Economic Council and National Security Council. He has also served as a deputy director at the U.S. Department of Commerce, as a managing director at the Center for American Progress, and as a reporter at Bloomberg News and the Baltimore Sun. Dechter received a B.A. in literature from Yale University and a master’s degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has held lecturer appointments at George Washington University, Johns Hopkins and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Panelists

John Martin Jones ’64
Retired Editor, The Greeneville (Tenn.) Sun; former co-owner, Jones Media, Inc.

John Jones, a member of a four-generation community newspaper family, is the retired editor of The Greeneville (Tenn.) Sun, a daily that his family owned and operated for almost 100 years before selling it in 2016. The Sun serves its Northeast Tennessee hometown of approximately 15,000 residents and the surrounding county. He was a reporter there from 1968 to 1978 and editor from 1986 to 2015. He was also a co-owner of Jones Media, Inc., which owned and operated both the Sun and 13 other community newspapers in Tennessee and North Carolina. From 1978 to 1986, he served on a full-time volunteer basis as communications director with Campus Crusade for Christ International, now Cru. His wife of 40 years, Helena, is also a retired newspaper journalist. A history major at Princeton, Jones is a 1965 graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Rich Rampell ’74
Chairman of the Board, WLRN Public Radio (Miami)

Richard Rampell is currently the chairman of the board of the Miami public radio and television stations, WLRN. He previously served on the board of National Public Radio (NPR) for six terms (18 years). He is a retired CPA who once ran the Palm Beach office of what is now the accounting firm BDO, but also served as Burt Reynolds’ business manager and a board member of a NYSE company. He also served as a board member and chairman of a number of private companies and nonprofit organizations during his career. Rampell majored in economics and is the father of Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell ’07.

Vanessa de la Torre ’04
Chief Content Officer, Connecticut Public Broadcasting

As chief content officer, Vanessa de la Torre oversees all content and news at Connecticut Public Broadcasting, including on radio, television and 60-plus digital platforms. She was promoted to this role in Feb. 2024. Since 2020, de la Torre has also led the New England News Collaborative, a regional hub of public media stations working together to share news and best practices. Earlier in her career, de la Torre was a newspaper reporter for outlets such as the Hartford Courant, where her investigative storytelling on Hartford education won regional and national awards. She also was part of the Courant team that was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting. Recently, de la Torre has served on the board of the award-winning New England chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Matthew Halgren ’09
Associate, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, LLP (San Diego)

Specializing in First Amendment law, Matthew Halgren collaborates with journalists to obtain government records and to avoid the legal pitfalls that can accompany the work of a free press. He advises clients in the news media industry on matters related to the reporting process, including defamation, copyright, the reporter’s privilege, invasion of privacy and access rights. He also serves on the board of inewsource, an investigative news website. He was previously a law clerk to Judge Richard R. Clifton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Marilyn L. Huff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. As a law student, Halgren worked in the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. His undergraduate research at Princeton focused on religion in public life, and he was a member of the editorial board of The Daily Princetonian.