Board of Directors

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Aaron Sharockman
Chair
Executive Director of PolitiFact

Aaron Sharockman is the executive director of PolitiFact, the largest fact-checking organization in the United States. Aaron leads the growth and development of PolitiFact, manages its outreach and news partnerships, and oversees new initiatives and product development. Aaron has been with PolitiFact since 2010 and served most recently as the editor of PunditFact, a website dedicated to checking claims by pundits, columnists, bloggers and the hosts and guests of talk shows. Previously, Aaron was a government and politics reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. Aaron was a 2016-17 Reynolds Fellow at the University of Missouri and taught a class on political fact-checking at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Rick Hirsch

Alligator alumnus with newsroom experience
Managing Editor of Miami Herald

Rick Hirsch is managing editor of The Miami Herald, where he has worked as a reporter and editor for 38 years. He is responsible for day-to-day oversight of The Herald’s news content on mobile, tablet, desktop, social and print platforms. He played a key role in its shift to digital news and video, as well as its collaboration with public radio. He also supervises newsroom training and recruiting.

Prior to moving into digital journalism in 2003, Hirsch served in a variety of editing and reporting roles, including managing editor of the newspaper’s Broward County edition. In Miami, he has supervised The Herald’s coverage of local government, public and private schools, and played a key role in coverage of Hurricane Andrew and its aftermath, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Hirsch is a past president of the Florida Society of News Editors, a past chair of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism Advisory Council and a college Alumnus of Distinction, and a founder of the Online News Association’s South Florida group.

Trey Csar

Professional with expertise

Trey Csar is a longtime education advocate and the Chief Operating Officer of Impact Florida, a new nonprofit, nonpartisan education advocacy organization, and the former President of the Jacksonville Public Education Fund (JPEF). Over a nine-year period, he grew JPEF into an
active voice for universally high-quality public schools in the Jacksonville area through research, community mobilization, and advocacy for common-sense systemic improvements. As part of that work, Trey oversaw the Quality Education For All Fund, through which private donors, in collaboration with the Community Foundation for Northeast Florida and JPEF, invested $38 million to improve the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers and leaders in historically under-performing schools in Duval County.

Trey teaches a graduate course in K-12 education policy at the Jacksonville University Public Policy Institute and serves as board chair of Renaissance Jax, a nonprofit focused on developing youth STEM talent in Northeast Florida
through LEGO robotics programs. Before coming to the Jacksonville Public Education Fund, Trey worked as a youth organizer in San Francisco, working to involve students throughout California in advocating for better educational opportunities for their fellow students. He taught in an inner-city elementary school in Houston with Teach For America and served as an assistant principal at KIPP New Orleans West (NOW), a school set up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to work with low-income students who evacuated to Houston from the New Orleans area.

Trey has a master’s degree in education policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Florida in Journalism and Business Administration. He lives in the Riverside-Avondale neighborhood of Jacksonville with his wife, Sunny Gettinger, and their two children, Cort and Max.

Jacob Luft

Working professional with expertise in one of the following areas: web development, coding, search engine optimization

Jacob is an executive at the Daily Racing Form, where he serves as digital product strategy lead with emphasis on mobile/tablet solutions for the paying customer base of its premium products. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1997, and was an Alligator editor-in-chief. He lives between Gainesville and Orlando. Jake broke into the business as a web producer for CBS Sports (which became CBS Sportsline), and joined the digital staff of Sports Illustrated in New York City in 2000, where he became product manager for its sports app.

Joanna Hernandez

A faculty member from the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications

Joanna Hernandez serves as the academic representative on the Alligator’s board of directors. Hernandez, a lecturer at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, is also the college’s director of inclusion.

Hernandez is also on the board of directors of Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) and serves as chair of the Membership Committee for the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). She is a lifetime member and former board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. And she once served as president of UNITY.

She has an associate’s degree in word processing from the Borough of Manhattan Community College and a bachelor’s in journalism from New York University. She earned her Master of Public Administration degree at Baruch College.

Hernandez is a longtime journalist. She began her professional career as a local reporter covering housing issues for her community newspaper in Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan in New York City. Her career path took her through a few legacy newsrooms, including Newsday, the San Francisco Examiner anJoanna d the Newark Star-Ledger. She is also an alum of METPro, where she was trained as a copy editor. She also was director of features production for the New York Times Regional Media Group, collaborating with editors of its 15 publications located across the U.S. Her last newsroom gig before joining the academe full-time was at the Washington Post, where she was a multiplatform editor on the universal desk.

Her adjunct teaching gigs include New York University, Hunter College and what was once called the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She left the Post to join the CUNY J-School as its career services director. She then became director of diversity initiatives, where she oversaw a $1.4 million budget to run a program that she created and managed with the goal of building a pipeline of newsroom candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

Ted Kruljac

Community Member at Large

Ted Kruljac is the Executive Director of Alumni Advancement for the University of Florida College of Medicine. His main priorities are as a fund raiser and as a supervisor who oversees a team fund raisers for the College of Medicine. Prior to his career in fund raising, Ted worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for 11 years with four separate daily newspapers. His last role in newspapers (2000-03) was as the Executive Sports Editor of the Ledger in Lakeland, FL. He received a bachelor's degree in Journalism from UF in 1997. He is also an Alligator staff alumnus.