At the anniversary celebration, those attending will also meet members of InDepthNH.org’s board and reporting staff starting at 5:30 p.m. for meet and greet. Tickets are $45 and may be purchased at https://tinyurl.com/4mn329va
By BOB CHAREST, InDepthNH.org
Dick Tofel has had a career that has included stints as an executive at the Wall Street Journal and then jobs centered around philanthropy. He says this has given him the opportunity to know more billionaires than most people.
Here is what Tofel said he has learned: Some of them are very talented — smart, effective, even wise, and others are just plain lucky.
That was a topic in his recent column, Second Rough Draft, a newsletter he writes for Substack about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.
Tofel will be featured speaker in Concord on Oct. 22, 2025, when he appears at InDepthNH.org’s 10th anniversary celebration at the Christa McAuliffe-Alan B. Shepard Discovery Center on the grounds of the N.H. Technical Institute in Concord.
Tofel said in his column that some of these billionaires who have become newspaper owners have proven good stewards in complex situations. Others, not so much. He takes a closer look at Paramount Skydance’s CEO David Ellison, now the owner of CBS News.
Press coverage of billionaires tends to endow all of them with qualities some simply do not have, Tofel concludes.
Hear his thoughts on topics that are driving the future of news, and why what Tofel writes matters to a free press. His column is available here: https://dicktofel.substack.com
He will be joined on stage by Nancy West, founder of InDepthNH.org and the main force behind this New Hampshire nonprofit news outlet.
Also appearing will be George Bald and Steve Taylor, both board members of the nonprofit that runs InDepthNH.org, the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. Bald is the former state commissioner of the Department of Resources & Economic Development, and Taylor served for 25 years as New Hampshire’s agriculture commissioner. They will talk about why they are involved in nonprofit news.
InDepthNH.org is a nonprofit watchdog that provides vigorous, in-depth news coverage of state issues that matter. The Oct. 22 event is from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. and will feature light refreshments and a cash bar.
Tofel was the founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until September 2021. As president, he had responsibility for all of ProPublica’s non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. During the period of Tofel’s business leadership, ProPublica published stories that won seven Pulitzer Prizes, seven National Magazine Awards, five Peabody Awards, three Emmy Awards and eleven George Polk Awards, among other honors. Also during this time, ProPublica grew from an initial staff of just over 20 to more than 160, and raised more than $225 million from other than its founding funders.
He is now an instructor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he led a faculty seminar on “The Pandemic, the Press, and Public Health” and teaches a course on “Engaging with the Press.” Tofel was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, with responsibility for its international editions and U.S. special editions, and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper, vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company, and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones. Just prior to ProPublica, he served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation, and earlier as president and chief operating officer of the International Freedom Center, a museum and cultural center that was planned for the World Trade Center site.
InDepthNH.org has done investigative reporting over its first 10 years on topics such as Northern Pass, the Laurie List of dishonest police, education funding, carbon credits, and payments to victims of sexual and physical abuse by the state at the Sununu Youth Services Center.
At the anniversary celebration, those attending will meet members of InDepthNH.org’s board and reporting staff starting at 5:30 p.m. Tickets are $45 and may be purchased at https://tinyurl.com/4mn329va