Executive Director Lynda McDonnell has been a journalist in Minnesota for more than 30 years, covering everything from politics to poverty, labor unions to honey queens. She spent 20 years as a reporter and editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, most recently as the political editor. Before that, she was a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune.
She has been a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a Bush leadership fellow at the University of Minnesota, where she earned an undergraduate degree in journalism and a masters degree in English, with an emphasis in creative writing.
Since 2002, McDonnell has run ThreeSixty at the University of St. Thomas. Each spring, she teaches advanced reporting to print journalism majors. McDonnell and her journalist husband live in Minneapolis and have two terrific adult sons. She is an essayist and short story writer who loves hiking the Ice Age Trail in western Wisconsin. She claims her messy desk is a sign of rampant creativity.
Youth Publications Editor Annie Nelson has both teaching and professional journalism experience. A Minnesota native and journalism graduate of the University of Missouri, she has tutored reading students ranging from 7-year-old first graders to 62-year-old men. She worked for two and a half years as a reporter for the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Mo. She is fluent in Spanish and reported for the nation’s only bilingual Spanish English student newspaper, Adelante!, during college. She has traveled to Latin America multiple times, including a semester she spent studying abroad in Havana, Cuba.
She was the local/national news editor at St. Paul Central Senior High School’s paper her senior year. She graduated from Central in 2000.
“My attitude is teens can do anything they decide they can do … My goal with the ThreeSixty students is to get them to stop thinking of themselves as students, stop discounting their abilities and go out there and get the story.”
Broadcast Program Manager David Nimmer graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1963, with a major in print journalism. He spent 15 years at The Minneapolis Star, 11 as a reporter and the last four as its managing editor. He left The Star to become a reporter for WCCO Television News. He did reporting for all 10 years and was the associate news director for the last four years at ‘CCO.
From 1989 through 2000, he was an assistant of professor of journalism at The University of St. Thomas. He is now a professor emeritus and working as a volunteer with ThreeSixty, a program to find, mentor and train students of color in high school who are interested in journalism.
Nimmer loves to fish and describes this part of as life, with a Medicare card, as a spiritual journey.
