The Art Of Communication

About Mark Contreras

Mark Contreras is President and Chief Executive Officer of Connecticut Public, the NPR and PBS community licensee for Connecticut.

He came to public media after a long career in local, mission-oriented news organizations.

His interest in local journalism began during his work with U.S. Senator Paul Simon on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, DC.

Mark began his media career with Capital Cities/ABC, Inc and after a number of roles at several of their newspapers served as President and Publisher of The Times Leader newspaper in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

He was then named Senior Vice President of Pulitzer Newspapers based in St. Louis, Missouri. In this role he had profit-and-loss responsibility for the newspapers and digital properties in 13 markets from Illinois to Hawaii. Pulitzer was a publicly-traded company with a controlling interest by the Pulitzer Family.

He then became the head of the newspaper division (SVP/Newspapers) of the E.W. Scripps Company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Scripps newspapers and digital operations were the 10th largest publisher in the US and had markets from South Carolina to Washington state. The company was publicly-traded and controlled by the Scripps Family.

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In 2011, he became the Chief Executive Officer of Calkins Media based in Levittown, Pennsylvania which owned 3 ABC affiliated television stations in Florida and Alabama and 5 newspapers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The company was privately-held and owned by the Calkins Family. The company was sold in 2017.

In 2017, Contreras was then named Dean of the School of Communications of Quinnipiac University.

He joined Connecticut Public in March 2019. While serving as President and CEO of Connecticut Public, the organization has undergone a reinvestment in local reporting resources as well as significant digital transformation including publishing its content today over more than 48 platforms, up from 3 in 2019.

He served as a past or current board member of a variety of media organizations including the Newspaper Association of America (chairman), The American Press Institute (chairman), Cincinnati Public Radio, Futuro Media, GFR Media (based in San Juan, PR) and Woodward Communications, Inc (based in Dubuque, IA).

He holds an A.B. in History from the University of Chicago and an MBA from The Harvard Business School.

He was also named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

His father is a Mexican immigrant and his mother and Irish-American school teacher.

Mark has been married to Marybeth Sughrue for 36 years and their son, Michael, lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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