Michael S. Williamson was born in 1957 in Washington, D.C. and raised in several foster homes around the U.S. before settling with a permanent foster in Northern California at age 12. He joined The Washington Post in 1993. He previously worked at The Sacramento Bee (1975-1991) and taught at Western Kentucky University (1991-1993). His first newspaper job was at the Pinole Progress (which later became part of The West County Times) where he did reporting and photography.David Stephenson
David Stephenson a four-time recipient of the Kentucky News Photographers Association’s Photographer of the Year Award as well as three-time Sports Photographer of the Year. Stephenson currently is the Photojournalism Adviser for the University of Kentucky’s student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel.
Prior to joining the staf of the Kernel, Stephenson was on staff at the Herald-Leader for 12 years. A 1992 WKU graduate, Stephenson recently completed a four-year project, “A New Dawn?”, following a young mother addicted to pain pills through a local Drug Court Program.
In 2005, Stephenson created heraldleaderphoto.com, a place for staff photographers to publish multimedia and slideshows. The site recently won a Media Eclipse Award for 2007 Kentucky Derby Coverage online. He also created a site specifically for one of his favorite series of stories on oddly name towns in Kentucky, Project Dateline. Stephenson led the staff’s charge into multimedia and has produced videos and multimedia projects which have won awards in the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, POYi, NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism, and The Southern Short Course.
