About • The Jersey Vindicator

The Jersey Vindicator was founded in 2023 as an independent, nonpartisan newsroom dedicated to high-quality investigative and public-service journalism about New Jersey government and urgent statewide issues, including elections, voting, public records, education, economic development, health, housing, the environment, criminal justice, human trafficking, and more.

We founded The Jersey Vindicator to address a crisis in journalism — the ongoing and rapid decline of corporate-owned legacy media outlets, which is greatly diminishing access to trusted and factual accountability and investigative reporting in the state.

We seek to uncover stories that would otherwise go untold and cut through partisanship and misinformation to deliver trusted, reliable journalism to residents of the Garden State. Our aim is to tell stories no one else is telling about how government functions in New Jersey, with the aim of sparking change that improves the quality of life for residents.

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Our board of directors

Craig Shofed

Craig is the managing director of Artworks Trenton, the capital city’s creative hub that promotes artistic diversity by fostering creativity, learning, and an appreciation of the arts in the city and beyond. After Craig’s second kidney transplant, he decided to quit his job in IT and become a full-time artist creating work under the name C.a. Shofed. He previously served on the Artworks board of directors.

Heather Taylor

Heather is the manager of digital media and programs at the Dow Jones News Fund. Previously she served as senior director of communications at The Citizens Campaign, where she developed a citizen journalism training program that empowered residents to embrace the fundamentals of journalism and harness the power of online media to effect change in their communities.

Krystal Knapp

Krystal was an investigative and computer-assisted reporting journalist at The Trenton Times for a decade. She is the founder of the local news outlet Planet Princeton. She has won numerous awards for reporting using public records and data. Previously she worked for Centurion, a nonprofit that seeks to free the innocent from prison. She also worked as a chaplain at New Jersey State Prison.