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The Student Press Law Center Board of Directions has unanimously selected Virginia Edwards as its new Chair, and appointed Patrick Carome and Mike Godwin, both of whom are accomplished lawyers in the online publishing field, to its Board of Directors.

The Student Press Law Center (SPLC) is a Washington, D.C.-area non-profit whose mission is to advocate for free-press rights for high school and college journalists. It also provides legal information and referral assistance at no charge to students and the educators who work with them.

Edwards is the president of Editorial Projects in Education, the 90-person nonprofit corporation that publishes Education Week and the annual reports Quality Counts, Diplomas Count and Technology Counts. She also serves as the editor and publisher of Education Week. Prior to that, she worked for two years for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and for nearly 10 years as an editor and reporter for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.

Edwards said she is excited to serve as chair as the organization celebrates its 35^th anniversary. "I'm looking forward to helping the SPLC complete the strategic planning process that will serve as our blueprint for moving into the next decade. I'm also looking forward to the prospects of expanding our advocacy work and our youth outreach into the digital publishing age," she said.

Carome and Godwin replace outgoing board members Rosalind Stark, formerly of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, and Shawn Chen of the Associated Press. Edwards thanked Stark, the outgoing board chair, and Chen for their many years of dedicated service during a time of enormous change that saw the organization complete a successful endowment campaign and recruit the Center's first new executive director in 22 years.

"The addition of two respected online media experts, Mike Godwin and Pat Carome, to SPLC's board perfecly positions the organization as we modernize our programs to keep pace with the way young people gather and share information today," Edwards said.

Carome is a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP in Washington D.C., where he represents leading communication and media companies in complex litigation and counseling matters. Carome's areas of expertise include defamation, privacy, copyright, trademark, press freedoms, trade secrets and general tort and contract laws.

He has represented a broad range of clients that include AOL, Time Warner, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC and Cable News Network.

Carome formerly worked as a staff attorney for the The Washington Post and served as staff counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran.

Godwin is general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, where he supervises legal policy and advises business affairs for the non-profit organization that offers wiki projects, including Wikipedia, one of the most-visited websites worldwide. He is a published author and has extensive experience in legal policymaking concerning technology, privacy, and the Internet, including criminal, constitutional, copyright, media and telecommunications issues.

He has previously served as a research fellow at Yale University, holding dual positions in the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and at the Yale Computer Science Department's Privacy, Obligations and Rights in Technologies of Information Assessment project. He has also served as legal director of Public Knowledge; staff attorney and policy fellow for the Center for Democracy and Technology; and staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The SPLC's 15-member board includes representatives from the journalism, legal, education, and nonprofit management fields.

The Student Press Law Center, which was founded in 1974, receives approximately 2,500 calls a year nationwide from student journalists, teachers and others who have concerns about censorship, free speech or other First Amendment rights. In addition to providing educational materials for student journalists on a wide variety of legal topics, SPLC operates an Attorney Referral Network of approximately 175 lawyers across the nation who provide free legal representation to local students when necessary.

For more information on the SPLC, go to www.splc.org.