Scott Blanchard

Chair, Interim Board of Trustees

Scott Blanchard is editor of StateImpact Pennsylvania, a public radio reporting project covering the state's energy economy. The collaboration brings together three stations - WITF (Harrisburg), WHYY (Philadelphia) and WESA (Pittsburgh) -as well as the environmental issues radio program The Allegheny Front.

Before he joined StateImpact in November 2017, Blanchard was enterprise editor at the York (Pa.) Daily Record, where he led the newsroom’s investigative and projects reporting.

 He arrived in York in 2001 and helped lead national award-winning coverage of the 30-year-old York riots murders investigation. In years since, he has focused on narrative storytelling, ethics and training, with special emphasis on trauma journalism. In 2012, he edited a story about the lasting trauma of a school shooting nine years after it happened; the piece received honorable mention in the 2013 Dart Awards. He was named a 2013 Ochberg Fellow, receiving training in PTSD science, self-help and peer support, and he received honorable mention for the Ochberg Society’s Mimi Award for editors that year.

He led a team that created a trauma awareness/peer-support program in Digital First Media in 2014, the first time a U.S.-based local news organization undertook such an effort. After the YDR was bought by Gannett, he helped coordinate and/or led trauma awareness and peer support training at newsrooms in York, Wilmington, Del., St. Cloud, Minn., Wausau, Wisc. and Milwaukee, Wisc. as well as at the Pennsylvania Newsmedia Association in Harrisburg.

He is a past president of the Pennsylvania Society of News Editors (2015-16).