On Tuesday, April 14th as the Sacramento Press Club Freelance Committee presented: 

Off The Beaten Path

 Speakers included:

Nancy Kincaid, director of communications and external affairs for the Department of Mental Health. She is a nationally accredited, award-winning public relations and marketing professional with more than 25 years experience.  Her career spans work in corporate and government public relations, and broadcast television and radio production and promotion at KSCH TV and Chancellor Broadcasting. She is an adjunct faculty member at CSU, Sacramento where she teaches marketing in the College of Business Administration and public relations management and writing courses in the Department of Communication Studies and Journalism. She also teaches POST-certified law enforcement media relations and incident management courses.

David Watts Barton, managing editor, Sacramento Press. He was a feature writer for the Sacramento Bee for 25 years before reading the writing on the wall and crafting a career as a multimedia content provider. He has written for local publications, in-flight magazines and even The Bee itself. He was a legal stringer for Bloomberg News, guest host for Capital Public Radio and blogger for bloggingthegrid.blogspot.com.

Mark Paul, an award-winning writer, editor, and policy expert with wide experience in journalism and California state government and politics. He covered California for 24 years, first as Editorial Page Editor and National Editor of the Oakland Tribune, then as Deputy Editorial Page Editor and columnist for the Sacramento Bee, where he wrote extensively about fiscal policy, health care, economics, urban development, and political reform. He won the 2000 Best in the West award for editorial writing about California policy. After leaving the Bee, he served as Deputy Treasurer and Policy Director in the California State Treasurer's Office and as Policy Director for the 2006 gubernatorial campaign of Phil Angelides. Paul received his B.A. and a master's degree in history from Stanford University. He has taught international relations and modern U.S. history at Simon Fraser University and Stanford University, and was an editor of Inquiry, a magazine published by the Cato Institute.

Deborah Pacyna is director of Public Affairs for the California Association of Health Facilities. Before joining CAHF in early 2009, she formed her own company, Pacyna Communication Strategies (PC Strategies), which provided a full range of communication services including public relations, media outreach and training, community and public affairs assistance, event planning and website management. A veteran communications strategist, Pacyna draws from her experience as a longtime broadcast journalist (including coverage of three gubernatorial administrations in California), a former communications director for a California constitutional officer (then-Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante) and as a senior vice president at a global public relations agency (Fleishman-Hillard).