Celeste Fremon is WitnessLA’s creator and editor. She is also an award winning freelance journalist specializing in gangs, law enforcement, criminal justice and education policy. She’s the author of G-Dog and the Homeboys, and is working on a new book, An American Family, about the life of a parolee, his wife and kids, during his first four years out of prison (based on her LA Weekly series of the same name). She’s a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, the co-director of the Homeboy Stories Project, on the Board of Directors for PEN USA, and a Pereira Visiting Writer at UC Irvine where she teaches literary journalism as it relates to social justice. She rafts the Middle Fork of the Flathead River in West Glacier, Montana, whenever practicality, work and weather allows, and is wildly proud of her 22-year-old son all year round.

Alan Mittelstaedt (WLA’s illustrious regular contributor) is a high school dropout who mimeographed his first article called “Deschooling Society: The Evils of Compulsory Education” and handed out 1,000 copies of the Ivan Illich-inspired screed at his rural Virginia high school in 1972 over the protests of his principal, who threatened to suspend him. He left school during his junior year and attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., and even got a diploma, albeit 18 years late. He lucked into his first journalism job in 1979 when he went home early from his job as a landscaper near Palm Springs to shoot pictures of a rare desert snowstorm. He gave them to the editor of a small weekly paper in Desert Hot Springs; the next day, he was hired as a part-time photographer and, when the editor was fired a few months later, he took his job. He produced all stories and photos for the 22-page weekly for 18 months until taking his first daily newspaper job at the San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune. During his 28-year newspaper career, he was city editor at the Portland (Maine) Press Herald and at the Pasadena Star-News and worked as an investigative reporter and an editor at the San Bernardino County Sun, where he somewhat surprisingly was named Employee of the Year in 1992 even though he was outspoken and openly critical of decisions of his Gannett bosses. Believe it or not, he’s only been fired once and that happened last November when new owners took over at the L.A. Weekly. He’d been news editor there since 1999.

WitnessLA’s web applications guru and site builder is Will Mason of Don’t Blink Design, formerly of newcars.com. (By sheer and marvelous coincidence, he also happens to be the editor’s aforementioned extremely smart son.)

WitnessLA’s talented graphic designer, responsible for the entire look of the site, is Kevin Fremon, also of Don’t Blink Design, formerly of Vivendi Universal (and the editor’s amazing nephew).

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NOTE: The above profiles might lead one to assume that there’s some nepotism going on here. But, in truth, WitnessLA would never have been able to afford the services of the Don’t Blink Design team had editor Fremon not harped a great deal about the importance of family, while simultaneously employing unseemly amounts of emotional blackmail. (And she is not anywhere near as sorry about doing this as others might want her to be.)