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 for social justice and new media at the Institute for Justice and Journalism, a Visiting Lecturer at UC Irvine where she teaches literary journalism as it relates to social justice, an adjunct professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, and a regular commenter on NBC’s The Filter. (She is also a river rafter, critter patter, rose wrangler, and the outrageously proud mom of Will Mason, who keeps the technical side of WitnessLA up and running.)

WILL MASON is WitnessLA’s web applications guru and site builder. A born engineer, Will began building computers at the age of 7 and mastered web development by 15. Hours of Apache Doc reading, open source code reversal, and a “No One Can Stop Me” attitude have led to his cutting edge technical abilities. One of the first developers to be hired at NewCars.com, Mason wore many hats as the webmaster of the company’s three main websites taking on the additional challenge of internal tool developer, writing web applications used by the company’s sales and support teams, as well as accounts receivable. Will became a partner in Don’t Blink Design with the focused intention of developing a top tier web development firm.

(By sheer and marvelous coincidence, Will also happens to be the editor’s aforementioned extremely smart son.)

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NOTE 1: 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.)

NOTE 2: For a rundown on WitnessLA’s new LA Justice Report team go here.