BIO
Travis Armstrong has worked as an editor, writer and media executive in print, radio and Internet communications.
He’s been a member of the editorial boards of the San Jose Mercury News, Santa Barbara News-Press and Monterey County Herald in California. His first voice-of-the-newspaper editorials appeared in the Oregonian in Portland while he was on a summer break from law school.
He was the host of "The Travis Armstrong Hour," town-hall political debates and other live programming on KZSB AM 1290 broadcast to Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
Previously, Travis worked as an editor in the D.C. news bureau of a national chain of 24 daily newspapers owned by Dow Jones & Co. He interned at the National Geographic Society and Kiplinger's magazine in Washington before joining Dow Jones.
In addition to editing and writing, Travis has held executive and managerial positions, including serving as the acting publisher of Santa Barbara's daily newspaper.
He was publisher when management changes and a union-organizing campaign brought national attention. A precedent-setting case from that time involving the First Amendment protections of a newspaper company to determine news content vs. employee control via labor-relations statutes is in federal court. The National Newspaper Association and some of the country’s largest publishers have filed supporting legal briefs.
Travis has a Juris Doctor from the UCLA School of Law and a master's in anthropology from Temple University in Philadelphia. His undergraduate degree is in news-editorial journalism, with a minor in business administration, from the University of St. Thomas.
Travis is a member of the Leech Lake Reservation (Pillager) band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. He has won five writing awards from the Native American Journalists Association, and he was the first enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe to serve as the editorial page editor of a U.S. daily newspaper.