Donna Balancia
The Florida Law Journal Publisher and Editor-In-Chief Donna Balancia is a veteran journalist who has always used the latest in technology to deliver her stories.
She was one of the first female sports writers in the locker rooms of New York City, she covered the Hollywood film business from the red carpet, and worked her way up the ranks to become a top-notch technology and business writer and editor.
The native New Yorker has worked for the most recognized news organizations.
While attending Iona College, Balancia covered professional, college and high school sports for Gannett, where she was part of the staff that helped innovate technology used by USA Today. She was trained by the company in extensive video and editing technologies and was identified to help build and market its multimedia program.
At the age of 20, Balancia worked as a photo researcher at United Press International at a time when the company was undergoing a revolution in news delivery. While at UPI, she helped develop new communications systems to transmit photos from the photo library to overseas clients.
Balancia transferred into the UPI sports department, where she used new technologies to file her stories to the newsroom from the ballpark. Early on, she saw the value in giving reporters the means of meeting deadlines from a remote location without having to dictate into a telephone. She helped carry the banner for portable computers and was an early adapter to coaxial technology.
During her travels through Asia, Europe and Polynesia, Balancia helped strategize new forms of communications with news outlets and analyzed how to move news articles, photographs and video across a variety of platforms. While in Los Angeles she was part of a consulting team that launched corporate Web sites for a variety of specialty media, including those for entertainment, lifestyle and business niches.
In Hollywood in the early 1990s, Balancia was selected from among more than 200 applicants to receive a several thousand-dollar grant from Aaron Spelling to write, direct and edit a three-camera TV comedy pilot based on her life in the newsroom. The show, “National Spy,” was the subject of a lawsuit several years later when she was working at an entertainment industry trade magazine. After subsequent settlement of that lawsuit, Donna moved to the Far East to cover global industry and file stories from Shanghai, and Huangzhou, China; Singapore; Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.
Her articles covering California’s technology and biotechnology sectors earned her praise from editors and a roster of corporate technology clients. Her stories have run in The New York Post, The New York Times, the Associated Press, BusinessWeek, Tribune Co. and USA Today.
Apart from her writing accolades, Balancia has won awards and recognition for her media consulting endeavors and her promotional work. Her father is a well-regarded New York attorney and she has a love for the law.
