(Mark Russell is donating 1 1/2 hours to the winning bidder),

Mark Russell, assistant managing editor/metro at The Plain Dealer since
August 1999, directs the metro staff of about 100 reporters, editors
and support staffers. Before becoming metropolitan editor, he was
business editor of The Plain Dealer for four years. He led a staff of 25,
including 14 reporters, in covering business news in Northeast Ohio.

Russell, 41, rejoined The Plain Dealer after working two years as an
assistant metropolitan editor at The Boston Globe. Before joining the
Globe in 1993, Russell was an assistant city editor at The Plain Dealer,
supervising reporters covering Cleveland City Hall, Cuyahoga County
government and general news stories. He initially joined The Plain Dealer
in 1987 as a business reporter covering retailing and later moved to the
city desk to cover City Hall and the 1989 Cleveland mayoral election.

From 1984 to 1987, Russell covered the Cleveland-Pittsburgh area for
The Wall Street Journal. In addition to general business assignments, he
covered banking, labor and aluminum and steel manufacturing.

A native of St. Louis, Russell received a bachelor's degree in
journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia. He currently serves on
the UMC journalism school's board of directors, the Missourian Press
Association.
Russell is a frequent speaker at middle and high school events. For
two years, he has served as a speaker/mentor at Kent State University's
Dow Jones Newspaper Fund high school workshop for minorities. He was a
student in such a program in St. Louis in the late '70s, and founded the
Cleveland NABJ high school journalism workshop in '88. That program is
now in its 15th year. Dozens of its graduates are now working
journalists. He has also volunteered to mentor student-journalists at the ASNE
and APME conventions.

For five years until the program took a break in 2002, Russell was an
organizer of The Plain Dealer's high school journalism workshop, modeled
after the Dow Jones program. He now is the director of the Plain Dealer
high school workshop, which restarted in the winter of 2004.

Russell and his wife, Christina, who has a home-based gift-basket
service, have a 14-year-old son, Mark Jr., and a 10-year-old daughter,
Alexandra.