Turn your Association into a Media Powerhouse

Jim Ylisela is co-founder and senior partner of RCG. He is an award-winning veteran Chicago journalist and a former publisher of Ragan.com. He brings more than 30 years of experience in writing, editing, communications research and consulting. Ylisela has designed and organized newsrooms for many companies and organizations, including Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he served as a faculty member and co-director of Medill News Service from 1988 to 2001. He works with communicators to create brand journalism news sites, organize and train writers and editors and restore reporting (and creative storytelling) to internal and external communications.

Tom Corfman is a senior consultant with 30+ years of experience in journalism, media relations and the law. He began his career as a civil rights litigator and criminal defense lawyer specializing in white-collar cases. He then became managing editor at The Chicago Reporter, an investigative monthly on race and poverty. Later, he was a reporter and editor at the Chicago Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business, where he wrote or edited many high-pressure investigative stories on defense contractors, pharmaceutical executives, real estate developers and Medicaid providers. Before joining RCG in 2021, he served for four years as director of communications for Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas.

Nick Lanyi is a media relations and crisis communications expert with RCG. He led the public affairs practice in the Washington, D.C., office of global public relations agency Porter Novelli from 2013 to 2015, and served as managing director at public affairs boutique LMG Inc. Lanyi spent 15 years as an award-winning reporter, financial journalist and freelance writer.

Manuel Roig-Franzia has been a reporter at The Washington Post for 22 years. He roamed the Southeastern United States as the paper’s Miami bureau chief and later traveled throughout Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean as the paper’s Mexico City bureau chief. He’s now based in Washington, DC, where he writes long-form profiles and in-depth investigative and feature articles on a wide-range of topics of national interest for the features section, front page and Sunday magazine. He’s reported on countless momentous events - everything from Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake - to major courtroom sagas. His profile subjects have included significant figures in the arts, including acclaimed novelists E.L. Doctorow and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and in the dark arts — Roger Stone.

He travels widely in the U.S. and abroad, and has written profiles, features and biographical pieces on a variety of sinners and saints, and on candidates in every presidential campaign since 2004 He’s also a frequent contributor of fiction and non-fiction book reviews. Roig-Franzia is the author of the critically acclaimed biography of Sen. Marco Rubio, “The Rise of Marco Rubio,” published by Simon and Schuster.