Cheree began her career as a general assignment reporter for The Charlotte Observer. Next she was a business and labor reporter and columnist. She then went to the medical beat, a beat which was unusual for newspapers in the 1970s. She left journalism to spend years working inside academic and community hospitals.
Cheree was a senior health care executive in academic medical centers and a teaching hospital in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Md.; Detroit, Mich.; and Chapel Hill, N.C. She also worked at the community level in Leesburg, Va., in a non-profit health care system.Along with public affairs, she has had operations duties in many of her jobs.
She established the first office of public information at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, N.C.
She was one of a team of six who opened the Wayne State University’s multi-disciplinary primary care center. The center had a annual capacity for 600,000 visits to doctors, nurse practitioners, clinical social workers, psychologists, pharmacists and nutritionists.
She was the spokesman for the Detroit Medical Center Corporation (DMMC), the parent organization of five teaching hospitals. The DMMC undertook what was, at that time, the nation’s largest hospital merger. The principals were the Detroit Receiving Hospital and the hospitals in the DMCC, but approvals and funding also had to come from the federal, state and city levels if this public-private partnership was to happen.
Her experience includes reorganizing the public affairs for an internationally-renowned school of public health in Baltimore.
She reorganized the office of public affairs and marketing for one of the nation’s busiest hospitals located in Washington, D.C. She also served as vice-president of public affairs for the hospital’s newly-formed parent corporation.
She was the senior vice-president of a community-based health system in Virginia, serving what was then the fastest-growing county in America.
She emerged with a unique set of experiences on which to draw as she returns to her roots in journalism.
Cheree has been listed in Who’s Who in the East and Who’s Who Among American Women. She was a Healthy Communities Fellow, a program sponsored by the American Hospital Association. She was twice a speaker for a Knight Center for Specialized Journalism programs and has been a frequent speaker on a wide range of health topics to professional and public audiences.
She has a B.A. degree in political science from Newcomb College, Tulane University.
She attended graduate school in journalism at the University of Missouri, writing for the general circulation daily, The Columbia Missourian. Cheree received a Special Commendation for Investigative Reporting.
She lives in Washington, D.C. She is married to Reese Cleghorn, professor and former dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, Md.