Attendees and Bios
Abhimanyu Das is a graduate student at the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. He is also a research assistant at the Center for Future Civic Media.
Edward Abrams is the Conducting Fellow of the New World Symphony, America's Orchestral Academy, in Miami. He has performed internationally as a clarinetist, pianist, and conductor and is also an award-winning composer.
Nadav Aharony is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab, where he is part of the Viral Communications research group and the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. His research revolves around the intersection between communication networks, social dynamics, and systems that learn. As part of his research he is working on communication technologies that empower close proximity interactions of groups and communities.
Yohir Akerman is a journalist by vocation, but not by education. Since August 2007 Akerman has worked as a Pan-regional Editor managing the content of all Poder Magazine, a regional leader in business and policy coverage of the U.S. Hispanic market and Latin America.
Twitter: PODERmagazines
Nicholas Allen is a computer programmer and graduate journalism student at Northwestern University on a scholarship underwritten by the Knight Foundation. His current project is automatically generating baseball game write-ups from box scores and play-by-play data.
Twitter: nicholasallen
Rosental Alves is the Knight Chair in Journalism and UNESCO Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the founding director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas
Twitter: rosental
Richard Anderson is an innovator. Anderson's current efforts are focused on developing a community network business model for the newspaper industry.
Angela Antony helps lead Beanstockd, a site using popular news as a vehicle deliver environmental information to people who normally would not be exposed to it. Beanstockd also produces an online alternate-reality game which rewards and incentivizes real-world environmental behavior.
David Ardia is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and the director of the Citizen Media Law Project. Prior to founding the Citizen Media Law Project, he was assistant counsel at The Washington Post and before that he practiced law at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation.
Twitter: citmedialaw
Orlando Bagwell is Director of Media, Arts and Culture at the Ford Foundation in the Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program and is responsible for the Foundation’s global program in these fields.
Joyce Barnathan is the president of the International Center for Journalists, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing quality journalism worldwide. She is also the chair of the Global Forum for Media Development, a membership network of 500 media assistance organizations that supports the development of independent media around the world. Previously, she served as executive editor at BusinessWeek.
Twitter: joycebarnathan
Sam Bayard is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. He contributes to the Citizen Media Law Project's legal guide for online media creators and its database of legal threats, and blogs on a number of topics, including First Amendment protection for anonymous speech, intermediary liability, copyright fair use, and the applicability of shield laws to non-traditional journalists.
Twitter: smbayard
Walter Bender is executive director of Sugar Labs and senior research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory. Bender was president of One Laptop per Child, where he developed and deployed technologies that are helping to revolutionize how the world's children engage in learning.
Joshua Benton is director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University (www.niemanlab.org), which is trying to figure out the future of journalism. Before Nieman, he was an investigative reporter for The Dallas Morning News.
Twitter: niemanlab
Jim Bettinger spent 20 years in daily newspapers (Riverside Press-Enterprise and San Jose Mercury News) as reporter, editorial writer and city editor and 20 years at Knight Fellowships at Stanford, as deputy director (11 years) and director (9 years).
Twitter: jrbettinger
Beverly Blake is the Program Director for Columbus, Macon and Millegeville and Interim Program Director for State College at the Knight Foundation. She served as senior vice president and senior charitable adviser of Wachovia’s Charitable Funds Management Group in Atlanta, where she oversaw six private foundations.
Leo Bonanni is a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab's Tangible Media Group, where he teaches about the social issues surrounding product design. His project Sourcemap.org is an open framework for sharing supply chains and the carbon footprint of objects, foods and events.
Twitter: amerigo
Rick Borovoy has been researching technology that supports face-to-face communication and community building for 15 years. He co-founded nTAG Interactive to commercialize his MIT Media Lab Ph.D. work in this area.
Twitter: rick.borovoy
Joe Boydston is Vice President of Technology & Digital Media with the McNaughton Newspaper Group in Northern California. He leads a team of passionate technologists, who's mission is building profit-driving tools for community news organizations.
Twitter: joeboydston
Jody Brannon, Ph.D., is national director of News21, a Carnegie-Knight alliance of 12 graduate journalism programs that is headquartered at Arizona State University, has worked in digital news since 1995, for The Washington Post, USA TODAY and MSN. She chairs the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations and serves on the Online News Association board.
Twitter: brannonj
Steve Bratt, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation, and Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, are working with an growing community of dedicated individuals to advance One Web that is free, open, and expanding to empower all people on the planet. The Knight Foundation is seeding the creation of the new Web Foundation and enthusiastically supporting its mission.
Twitter: webfoundation
Bill Buzenberg is executive director of The Center for Public Integrity. Prior to that he was senior vice president of news at American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio. Buzenberg launched such programming initiatives as American RadioWorks and Speaking of Faith. Buzenberg was vice president of news and information at National Public Radio from 1990 to 1997.
Matt Carroll has worked at the Boston Globe since 1987 and has been a member of the Spotlight team since 1997. Before becoming a reporter, he worked as a copy editor on the Business desk for two years. As a reporter, Carroll has covered real estate and the MetroWest area. In 1994 he started the Globe’s first internal website, which is used by reporters and editors, under the tutelage of the Information Technology Department. Carroll specializes in computer-assisted reporting and handles the paper’s growing library of databases.
David Chandler is a science journalist working for the MIT News Office, covering science and technology at MIT. He was a science writer at the Boston Globe for 20 years, and has been a freelance writer for New Scientist, Technology Review, Wired, Nature, Smithsonian and many other publications.
Twitter: _dlc_
Farai Chideya is an award-winning multimedia journalist who has worked for organizations including Newsweek, ABC, CNN, and most recently, NPR as host of "News and Notes." She founded PopandPolitics.com and has published three nonfiction books plus the new novel, "Kiss the Sky."
Twitter: faraichideya
Dante Chinni is the creator and director of Knight's Patchwork Nation project, which is partnered with both the Christian Science Monitor and PBS NewsHour. He works out of Washington DC and is writing a book based on the project.
Twitter: Dchinni
Aleksandra Chojnacka is a recent MBA graduate from Arizona State University.
Sue Clark-Johnson was president of Gannett’s Newspaper Division, the largest by circulation in the nation, since September, 2005. Prior to that, she was chairman and CEO of Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., which publishes The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, and senior group president of Gannett's Pacific Newspaper Group, which had oversight responsibility for thirty-two companies throughout the West, including Hawaii and Guam.
David Cohn is a recovering tech reporter turned entrepreneur. I am an open book: www.digidave.org.
Twitter: digidave
Beth Coleman is a professor in CMS & PWHS. She is working on a locative media/urban mapping project in Paris this summer.
Jacob Colker is the Co-Founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries. Jacob has spent nine years using technology to advance political activism, issue advocacy, and volunteer engagement, and he has managed political and issue advocacy campaigns across the country and around the world.
Twitter: extraordinaries
Chris Csikszentmihályi is co-Director of the Center for Future Civic Media and directs the Media Lab's Computing Culture research group. Twitter: csik
Charlie DeTar is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab working in the Speech + Mobility group. Charlie's current work focuses on the relationship between consumer behavior, personal decisions, and happiness.
Ana Domb Krauskopf is a journalist and film and music producer. Her work has always revolved around the creative industries. Currently, she is researcher and graduate student at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.
Twitter: anadk
Geoff Dougherty is the founding editor and CEO of Chi-Town Daily News. Prior to launching the Daily News in 2005, he was an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times.
Kevin Driscoll is a recent graduate of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. He is looking for unexpected uses of consumer technologies that facilitate learning.
Jack Driscoll worked 39 years at the Boston Globe, 7 as Editor, then was named Editor-in-Residence at MIT Media Lab in 1995 and member of C4FCM Advisory Board in 2007. Author of "Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism."
Harry Dugmore is the MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communication at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. He's worked extensively in development communication, behavior change and long-term strategy planning.
Twitter: HarryDugmore
Paula Ellis joined the Knight Foundation in September 2006. She is a member of the Executive Committee and oversees the foundation's national programs, new initiatives, the Transformation Fund and evaluation work. She was formerly vice president for operations at Knight Ridder in San Jose, Calif., overseeing 15 newspapers
Tree Elven is currently working in El Salvador on a Knight Fellowship, taking the uniquely independent digital newspaper elfaro.net to the next level in terms of product, presentation and commercial viability across digital media platforms. A writer, journalist, editor, voice talent and new media director, Tree has previously worked with the Agencia EFE news agency, the HELLO! celebrity news group, and France 24 TV.
Twitter: mstree
Ingeborg Endter is a consultant in community media and new technology, recently retired as the Outreach Director at the Center for Future Civic Media.
John Ewing is a new media artist merging dialogic public art with activism and education. He is currently focusing on long term community based projects in Boston, MA
Kurt Fendt heads MIT's HyperStudio for Digital Humanities and is Research Director in the Comparative Media Studies Program. He teaches media and culture courses in the German Studies Program at MIT and is organizer of the annual European Short Film Festival.
Twitter: fendt
Marc Fest is Vice President for Communications for the Knight Foundation. An Internet entrepreneur and public relations veteran, he served as an inaugural member of Knight Foundation's Community Advisory Committee for Miami-Dade and Broward counties from 2002 to 2007.
Tom Fiedler is dean of the College of Communication at Boston University. He came to that position in 2008 following a 36-year career as a newspaper reporter, editor and columnist, the last six years as the executive editor of The Miami Herald.
Twitter: thomasefiedler
Pam Fine is the Knight Chair for News, Leadership and Community at the University of Kansas. She has held editorial leadership positions at the Indianapolis Star, Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is a former board member of ASNE, and will co-chair ASNE's convention program in 2010.
Twitter: pamfine
Bodil Fox works with Foundation Contract Services at Tides, partner to forward-thinking philanthropists, foundations, activists and organizations. She is responsible for overall management of Foundation Contract Services.
Russell Francis' research explores the implications of media change for learning, cognition and education. He recently developed a framework called: Towards a Participatory Pedagogy for Civic Engagement based on a case study of Global Kids Media Masters programme at the High School for Global Citizenship.
Margie Freivogel is the founding editor of the St. Louis Beacon, an online-only, non-profit site that provides news that matters to the St. Louis region. She previously worked for 34 years as a reporter, Washington correspondent and editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Twitter: mwfreivogel
Ben Fry is director of Seed Visualization and its Phyllotaxis Lab, a design laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts focused on understanding complex data. Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information.
Amy Gahran is half of I, Reporter. She and partner Adam Glenn created the KNC-funded Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker community journalism project, which concluded in 2008. Amy & Adam built & manage the RJI Collaboratory site, and Amy blogs at Contentious.com and Poynter's E-Media Tidbits.
Twitter: agahran
Florence Gallez is a freelance journalist, former Moscow-based correspondent (The Moscow Times, BNA, CNN) now a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and a Research Assistant at the MIT C4FCM where she is developing the 'Open Park' system for collaborative news production.
Twitter: OpenPark
Dawn Garcia is the Deputy Director of the John S. Knight Fellowships, a program that brings 20 journalists to Stanford University annually from around the world for a transformative year focusing on journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. She is also President of the Journalism & Women Symposium, a national organization of women journalists and journalism educators.
Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia - the world's largest and most popular encyclopedia. Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation, Gardner was a working journalist for 15 years, most recently as head of CBC.CA, the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Jessica Goldfin is a Journalism Associate with the Knight Foundation. She graduated from Florida State University in December 2005 with degrees in Art History and Classical Archaeology and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Communication Studies from the University of Miami.
Howard Goldkrand is an artist and cultural engineer working in sound, sculpture, and social media. He is working on a locative media/urban mapping project in Paris this summer.
Twitter: goldzillen
Rich Gordon is associate professor of journalism and director of digital innovation for the Medill School at Northwestern University. He has spent most of his career exploring the intersection of journalism and technology -- via computer-assisted reporting, online publishing, digital product development and, via a News Challenge grant, training technologists in the art and science of journalism.
Twitter: richgor
Paul Grabowicz is Associate Dean, Senior Lecture and New Media Program Director at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to that he spent most of his career as an investigative reporter at the Oakland Tribune newspaper.
Twitter: pgrabowicz
Jennifer Bensko Ha is Executive Director of Digital Media at WNYC Radio.
Twitter: dupkaspike
Gregor Hackmack founded the dialogue and transparency website parlamentwatch.org together with his colleague Boris Hekele in Germany. On parlamentwatch.org citizens can post public questions and recieve public answers.
Vanessa Hamer is the Director of Operations for The Open Planning Project, a non-profit that builds open source tools to get citizens empowered and engaged. www.theopenplanningproject.org
Twitter: vhamer
Keith Hammonds directs Ashoka's News & Knowledge Entrepreneurs program, which identifies and supports innovators around the world whose work promises to better inform, connect, and engage people. He was formerly executive editor of Fast Company magazine.
Twitter: keithhammonds
Tristan Harris, co-founder/CEO of Apture, is interested in entrepreneurship, using technology to unlock the untapped potential of the world's media assets (videos, photos, background materials, documents, maps, slideshows) to generate more empathy in how people understand the world. Our mission to let you "Surf Information at the Speed of Thought" and push the boundaries of previous communication media. Also working to make government data more accessible.
Twitter: tristanharris
Eduardo Hauser, a media entrepreneur and recovering lawyer is the CEO of DailyMe.com, a board member of National Public Radio and the Journalism Advisory Committee of the Knight Foundation. Prior to starting DailyMe he spent 7 years at AOL, where he started the Latin American division, and previously was head of news at Venevision in Venezuela.
Twitter: eduardohauser
Jenne Herbert is Executive Assistant for the Journalism Program at the Knight Foundation. She is a former office manager and executive assistant to the editor in chief and publisher at Media Design Systems, responsible for publishing Florida International Magazine and Architectural Digest's advertorial regional section.
Amanda Hickman is the Director of Technology at Gotham Gazette and Citizens Union Foundation.
Twitter: amandabee
Mako Hill is a scholar, technologist, programmer and free software and free culture activist. He writes software, books and articles is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is a fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media.
Philip Hilts has been a journalist for more than 40 years, with 15 years at the New York Times, 10 years at the Washington Post, and six books published. He is now the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT.
Twitter: philts2
Matthew Hockenberry is a visiting scientist for the Center for Future Civic Media and holds an appointment in the Tangible Media Group as well. He is a researcher particularly interested in the social, technical and philosophical implications of the web.
Twitter: hockendougal
Nicole Hollway, general manager of the St. Louis Beacon, has spent her entire career applying new media to products and communication in industries ranging from Broadway to finance.
Twitter: nicolehollway
Ellen Hume, Research Director of C4FCM, is leaving this summer to become an Annenberg Fellow at Central European University's Center for Media and Communication Studies, Budapest. Also, Publisher, New England Ethnic Newswire www.ethnicnewz.org
Twitter: HUMORus
Alberto Ibargüen is president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Ibargüen is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and of El Nuevo Herald. During his tenure, The Miami Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.
Kimberley Isbell is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She recived her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 2000, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Record and President of the HLS Civil Liberties Union. Prior to joining the Berkman Center, she was an associate at law firms in Washington, DC and Richmond, Virginia.
Twitter: kisbell
Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture. He writes writes regularly about media and cultural change at his blog, henryjenkins.org.
Twitter: henryjenkins
Whitney Johnson is a principal at Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm, which applies the proprietary framework of 'disruptive innovation' to identify investment opportunities. Johnson was formerly an Institutional Investor double-ranked sell-side analyst at Merrill Lynch covering Latin American media and telecom.
Twitter: johnsonwhitney
Colleen Kaman is finishing a masters degree in Comparative Media Studies and is a researcher with the C4FCM. Previously, she worked as a broadcast journalist with CNN and a documentary filmmaker.
Gary Kebbel joined the Knight Foundation in January 2006 as a Journalism Program officer and became Director in March 2008. He was news director at America Online, where he trained and directed the team that built AOL News into the world’s largest online news site. Before that, he helped create USAToday.com and Newsweek.com, and was a home page editor at washingtonpost.com.
Sheila Kim is co-director for Public Insight Journalism.
Roberta F. King is vice president of PR & Marketing at Grand Rapids (MI)Community Foundation. She, along with a team from Grand Rapids Community Media Center are launching a multi media citizen news source later this summer.
Twitter: RobertaFKing
Leila Kinney is Director of Arts Initiatives at MIT and works with the Associate Provost on strategic planning, cross-school collaboration, communications and development for the arts at MIT.
Adam Klawonn is a Phoenix native and award-winning journalist whose company oversees the develop of two digital news projects serving Arizona readers and mass-transit users in Downtown Phoenix. He previously taught online journalism at Arizona State University.
Twitter: zoniereport
Scott Klein is the Editor of Online Development at ProPublica, overseeing news application development and production. He previously worked at The Nation, directing editorial and business application development for the TheNation.com.
Twitter: kleinmatic
Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology at New York University. His first book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, won six scholarly and literary prizes.
Eric Klopfer is associate professor and director of the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. Klopfer's work focuses on the use of games and simulations for learning, with a particular interest in mobile technologies.
Twitter: eklopfer
Ben Koski is a Software Engineer in the The New York Times' Interactive News Technology group. He joined the Times in 2007. He helped lead the Times' 2008 election coverage online and has had a hand in the paper's reader-submitted content efforts.
Joel Kramer is Editor and CEO of MinnPost.com, a not-for-profit startup providing high-quality journalism for Minnesotans on the internet.From 1983 to 1991, Joel was Executive Editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and from 1992 to 1998 he was Publisher and President.
Grant Kristofek is on the development team for Sourcemap.org, an open source tool to help producers, business owners and consumers understand the impact of supply chains. He is a contributor to the development of Sustainable Minds, a new sustainability assessment tool for designers, and serves on the advisory board to Ecolect.net, an online sustainable materials guide and design community.
Twitter: gkristo
Lan Le is a research assistant at the Ed Arcade and is a CMS graduate student.
Twitter: lanxle
Thomas Levenson is Professor of Science Writing and Director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT. His work includes four books, most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter (June, 2009) and 10+ long-form science documentaries.
Twitter: tomlevenson
Jane Levikow Is the Director of External Relations for Tides. She has been involved in non-profit management for over 20 years. Jane has been with Tides for 14 years and has helped create Tides' approach to nonprofit management as a convenor and collaborator in the nonprofit sector.
Josh Levinger trained as an aerospace engineer at MIT and worked in the "real world" for a year after graduation. Upon deciding that he didn't really want to build killer robots for the Defense Department, he joined the Center for Future Civic Media to help build the next generation of tools for activists.
Twitter: jlev
Kenneth Li covers the media business from content to distribution for the paper and website.
Caroline Little is CEO for North America for Guardian News and Media and wasfFormerly was CEO of The Washington Post Company's online division (washingtonpost.com, Slate, Newsweek).
Twitter: chick2
Dianne Lynch is the president of Stevens College in Columbia, Missouri. She is a judge of the Knight News Challenge grant and a member of the Knight Foundation's Journalism Advisory Council.
Twitter: diannelynch
Michael Maness is vice president of Innovation and Design for Gannett Co., Inc. He had been vice president of Strategic Planning for Gannett’s Newspaper Division since February 2006. Maness began his career with Gannett as market development coordinator at the Springfield (MO) News-Leader in 1997. He served as Online and New Media manager at Springfield before becoming director of Online Services at The News Journal in Wilmington, DE.
Ryan Mark recently graduated journalist-programmer from Rich Gordon's project at the Medill school of journalism and worked on the Newsmixer.us project. Ryan is living in Boston area working on various independent web development projects.
Twitter: ryanmark
Danielle Martin is graduating in August as a Masters in City Planning from MIT, working with the MIT@Lawrence university-community partnership to create models for integrating participatory media and digital storytelling into community organizing and development projects with both youth and adults.
Twitter: mizzdmartin
George Martinez is the Director of Information Systems at the Knight Foundation. He leads the foundation’s information systems department and its initiative to achieve Universal Wireless Access in its 26 communities.
Ceasar McDowell is a Professor of the Practice of Community Development @MIT. He is also Director of dropping knowledge international. In both cases his works centers on building tools and techniques for bringing the voice, knowledge and insights of marginalized people into democratic and creative processes.
Twitter: clmcdowell
Michele McLellan is a consultant who specializes in journalism training, organizational development and helping news startups be successful. She is a Circuit Rider with the Knight Community Information Challenge and a leadership consultant and blogger with the Knight Digital Media Center in Los Angeles.
Twitter: michelemclellan
Brein Mcnamara is the Deaf founder of Signcasts. Signcasts is dedicated to the idea of answering the information needs of the Deaf by providing them with equitable access to the tools of citizen journalism using American Sign Language.
Twitter: signcasts
Susan Mernit, this 2008-09 consultant/program manager for the Knight News Challenge, is a former Netscape and AOL VP and a Yahoo! senior director who is now starting her own hyperlocal project, Oakland Local, a community news and information hub launching this fall.
Twitter: susanmernit
Alexa Mills is the Community Media Sprecialist at MIT's Community Innovator's Lab, where she has combined her passion for stories with her passion for bottom-up urban planning. Alexa works directly with communities to develop media that expresses their perspective on various issues.
Loren Newquist works with Foundation Contract Services at Tides, partner to forward-thinking philanthropists, foundations, activists and organizations. He is responsible for financial management of Foundation Contract Services.
Eric Newton is vice president of the journalism program for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Since 2001, he has developed $250 million in grants to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide.
Chris O'Brien is a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News where he writes about business and technology in Silicon Valley. He is also manager of The Next Newsroom Project, which was funded through a News Challenge Grant received from the Knight Foundation in 2007.
Twitter: sjcobrien
Ryan O'Toole is research Assistant in the Computing Culture Group & Fellow at the Center for for Future Civic Media.
Twitter: evlrbot
Ory Okolloh is the co-founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi. She graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School and writes one of the most popular blogs in the Kenyan sphere at Kenyan Pundit.
Twitter: kenyanpundit
Scot Osterweil is the Research Director of the Education Arcade, a research project within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. He has been designing games professionally for over 15 years.
Geneva Overholser is director of the School of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Previously, she held the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting for the Missouri School of Journalism, where she was based in the school’s Washington bureau.
Dan Pacheco is the founder of Printcasting.com, a 2008 Knight News Challenge project for democratized local print publishing. He's been a leader in community and social networking since 1995 at places such as Washingtonpost.com, America Online and Knight Ridder Tribune.
Twitter: pachecod
Mayur Patel is Director of Strategic Assessment and Impact at the Knight Foundation. He is responsible for leading the foundation's research and works closely with program teams and grantees to assess the impact and effectiveness of the foundation's work.
Susan Patterson is the Program Director for Charlotte, N.C. and Myrtle Beach and Columbia, S.C. at the Knight Foundation. She is the former editor and publisher of The Union-Recorder in Milledgeville, Ga
Nora Paul is Director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the Univ. of MN School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She was formerly on the faculty at the Poynter Institute (1991-2000) and editor for information services at the Miami Herald (1979 - 2000).
Twitter: npaul
Daniel Pereira is the Research Manager of the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) - which is part of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) Program at MIT.
Anthony Pesce is a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner in the Young Creator category, and former Editor in Chief of the Daily Bruin at UCLA. He is graduating UCLA with a degree in Geography/Environmental Studies and interning at the Los Angeles Times.
Twitter: anthonyjpesce
Dale Peskin is a media visionist, game-changer, blogger, developer, designer, author, analyst, advisor, teacher, thinker and speaker. He helped pioneer news on the Internet, co-founded the We Media conference, movement and community.
Greg Peverill-Conti has been doing communications for almost 20 years. He now does much more in the social/digital space - professionally, through various organizations and as an individual.
Twitter: gregpc
Aron Pilhofer is co-founder and editor of the Interactive News Technologies team at The New York Times -- a news-focused team of journalist/developers who build dynamic, data-driven applications to enhance The Times' reporting online. He joined The Times in 2005 as a projects editor.
Twitter: pilhofer
Vikki Porter, director of the Knight Digital Media Center at USC Annenberg, develops programs for digitally fluent journalists so good journalism survives the 21st Century.
Twitter: VikkiPorter
Aaron Presnall is a political economist specializing in issues of banking and telecommunications regulatory transition, and the roles of information and participatory politics in regulatory outcomes.
Paul Radu is a Knight International Fellow and consultant working in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. He is project coordinator and co-founder of the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism.
David Reed co-leads the Viral Communications Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, and is a principal in the MIT Communications Futures Program.
Jeff Reifman is currently focusing on building Facebook news community applications and working with researchers to understand news engagement in social networks. He lives in Seattle, Wa.
Twitter: reifman
Mitchel Resnick is a Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Laboratory, and a co-director of the Center for Future Civic Media. My goal: to engage people (especially children) in creative learning experiences, so that they can create new opportunities for themselves and their communities.
Twitter: mres
Nicholas Reville is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), which makes Miro, the free and open video player.
Gail Robinson is editor in chief of Gotham Gazette, an award winning publication on New York City issues that has played a pioneering role in on-line local coverage and in non-profit media. Prior to joining Gotham Gazette in 2000, Gail spent 25 years as print journalist for magazines and newspapers, covering education, politics, the environment and foreign affairs.
Dave Roll is the founder of the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, an organization that calls upon a global network of 160 top tier commercial law firms to provide pro bono legal services to social entrepreneurs, including News Challenge winners and others involved in news and civic media. Dave is also a senior partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, a large Washington DC-based law firm where he practiced antitrust law for many years.
Dharmishta Rood is the co-founder of the Populous Project, aimed at giving student and small town newspapers the tools they need to publish online. She holds a B.A. in Design | Media Arts from UCLA and a masters in education from Harvard.
Twitter: Dharmishta
Margaret Rosas is a technologist who has spent the past 14 years transforming real life situations into web experiences. She is currently navigating the intersection of social media and public radio to craft a user experience that considers both offline and online user engagement.
Twitter: mrosas
Scott Rosenberg is the founder of the MediaBugs project. He cofounded Salon.com and served as its managing editor, wrote for the San Francisco Examiner for a decade, and is the author of two books -- Say Everything and Dreaming in Code.
Twitter: scottros
Gabriel Sama is a blogger, journalist and media consultant. He has worked at the Wall Street Journal and as founding editor of the Rumbo chain of newspapers. He holds a MS in journalism from Columbia University and was selected as a 2010 Knight fellow at Stanford.
Twitter: gabosama
Salimah Samji is Program Manager for Google.org and is focused on transparency and accountability.
David Sasaki is the Director of Rising Voices, a global citizen media outreach initiative of Global Voices Online. He manages a portfolio of small-scale projects around the developing world that use citizen media to effect social change.
Twitter: oso
Jan Schaffer, former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is executive director of J-Lab (J-Lab.org) and a pioneer in the areas of civic journalism, interactive and participatory journalism and citizen media ventures. J-Lab rewards innovations through the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. It funds citizen media start-ups through its New Voices project (J-NewVoices.org) and enterpreneurial startups with its McCormick New Media women initiative. It also publishes e-learning tutorials on J-Learning.org and the Knight Citizen News Network (KCNN.org).
Dennis Scholl is the Miami Program Director for the Knight Foundation. He is responsible for the foundation's initiatives in South Florida, including the Knight Arts Challenge.
Dan Schultz graduated from Carnegie Mellon University this year with a degree in Information Systems. He was a 2007 News Challenge Winner.
Twitter: slifty
Stephen Schultze is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he works on the Media Cloud project.
Brad Seawell coordinates the MIT Communications Forum and helps to coordinate and promote some CMS events.
Joel Selanikio is the co-founder and director of DataDyne.org, and as a practicing pediatrician and software developer has a passion for creating software that sustainably addresses the needs of public health and international development.
Aaditeshwar Seth works in building digital technologies to promote community media in rural areas of developing countries. He is the founder of a social entrepreneurial startup, Gram Vaani Community Media, funded as part of the Knight News Challenge for 2008. He completed his Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 2002, both in computer science.
Zach Seward is assistant editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab, covering developments in online news media. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and Forbes.com.
Twitter: NiemanLab
Tony Shawcross is the Founder and executive Director of Deproduction, a nonprofit media and technology organization. Founded in 2002 as an award-winning video production and training organization, Deproduction has expanded to include a Public Access TV station and training facility, Denver Open Media, and an open-source web-development operation, Civic Pixel.
Twitter: deproduction
Ryan Sholin is completely immersed in online news development, design, and evangelism. Since his start in the industry as a graduate student researching the flow of information through news organizations and the blogosphere, Ryan has made it his mission to help professional journalists get the tools, skills, and inspiration they need to inform their communities on any platform.
Twitter: ryansholin
Trabian Shorters is the Vice President for the Knight Foundation's Communities Program. He is a member of the Executive Committee and is responsible for the foundation’s initiatives in 26 communities across the United States.
Andrew Slack created and directs the HP Alliance, where he uses new media platforms to build a community that reaches tens of thousands of teenagers by connecting the themes in the Harry Potter books to themes of social justice and activism. Andrew has also produced, co-written, and costarred in three videos that have been seen close to 8 million times.
Kevin Slavin is the Managing Director and co-founder of Area/Code. Founded in 2005, Area/Code creates cross-media games and entertainment for clients including Nokia, CBS, Disney Imagineering, MTV, Discovery Networks, A&E Networks, Nike, Puma, EA, the UK's Department for Transport, and Busch Entertainment.
Twitter: areacodeinc
Josh Stearns is Program Manager at Free Press a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media through education, organizing and advocacy. He directs campaign activities related to the future of journalism and media consolidation.
Twitter: jcstearns
Paul E. Steiger is the editor-in-chief and chief executive of ProPublica, a non-profit, non-partisan investigative journalism team launched in January 2008 and based in New York. He is also the chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based non-profit and a trustee of the Knight Foundation.
Howard Stevenson serves as chair of National Public Radio as well chair of Harvard Business School Publishing. He is the Sarofim-Rock Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and has served three times as a senior associate dean at HBS as well as vice-provost of Harvard University including major stints in charge of fundraising.
Polly Talen is the Program Director for Duluth and St. Paul, Minn. at the Knight Foundation. She is the former senior vice president of nonprofit and foundation partnerships for DoTheGood Inc., an online philanthropy company, and longtime senior program officer at the Dayton Hudson Foundation.
Kristen Taylor is the Online Community Manager for the Knight Foundation. She leads the foundation's efforts to build online communities and direct the development of Knight Forum, a new social networking site focusing on transformation. She was formerly the associate director of content and social media at PBS Interactive.
Eric Umansky is a senior editor at ProPublica, where he oversees daily reporting. Previously, Umansky wrote Slate’s “Today’s Papers.” He has also written frequently on national security issues and has studied Arabic in Damascus, Syria. Earlier in his career, Umansky was editor of MotherJones.com.
Twitter: ericumansky
Anna van Someren is Creative Manager for project New Media Literacies (NML) at MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS).
Twitter: newmedia4change
Katrin Verclas is the co-founder of MobileActive.org, a global network of people using mobile technology for social change. She is also a 2009 fellow at the MIT Media Lab, and runs a mobile technology company.
Twitter: katrinskaya
Leslie Walker is the Knight Visiting Professor in Digital Innovation at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Previously, she was a technology columnist for The Washington Post and editor of washingtonpost.com in the early days of Web news.
Twitter: leswalker
Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist and artist. He is the founding manager of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, which researches new forms of visualization and how they can enable better collaboration. The lab’s latest project is Many Eyes, an experiment in open, public data visualization and analysis. Wattenberg's work focuses on visual explorations of culturally significant data.
Andrew Whitacre is Communications Manager for the Center for Future Civic Media and the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.
Twitter: akwhitacre
Lisa Williams is the founder of Placeblogger.com, the largest searchable directory of local weblogs. Lisa is also the creator of H2otown.info, a nationally recognized example of a citizen journalism/community site and on the board of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
Twitter: lisawilliams
Ivan Willig is currently an Outreach engineer for OpenGeo, the mapping division of The Open Planning Project.
Todd Wolfson is a founding member of the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia, a Knight News Challenge Winner. He is also an incoming assistant professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University.
Twitter: mediamobilizing
Sarah Wolozin is Associate Director of the Center for Future Civic Media.
Katie Wright manages grantmaking and community initiatives, as Programs Manager at The Park City Foundation. A 2007 Community Information Challenge winner, she is working on a Community Footprint Website project.
Twitter: katherinedynes
Alyssa Wright is technologist working in the realm of design, theory and society. She is currently an outreach engineer at OpenGeo, an open source geospatial company and a research affiliate at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, where she continues to develop the positive action application, Hero Reports.
Sara Wylie is co-director of the ExtrAct Project and a graduate student in MIT's Science Technology and Society program.
Christina Xu is a recent graduate of Harvard College, where she majored in History of Science and wrote a thesis about instant messaging. She has been doing a little bit of everything for the ExtrACT project for over a year.
Twitter: chrysaora
Sarita Yardi is interested in how local communities of Twitter users share news and information. She is looking at what kinds of community exists among people who are tweeting from the same cities: do they trust one another more, do they tweet about the same topics, and to what extent do their follower circles overlap?
Twitter: yardi
Owen Youngman is Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University and was formerly senior vice president / strategy, Chicago Tribune. He launched chicagotribune.com, metromix.com, and RedEye.
Twitter: YoungOwen
Jose Zamora joined the Knight Foundation in February 2007 as a Communications assistant and was promoted to Journalism Program Associate in October 2007. Jose, a journalist and former news executive with elPeriodico in Guatemala City, Guatemala, has a law degree from Universidad Francisco Marroquin and a master's degree in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin.
Alexander Zolotarev is a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner and spent 2007-2008 in NYC as a Fulbright Scholar at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, writing a disertation on citizen journalism. He now works on SochiReporter, a website about the Russian city of Sochi preparing for hosting 2014 Winter Olympics.
Twitter: zanderzolotarev
Ethan Zuckerman is the co-founder of Global Voices, an international citizen media community. He is a senior researcher at the Berkman Center at Harvard and a fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media.
Twitter: ethanz
David Zwarg is a GIS software developer at Avencia, and has over nine years of experience in internet application design and deployment. He develops web and desktop-based mapping solutions with a mixture of proprietary and Open Source mapping frameworks.
