Reinventing Journalism and Yourself

 Meet the Panelists

Joshua Benton is director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, an effort to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet era. Before spending a year as a 2008 Nieman Fellow, he worked for a decade as a newspaper reporter and occasional foreign correspondent, most recently at the Dallas Morning News, where he won a top prize from Investigative Reporters and Editors and five first-place national awards. He began blogging during the Clinton years and coded his first web pages in 1994.

Marcela Garcia became the editor of El Planeta in April 2007, but has been a part of its news staff since February 2005, when she started writing as an intern. She has over 10 years of experience in journalism, including stints at Grupo Reforma and The Dallas Morning News, both in Monterrey, Mexico, her hometown; and as a freelance writer for the Boston Globe and other local news outlets. She moved to Boston in 2002 to attend the Harvard Extension School, where she received a graduate degree in journalism in 2005. Marcela also holds a B.S. degree in Economics.

Dan Gillmor is an internationally recognized leader in new media who is the founding director of the Knight Center at ASU. A longtime Silicon Valley-based journalist, Gillmor wrote a popular business and technology column for the San Jose Mercury News and launched a weblog in 1999, a site believed to have been the first mainstream journalism blog. In 2004, he published We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, the leading book on citizen journalism. He also directs the Center for Citizen Media, a project to expand grassroots media.

Sandeep Junnarkar is the former New York bureau chief of CNET News.com, and has specialized in writing about technologies used in different industries. In April 2003, his three-part report on the security risks of online banking was named “Best in Business Projects among Real-Time Publications” by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Junnarkar helped to create online editions of The New York Times, working as breaking news editor, writer, and Web producer when the paper went live on the Internet as The New York Times on the Web. Junnarkar is founder and editorial director of www.livesinfocus.org, a multimedia Website that features stories on underreported issues. In recent years, Sandeep has served as a judge for the National Magazine Awards and Online Journalism Awards. He has given talks or led discussions about Social Media and Online Journalism at The Council on Foreign Relations, Columbia University’s Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, and the Online News Association. In January 2008, he was elected president of the South Asian Journalists Association. He received a B.A. in Social Science from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Dan Kennedy, Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, teaches news reporting, media law and other journalism courses, with an emphasis on blogging, social media and technology. He writes a weekly online column for The Guardian and is a contributing writer for CommonWealth Magazine and the Boston Phoenix.  Kennedy is also a regular panelist on Beat the Press, a weekly media roundtable on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). A former media critic for the Phoenix, he is the 2001 recipient of the National Press Club's Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism. In both 2008 and 2009, he was a finalist in the Syracuse University Mirror Awards for his Guardian commentaries on media issues. He is the author of Little People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, 2003), a book about the culture of dwarfism.  His blog, Media Nation, is online at medianation.blogspot.com. Kennedy received his bachelor's degree in journalism from Northeastern University and his master's degree in American history from Boston University. From 1979-'88, he was a reporter and editor for the Daily Times Chronicle, in Woburn, Mass.

Harold S. Lewis is the Business Development Officer for the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University and also a Distinguished Lecturer of Professional Practice for the Department of Communication with KSU.  Previously, Lewis spent eight successful years with The Weather Channel Companies most recently as Vice-President and General Manager of The Weather Channel Interactive Consumer Application Software business.  Prior to this role, Lewis was Vice President and General Manager of The Weather Channel Radio and Newspaper Syndication business for three years.  Lewis began his career with The Weather Channel Inc. in 2001 as Director of Strategy and Corporate Development.  After obtaining his Masters in Business Administration in Finance from Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business, Lewis worked with Accenture for seven years providing I.T. and strategic consulting services and solutions to Fortune 100 sized companies.  After his successful stint with Accenture consulting to Telecommunications and Financial Services companies while rising through the ranks from Staff Consultant to Experienced Manager, Lewis worked with three Internet/technology start-up companies beginning with Cox Interactive Media in 1996 as their Business Development Manager where he helped drive awareness and use of their web sites by negotiating content and commerce related deals.  Lewis later was one of the initial employees of mp3radio.com, a joint venture of Cox Interactive Media and mp3.com, as its Director of Web Site Services where he led the customer service effort providing web site content, commerce, and digital music services to its 150 AM & FM radio station clients enabling them to drive visitors to and revenues from their web sites.  Lewis then joined Internet incubator eLaunchpad where as Vice-President of Product Development, he worked closely with technology entrepreneurs to rapidly prototype, launch, and generate revenues for their e-commerce websites.  Prior to obtaining his MBA, Lewis was an Advertising Account Executive with the Atlanta Journal Constitution which he joined after obtaining his Bachelor of Arts degree with a concentration in Economics from Harvard University. 

Persephone Miel is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at The Harvard Law School here she directs the Media Re:public project, examining the impact of participatory journalism on the information environment. Prior to joining Berkman, she spent more than 12 years with Internews Network,  an international NGO supporting independent media around the world. She designed and managed a variety of projects to support the growth of non-state news media, including TV, radio, print and online outlets, in the former Soviet Union and participated in program design and development for Internews projects in other parts of the world. Persephone lived in Moscow from 1992 to 1998. From 1993 to 1994, she was the host of an English-language morning news show there.

Geanne Rosenberg, a journalist and attorney, chairs Baruch College's new Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions and directs the Harnisch Collaborative Projects at Baruch. In addition, she teaches media law and journalism ethics at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism and Baruch College. She authored and produced Knight Citizen News Network's Top Ten Rules for Limiting Legal Risk  and the recently launched Citizen Journalist's Guide to Open Government, and co-authored the Poynter Institute's News University course Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Online Publishers. Prior to joining City University of New York, she taught as an adjunct at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Her journalism experience ranges from local community coverage through journalistic projects on complex national and international issues, including work as a business and legal journalist covering law, accounting, technology, media, regulatory issues and many other topics.  Her articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines including Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and The National Law Journal.  She has a J.D. from Columbia University's School of Law, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar; an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; and a B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College. 

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and holds fellowships with both the Berkman Center for Internet and Societ at Harvard University and the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman calls Doc "one of the most respected technology writers in America." J.D. Lasica, author of  Darknet and proprietor of Our Media, calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement." In 2005, Doc won the Google O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator. At the Berkman Center, Doc leads Project VRM which has the immodest ambition of liberating customers from entrapment in vendor silos and improving markets by creating a productive balance of power in relationships between supply and demand. At CITS, his work centers around study of the Internet as a new form of infrastructure. As a writer, Doc's byline has appeared in OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, Release 1.0, The Globe & Mail and many other publications. Doc has been a keynoter, a featured speaker or a panelist at countless events and trade shows: Digital ID World, O'Reilly's OSCON and Etech conferences, eCom eXpo, Les Blogs, Le Web, Reboot, Samtelerne, Supernova, LinuxWorld Expo, National Chamber of Commerce, CES, Comdex, Desktop Linux Summit, Linux Lunacy Geek Cruises, Gnomedex, BloggerCon, First Tuesday/Zurich, JabberCon, PC Forum, Seybold, Syndicate and Demo. He is also a figure in the "unconference" movement, in which he helps organize the twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshops.  Doc also has a consulting practice with The Searls Group, which has worked with Hitachi, Sun, Apple, Nortel, Borland, British Telecom, Motorola and other leading companies, in addition to many start-ups.

Lisa Williams is the founder and CEO of Placeblogger.com, the largest searchable directory of local weblogs and winner of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge Award. She also serves on the board of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and works as a consultant for an array of media clients.
Before Placeblogger, she launched H2otown.info, a nationally recognized example of a citizen journalism community site, covering and talking about Watertown, MA. She also worked at Boston.com, the online wing of The Boston Globe, on online community, social networking, and blogging. Prior to moving into online local media, she was director of the Enterprise Software research group at Yankee Group and Daratech. 

Leonard Witt holds the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University and was named an Eminent Scholar by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia in May 2008. With $1.5 million in new funding from the Harnisch Foundation, he is the founder of the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University. The Center will advance research aimed at discovering innovative ways to produce financially sustainable, high quality and ethically sound journalism. The Center will produce applied research, build collaborations and advance innovative projects to test the viability of community-supported journalism. Witt’s scholarship centers around civic and citizen journalism represented by his First Monday peer-reviewed paper: “Constructing a Framework to Enable an Open Source Reinvention of Journalism.” He conceived Representative Journalism, a new model, enabling communities to hire their own journalists. He has received continuing funding from The Harnisch Foundation to test this community-supported journalism project in Northfield, MN. Other funded projects include Blog2Learn, helping teachers blog, and the year long Journalism and the Public: Restoring the Trust project funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. He has organized major academic conferences for the AEJMC, including one at Kennesaw State University and others in Toronto and San Antonio and co-sponsored the Journalism that Matters summit in Washington, D.C. His annual SoCon, social media, social networking conference at Kennesaw State draws about 300 metro Atlantans representing marketing, blogging, new and traditional media, academia, public relations, human resources and executive ranks. He was a journalist for more than 25 years, including being editor of Sunday Magazine at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Minnesota Monthly magazine. Before entering academia in 2002, he was the executive director of the Minnesota Public Radio Civic Journalism Initiative. He blogs at PJNet.org.

Suzanne Yada is a social media strategist and steering committee member at The Public Press, a non-profit non-commercial news outlet in San Francisco where she works in many aspects of the organization, including devising a plan for social media integration, helping with business and strategic planning, blogging, and designing marketing and fundraising materials.  She has also assisted the Society of Professional Journalists NorCal chapter in putting on events, designing marketing materials and using social media to gather comments from the public. She is also a copy editor for SHiFT, a San Jose State University-based magazine distributed to social entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, a blogger for San Jose Metblogs, a network of hyperlocal blogs and an active Twitterer who was named one of the top 10 journalists on Twitter by prominent blogger Mark Luckie at 10,000 Words. Previously, she worked as the managing editor for the Global Media Initiative, a group of 20 SJSU students who traveled to London and Paris in March 2009 to gain international reporting experience.