Stowe Boyd is an internationally recognized authority on social tools and their impact on media, business, and society. He works as an analyst, advisor, futurist, and researcher, and is principally known for his writing at /Message, his blog. He has spoken widely on the “social revolution” as he calls it, at venues such as Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0, Next, mesh, Reboot, 140 Characters, Lift, Les Blogs, Shift, Futuresonic, Defrag, Supernova, and many others. He is also the founder and president of Microsyntax.org, a non-profit dedicated to research surrounding emergent information structures of the real time stream.
David Cohn has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times. While working toward his master’s degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Cohn worked as the editor at newassignment.net, which focused on citizen journalism and ways news organizations could explore the social web. Cohn also worked with Jeff Jarvis from Buzzmachine.com to organize the Networked Journalism Summit. He has been a contributing editor at NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit media literacy tool and news filter. Most recently Cohn is the founder of Spot.Us a nonprofit to pioneer “community funded reporting.”
Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students appreciate the startup culture of risk-taking, and to foster new media products and services.
Dan is also director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. The center is an affiliate of ASI and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” (O’Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens’ media and why it matters.
From 1994 until early 2005 Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During 2005 he worked on media projects at Grassroots Media Inc.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont, Gillmor received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.
Bill Grueskin is the Dean of Academic Affairs for The Journalism School at Columbia University.
Grueskin began his journalism career in 1975 as a reporter and editor at the Daily American in Rome, Italy. From 1977 to 1979, he served as a VISTA volunteer and the founding editor of the weekly Dakota Sun on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
After completing graduate school, he worked as a reporter and editor at the Baltimore News American and the Tampa Tribune. In 1985, he moved to the Miami Herald and eventually became city editor, where he oversaw the paper’s local coverage of Hurricane Andrew. The paper’s overall coverage of the storm won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service.
Grueskin joined The Wall Street Journal in 1995 as an editor on Page One; he was named deputy Page One editor in 1998, responsible for such coverage areas as the changing stock market, welfare reform, race and business, and the internet economy.
In June 2001, he was named managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, the largest subscription news site on the Web. He oversaw the staff in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, across the street from the Journal’s offices. During his tenure at the Online Journal, the number of subscribers doubled to more than one million. The site also introduced numerous features, including blogs, interactive graphics, podcasts and a robust video platform.
In 2007, he was named deputy managing editor/news for The Journal, overseeing 14 domestic news bureaus, and combining the print and online news-editing desks in New York and New Jersey.
Mr. Grueskin has a bachelor’s degree in classics from Stanford University and a master’s degree in international economics and U.S. foreign policy from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He has served on various community boards, and also has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror in the public-service and features categories.
Jack Lail is Director of News Innovation for The Knoxville News Sentinel, whose primary sites are knoxnews.com and GoVolsXtra.com. He started developing successful editorial and business models for digital news products in 1994, beginning with a newspaper operated dial up bulletin board system. Due to his knack for hiring extremely talented people, the News Sentinel’s sites have won numerous national and regional awards and are considered among the more innovative newspaper-run Web sites. He is a board member of the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), a member of the Society of Professional Journalists Digital Media Committee and is a past board member of the Newspaper Association of America’s Digital Media Federation. Before focusing on digital strategies, Lail held various reporting and editing positions with the Knoxville newspaper and small dailies in his native North Carolina. He writes a personal blog at jacklail.com.
Howard Owens is publisher of The Batavian, an online-only news site in Batavia, N.Y. He was the Director of Digital Publishing for GateHouse Media, Inc. from 2006 to 2009. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. He’s been a daily and weekly reporter and editor, as well as a community news publisher. In 1995, he co-founded East County Online, the first web site in the U.S. serving a group of weekly newspapers. Between 1999 and 2005, he worked for the Ventura County Star, becoming director of new media in 2004. The Star won numerous awards for its web sites during those six years, including a General Excellence award from the Online News Association. In 2005, Howard was named VP of Interactive Media for the Bakersfield Californian. Bakersfield.com went on to win the Inland Press Association’s first-ever General Excellence award in 2006. Howard was a member of the NAA’s Digital Media Federation board of directors and served as the chair of the Federation’s audience development committee. Howard blogs about newspapers on the web at howardowens.com.
Beth Parke is executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists, an educational membership organization of more than 1400 journalists, educators and students in the US and 32 other countries. Founded in 1990, SEJ works to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of news reporting on environment-related issues through programs and services designed by journalists, primarily for journalists. Parke also serves on the executive committee of the Council of National Journalism Organizations. Prior to joining SEJ she produced, hosted and syndicated award-winning radio series as well as programming for National Public Radio affiliates in Philadelphia and Boston. Parke earned her B.A. from Boston College and her M.A. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she studied with the legendary George Gerbner and Robert Louis Shayon. Always a futurist, Parke’s 1979 thesis studied the feasibility of an audience driven video delivery system. She believes in the future of public service journalism and its essential value to local audiences worldwide.
