Knight Foundation
Election Meeting
Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami Beach
Oct. 27-28, 2011
Attendees
Bill Adair - PolitiFact
Bill Adair is the creator and editor of PolitiFact, which won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2009. He also serves as the Washington Bureau Chief for the St. Petersburg Times. He's worked in Washington since 1997 and has covered Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, national politics and aviation safety. Adair is the author of "The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation," a behind-the-scenes account of how the National Transportation Safety Board solved one of the biggest mysteries in aviation. He is the winner of the Everett Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress, the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award and the Manship Prize for New Media in Democratic Discourse. He lives in Arlington, Va. with his wife and three children.
Erica Anderson - Twitter
Erica Anderson (@EricaAmerica) is a member of Twitter’s content team. She recently launched Twitter for Newsrooms and focuses on helping journalists and news organizations use Twitter as a tool to find sources faster, tell stories better, and build bigger audiences. Prior to Twitter, Erica worked as Katie Couric’s digital strategist at CBS News. She has also worked as a citizen journalist for MTV and as a top-rated CNN iReporter. Erica holds a xx from the Indiana University School of Journalism.
Emily Bell – Columbia University
Emily Bell was director of digital content for Britain's Guardian News and Media from 2006 to 2010. Previous to that post, Bell was editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited from 2001 to 2006. Under Bell, the Guardian received numerous awards, including the Webby Award for a newspaper website in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009, and British Press Awards for Website of the Year in 2006, 2008 and 2009. Bell first joined the Observer newspaper, which became part of Guardian News and Media, in 1990, as a business reporter specializing in media business, marketing and technology. Bell is a leading media commentator in the U.K., writing about broadcasting and media policy issues. She is a 1987 graduate of Christ Church, Oxford University, where she earned a master's degree in jurisprudence.
Cody Brown – Kommons/Nerd Collider
Cody Brown is the founder of Scroll and has spent the past three years applying emerging technology to online journalism projects. In college, he founded a project called NYU Local that went on to become the most trafficked publication at the school. His current startup is a new publishing framework that helps editors create powerful visual layouts and lead high quality discussions.
Bill Buzenberg - Center for Public Integrity
Bill Buzenberg is Executive Director of the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C. He served for 27 years in public radio, as Vice President of News for National Public Radio, as well as NPR’s London bureau chief. He was responsible for launching Talk of the Nation, the expansion of All Things Considered and NPR’s 24-hour newscast service. He was also Senior Vice President of News at American Public Media where he launched American RadioWorks and Speaking of Faith. He also began the Public Insight Network, an innovative use of technology to draw knowledge from the audience. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Buzenberg has had fellowships at the University of Michigan, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Dante Chinni - Patchwork Nation
Dante Chinni is the director of the Patchwork Nation project, a Knight Foundation-funded collaboration including the PBS NewsHour, the Christian Science Monitor and public media affiliates that studies politics, socio-economics and culture in a time of change. Patchwork Nation won a 2009 Knight Batten Award for journalistic innovation and is the focus of "Our Patchwork Nation" from Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin.
Based in Washington, D.C., Chinni has been covering politics and the media for more than 10 years. He has worked as a reporter-researcher at Newsweek and a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He has written for publications including The Economist, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal and Columbia. A native of metro Detroit and a graduate of Michigan State University, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Christina, and their two children.
Steven Clift – E-Democracy
Steven Clift is an online innovator focused on the use of the Internet in democracy, governance, and community. For almost two decades he has worked to fundamentally improve democracy, community building, and citizen participation through social media online. He is the founder and executive director of E-Democracy.org. While this effort created the world's first election information website in 1994 in Minnesota, today the effort he leads builds inclusive and effective online participation at the neighborhood level in three countries. A serial social entrepreneur recognized as an Ashoka Fellow, BeNeighbors.org and the Inclusive Social Media project working in low income, high immigrant neighborhoods are two of his current priorities. He has spoken across 30 countries from Iceland and Libya to Mongolia and Kenya on government and citizen use of the Internet to improve democracy and build community. Steven Clift is married with two small children and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can follow Steven via http://stevenclift.com and @democracy on Twitter.
Adam Conner – Facebook
Adam Conner is the Associate Manager for Public Policy in Facebook¹s Washington DC office, where he focuses on government and political outreach and directed the company's election efforts in 2008, 2010 and 2012. In 2009 Politics Magazine named him one of their ³Rising Stars,² in
2010 MSNBC named him to the BLTWY Power List: 35 people under 35 who changed DC in 2010, and in 2011 the Diplomatic Courier named him one of the "Top 99 Most Influential International Professionals Under 33." Prior to opening Facebook's Washington DC office, Adam was the Director of Online Communications for Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, Chairwoman of the Rules Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He previously served as the Deputy Director of Online Communications for Forward Together, the presidential exploratory committee for former Virginia Governor Mark Warner. Adam holds a bachelor¹s degree in political communication from the George Washington University and hails from Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Hannah Eaves – Link TV
Hannah Eaves, Vice President/Digital & Engagement, oversees Link TV’s Internet operations, managing design, engineering and new technology development. While at Link she has overseen the creation of ViewChange.org, a video platform for stories of progress in the developing world, and Link News (news.linktv.org). She also recently coauthored the white paper Link News: A Case Study of Young Online News Users. Prior to Link TV, Hannah worked for 10 years as an interactive multimedia producer, video producer and video editor for clients including Tower Records, Kaiser Permanente and Blockbuster. As a journalist she has covered the convergence of film, TV and the tech world for publications including SOMA Magazine, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of
Documentary Film, Alternet, GreenCine, PopMatters, and SF360.
Maya Enista Smith - Mobilize.org
Maya Enista Smith joined the Mobilize.org team in 2005 as Chief Operating Officer. Today, she is the Chief Executive Officer of a growing and innovative Millennial organization that seeks to improve democracy by investing in Millennial-driven solutions.
Maya began her non-profit career 8 years ago as the East Coast Coordinator for Rock The Vote at age 17. Through her work with Rock The Vote, Maya registered over 30,000 young people and was awarded the "Rockin' The Street's" award.
Maya grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey and studied Political Science and Urban Studies at Rutgers University. She currently resides in Washington DC.
Seth Flaxman- TurboVote
Seth founded TurboVote while receiving a Master’s in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He previously worked as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations (where he founded CFR's annual capture the flag game), a program administrator at the Institute for International Education, and a berktern at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. While earning a B.A. in economics at Columbia University, Seth served as student body president, leading the student council in successfully lobbying Columbia to reform its financial aid policies.
Erika Fowler- Wesleyan University
Erika Franklin Fowler (Ph.D, University of Wisconsin – Madison) is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, where directs the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks and analyzes all political advertisements aired on television in real-time during elections. Fowler specializes in political communication - local media and campaign advertising in particular - and her work on local news coverage of politics and policy has been published in political science, communication, law/policy, and medical journals. Prior to arriving at Wesleyan University, she spent two years as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan and five years as the Research Director of the University of Wisconsin NewsLab, one of the largest and most systematic local TV tracking projects ever conducted. She also serves on the ABC News Election Night Decision Desk and frequently gives talks to health journalists about how to improve their reporting.
David Gehring - YouTube
David leads News Content Partnerships for Google at YouTube. In this role, David works closely with news organizations of all sizes on everything from content strategy to distribution and monetization. Prior to Google, David was an entrepreneur and consulted news media organizations on digital product and business development strategy.
Roshi Givechi – IDEO
Roshi Givechi is a Design Director and Associate Partner at IDEO, and currently serves as Co-Lead of IDEO San Francisco. With roots in communication and new media design, she works toward deeper engagement with clients and other stakeholders through all forms of storytelling. Fascinated with exploring and redefining how people interact with objects, brands, spaces, services and one another, she particularly thrives on crafting the "right" stories in the "right" channels for the "right" audiences. She believes IDEO's insight-based angle on communication design and narrative form has impact at different junctures of the design offering, from the depiction of a strategic vision to build internal momentum early on, down to the tangible expression of a branded experience.
Roshi has co-taught cross-disciplinary design at the California College of the Arts, spoken at conferences, designed websites at Microsoft and MSNBC in her past life, and coached clients on ways to innovate through IDEO workshops. Her clients include American Refugee Committee (IAmAStar.org Somalia campaign), AT&T Wireless, Bank of America (leading to “Keep the Change”), Forest City, the Gap, the Kauffman Foundation (Revitalizing 18th & Vine), Nokia, NASA, Ritz-Carlton, Steelcase, TSA with Northrop Grumman, as well as United Media (Dilbert’s Ultimate Dream Cubicle). In January 2009, she was profiled in I.D. Magazine's "I.D. 40" list as one of 40 leading design innovators. (The magazine folded that same year, as did her window for envisioned fame and fortune.)
In her previous work experience, Goldfin interned in the publications department at the Art Institute of Chicago, worked as an archaeological data analyst at the Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation and excavated in Chianti, Italy and Petra, Jordan.
Joe Goldman - Omidyar Network
Joe Goldman leads Omidyar Network’s efforts to improve civil discourse in the United States. His work is critical to Omidyar Network’s overarching goal to empower individuals to hold their governments to account.
Joe has spent his career working to strengthen democratic institutions through public deliberation and policy reform. Most recently, he served as the interim executive director at the Campaign for Stronger Democracy, a coalition that encourages collaboration among a wide array of democracy reform advocates. Previously, Joe was Vice President of Citizen Engagement at AmericaSpeaks, where he directed and consulted on some of the largest public deliberations in the world, including the New Orleans recovery plan after Hurricane Katrina, post-9/11 redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, and the creation of a regional economic agenda for Northeast Ohio. Joe has also managed citizen engagement programs from inside government, working for the Executive Office of the Mayor in Washington, D.C. and the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission in Chicago. A leader in the field of public deliberation, Joe has trained federal managers, legislative staff, and public officials on engaging the public and has written and spoken about the need for more open, collaborative government.
Joe was a Public Service Fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he received a masters in public policy. He earned a BA in political science from Vassar College.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson - Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Jamieson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the International Communication Association. She is the author or co-author of 16 books including: The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Messages Shaped the 2008 Election (Oxford University Press, 2010), Presidents Creating the Presidency (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford, 2008) and unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (Random House, 2007). Dr. Jamieson has won university-wide teaching awards at each of the three universities at which she has taught and political science or communication awards for five of her books.
Burt Herman – Storify
Burt is founder of Hacks/Hackers,worldwide organization bringing together journalists and technologists. He previously reported from around the world for The Associated Press over a 12-year career, six of those in news management as a bureau chief and supervising correspondent. He headed AP's office in Korea, and also founded a bureau covering the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia.
Burt was a Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, a program for distinguished journalists selected for a year of study. While there, he completed coursework at the Graduate School of Business, Institute of Design and Computer Science department. At Stanford, he also co-founded a workshop on Redesigning Journalism at the Institute of Design.
Burt is a graduate of Stanford University, where he received a B.A. with honors in political science and M.A. in Russian and East European studies.
Elise Hu - NPR
Elise is the Digital Editorial Coordinator of NPR's new StateImpact project. A Texas native, she helped launch The Texas Tribune, a non-profit online news startup devoted to government and politics.
While at the Tribune, Elise oversaw television partnerships and multimedia projects; contributed to The New York Times' expanded Texas coverage and pushed for editorial innovation across platforms. Her work in 2010 earned a Gannett Foundation Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism and a National Edward R. Murrow award for best online video.
She previously worked as the state political reporter for KVUE-TV in Austin, WYFF-TV in Greenville, SC and reported from Asia for the Taipei Times. She earned her bachelors in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Ben Huh - Cheezburger
Ben Huh is the CEO and founder of Cheezburger. He's a former journalist turned dot com entrepreneur who has a knack for nailing the zeitgeist and has been credited with bringing Internet memes to the mainstream and popularizing Internet culture. The success of Cheezburger is attributed to Ben’s knowledge of memes, viral content, and crowd sourcing. Ben graduated with a BSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Charlie Mahtesian – Politico
Charles Mahtesian is Politico's national politics editor. He came to Politico after five years as the executive editor of National Journal's Almanac of American Politics, the biennial book often
referred to as "the bible of American politics."
Prior to joining the Almanac, he spent eight years as a national correspondent for Governing magazine, where he covered state legislatures, governors and urban politics.
He began his career reporting on elections and congressional redistricting for Congressional Quarterly, where he was also a contributing writer to the books "Politics in America" and "Congressional Districts in the 1990s."
Mahtesian has served as an election night analyst for National Public Radio and appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including NPR's "All Things Considered," MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews,"and on FOX News, C-SPAN, CNN and the BBC.
He has written for a variety of newspapers, journals, and magazines including The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, National Journal, Congress Daily, Government Executive, and Campaigns and Elections.
He earned his bachelor's degree in politics from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and his J.D. from American University.
Lori McGlinchey – Open Society Foundations
Lori McGlinchey is senior program officer for the U.S. Transparency and Integrity Fund of the Open Society Foundations. She is responsible for grantmaking in several areas, including media and broadband policy, journalism, access to information, and government transparency. She has also overseen grantmaking related to the politicization of science based policymaking.
McGlinchey joined the Open Society Foundations in September 2000 and served as program officer for the Project on Death in America until the program closed in 2004. She also served as assistant director of U.S. Programs. She serves on the steering committee of the Media Democracy Fund and on the board of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media. She is a graduate of Amherst College.
Ellen Miller - Sunlight Foundation
Ellen S. Miller is the co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. She is the founder of two other prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics -- the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign -- and a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics. Her experience as a Washington advocate for more than 35 years spans the worlds of non-profit advocacy, grassroots activism and journalism.
Ms. Miller’s work has recently been featured in Government Technology ("Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers in Public Sector Innovation," March 2011), Washingtonian Magazine (“100 Tech Titans,” May, 2009), Fast Company, (“The Most Influential Women in Technology,” January, 2009), WIRED Magazine (“15 People The Next President Should Listen To,” October, 2008), The Chronicle of Philanthropy (“Seeking Online Exposure,” January, 2008). Ms. Miller also served as deputy director of Campaign for America's Future, was the publisher of TomPaine.com and was a senior fellow at The American Prospect. She spent nearly a decade working on Capitol Hill. She blogs regularly at SunlightFoundation.com.
Bryan Monroe – CNNPolitics.com
Bryan Monroe is the Editor of CNNPolitics.com. Monroe leads the editorial planning and content strategy for CNN's online and mobile political coverage from the network’s Washington, D.C. Bureau. Most recently, Monroe was a visiting professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and is a former president of NABJ, the National Association of Black Journalists. Monroe also served as Vice President and Editorial Director at Ebony and Jet magazines in Chicago. At the magazines, he led the coverage of the 2008 presidential elections, conducted the first interview with then President-elect Barack Obama following his November victory; and also had the last major interview with pop star Michael Jackson before his death in 2007. As asst. Vice President/News at Knight Ridder, he helped lead the team at the Biloxi (Miss.) Sun Herald that won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
Raju Narisetti - The Washington Post
Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) is Managing Editor of The Washington Post where he is responsible for all of the Post's online/mobile content and strategy as well as Social, Engagement and Interactivity teams. He also manages its photo, graphics, video, and design teams. Prior to joining the Post in January 2009, he was the founding editor of Mint, a business daily newspaper and website in India, published by HT Media Ltd in collaboration with The Wall Street Journal. Earlier, he spent 13 years at The Wall Street Journal, where he was the Editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe and Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal USA. He earned a BA in Economics and Sociology from Osmania University, Hyderabad, and a postgraduate diploma in Management from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He also holds a postgraduate diploma from the Times of India School of Journalism, New Delhi, and an MA in Journalism from Indiana University. Raju is on the board of the World Editors Forum.
Kara Oehler – Zeega
Kara Oehler is a Peabody award-winning audio documentarian, a 2011-2012 Radcliffe/Film Study Center Fellow and co-founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard, a hub for media innovation. Oehler is co-creator of: Zeega, an open-source HTML5 platform that allows anyone to easily create works of interactive journalism; Mapping Main Street, a collaborative documentary that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos; Yellow Arrow: Capitol of Punk, an interactive documentary that was featured in MoMA’s exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind”; and the UnionDocs Collaborative, a laboratory for documentary arts research and production.
Eli Pariser
Eli Pariser is the former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, and the organization's current Board President.
Pariser's rise to prominence as a political activist began when he and college student David H. Pickering launched an online petition calling for a nonmilitary response to the attacks of September 11th. (At the time, he was working as a program assistant for the national nonprofit More Than Money.) In less than a month, half a million people had signed the petition and in November of that year, Moveon.org founders Wes Boyd and Joan Blades asked Pariser to join their organization.
During the 2004 US Presidential Election, Pariser co-created the Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest and raised over $30 million from small donors to run ads and back Democratic and progressive candidates. Writing for The New York Times Magazine in 2003, journalist George Packer referred to MoveOn as the "mainstream" element of what "may be the fastest-growing protest movement in American history."
Pariser noticed a pattern of differing responses to search engine queries based on a user's past Internet search history, such that people with a liberal orientation would get one set of responses while conservatives might get an entirely different set of responses, if a person used Google or Facebook or Yahoo to search for a specific phrase or term on the Internet. For example, a liberal typing "BP" might get information about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, while a conservative typing "BP" might get investment information about the oil company. This led to his development of the concept of a filter bubble which he described in a book in which he argued that there was a danger that people would not get exposed to viewpoints different than their own.
Maribel Perez Wadsworth- Gannett
Maribel Perez Wadsworth is digital news executive in the Gannett U.S. Community Publishing Division Corporate News Department. She works with Gannett Information Centers to help guide the continuing evolution of digital journalism and innovation in new technologies. Her role is to be a champion of quality journalism across all platforms. Wadsworth serves as liaison with Gannett’s Digital Division, Broadcast Division and ContentOne on collaborative initiatives. She will also oversee and champion USCP Information Centers’ commitment to diversity.
She began her journalism career as a news assistant for the Associated Press in Miami in 1994. She joined Gannett as a reporter for the Rockford Register Star in 1996, transferring to The Fort Myers, Fla. News-Press the next year. In Fort Myers, Wadsworth held various positions over 12 years from reporter to Managing Editor/Digital & Custom Content.
B.S. News-Editorial Journalism and English Literature, University of Miami.
Aaron Presnall - Jefferson Institute
Aaron Presnall is Director of Studies at the Jefferson Institute. A political economist, Presnall specializes in the role of participatory politics in regulatory outcomes. In addition to scholarly works and popular opinion pieces, he has written on the business and political environment of Europe for the Economist Intelligence Unit, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and numerous private and governmental organizations in Europe and the United States. Before founding the Jefferson Institute in 2003, he served with the EastWest Institute for seven years in Prague, then in Belgrade as EastWest’s regional director of Southeast Europe. He earned a Ph.D. in politics from the University of Virginia.
Andrew Rasiej – Personal Democracy Forum
Andrew Rasiej is a serial social entrepreneur and founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website about the intersection of technology, politics, government and advocacy. He is also the co-founder of TechPresident.com<http://techPresident.com/> an award winning blog that covers how the White House, the federal government, and Congress are using the web, and how technology is empowering new levels of citizen engagement throughout the United States. He is the founder ofMOUSE.org<http://MOUSE.org/>, a not for profit focused on 21st century public education, co-founder ofMideastwire.com<http://Mideastwire.com/>, which translates Arabic and Farsi news and opinion pieces into English, and serves as Senior Technology Advisor to the Sunlight Foundation a Washington DC based organization focused on using technology to help make government more transparent and accountable. He also serves as Chairman of the NY Tech Meetup, a 20,000 member organization of technologists, venture funders, marketers, etc. representing the start up, technology, and innovation industry in New York City. He also coined such terms as: We-Government, Voter-Generated Content, and Videracy, to help describe the expanding digitally connected world we all now live in.
Elspeth Revere - MacArthur Foundation
Elspeth Revere is Vice President of Media, Culture, and Special Initiatives of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her responsibilities include support for media in a technologically changing environment; a changing set of special initiatives; arts and culture in Chicago; grants in response to special opportunities, and the Foundation's program of institutional grants.
Revere joined the Foundation as a program officer in 1991. She was promoted to Associate Director of the program in 1992, to Director in 1998 and to Vice President in 2006. Prior to joining the Foundation, she was President of the Woodstock Institute, a nonprofit policy research organization working to increase private sector investment in low-income neighborhoods, Director of Program Development for the city of Chicago's Department of Housing, and a Senior Planner in the Department of Development and Planning. She has also worked on community development projects in Guatemala.
Revere holds a master's degree in urban policy and planning from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago.
Patrick Ruffini – Engage
Patrick Ruffini is a political strategist whose work has helped define the convergence of new media and politics for more than a decade. Ruffini is currently a partner at Engage, an interactive public affairs firm he founded in 2007. He has helped Presidential candidates, Fortune 10 companies, leading think tanks and advocacy organizations navigate today's open and participatory online ecosystem. Ruffini’s analysis of emerging political trends and digital media has been featured by the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, PBS MediaShift, Newsweek, the National Review, Townhall magazine, Fox News Channel and C-SPAN's Washington Journal. Ruffini is a 2000 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and currently resides in the Washington, D.C. suburbs with his wife and adorable twin daughters.
Jason Rzepka – MTV
Jason Rzepka is vice president of public affairs at MTV, the #1 global youth brand. His charge, quite simply, is to use MTV’s superpowers for good. Jason does this by marshaling the network’s forces to engage and activate America’s youth on the biggest challenges facing their generation. He is responsible for the strategic direction of all of MTV’s “pro-social” campaigns, including the boundary-shattering, Peabody-winning “It’s Your (Sex) Life,” with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has reached over 200 million young people on sexual health issues; Emmy-winning “Choose or Lose,” which has helped drive the largest youth voter turnouts in U.S. history; and Webby-winning “A Thin Line,” which has inspired over 1 million young people to draw their own line between digital use and digital abuse (all forms of digital bullying, dating abuse and discrimination).
Dan Schultz – MIT Media Lab
Dan Schultz is a second year graduate student at the MIT Media Lab studying in the Information Ecology group. At the lab he is a Research Associate at the Center for Civic Media, where he is developing his thesis topic: "Just-in-time Media: Automatic Incorporation of Context and Primary Sources for an Augmented Media Experience." Before coming to the lab Dan received an undergraduate degree in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about "Connecting People, Content, and Community" on the PBS Idea Lab.
Natalie Jomini Stroud – University of Texas at Austin
Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the Assistant Director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation at the University of Texas at Austin. She researches the intersection of media and politics. Her book, Niche News: The Politics of News Choice (2011, Oxford University Press), explores the use and consequences of likeminded media use.
Lisa Tozzi – The New York Times
Lisa Tozzi is a deputy editor on the national desk of The New York Times working on the Web and print report. She joined the Times in early 2000 as a politics producer and held various positions over the past 11 years, including deputy culture editor and assistant editor on the politics desk overseeing The Times’s coverage of the 2008 election on the Web.
Prior to coming to The Times, Lisa was the assistant politics editor and a reporter for The Austin Chronicle in Texas, and a reporter covering central New Jersey for The News Tribune. A 1992 graduate of Rutgers University, she lives in New York City with her husband and dog.
Conor White-Sullivan - Localocracy
Conor is the director of Editorial Technology for Aol Huffington Post Media Group, where he focuses on developing products that engage readers in new ways across HPMG properties. Previously he was the CEO and Co-Founder of Localocracy, an online town common for local civic engagement. Localocracy was funded by the Knight Foundation and were the winners of the Poynter Promise in Entrepreneurial Journalism, and were acquired by Huffington Post in 2011. Conor speaks frequently on the internet and democracy, in 2011 he was named a Champion of Change by the Obama Administration.