Jim Benning

Writer, editor

Jim Benning began his writing and editing career as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register, covering politics, crime and human interest stories. While at the Register, he landed a magazine assignment that took him to the Adirondack Mountains to write about competitive lumberjacks — men, mainly, who chop wood not because it needs to be chopped, but simply to see who can do it the fastest. Benning spent several days eating stacks of pancakes and learning about the nuances of axe handles and chainsaws. He loved it. Hopped up on maple syrup, he quit his job to freelance for magazines.

Since then, for stories for all kinds of publications, he's learned to bullfight; surfed off Bali; visited Fiji in the midst of a coup; kayaked with humpback whales off Maui; backpacked around China; explored the dangers of urban runoff; profiled environmental activists and academics; and hung out with the writers of the Onion.

In essays, he's celebrated the joys and challenges of communicating abroad; meditated on the subtle ways that wanderlust takes hold; explored the global impact of the publishing company Lonely Planet; and, for an audio essay for public radio’s The Savvy Traveler, commented on an unexpected encounter in a small town in Malaysia.

In 2001, frustrated with the dearth of outlets for literary travel writing, Benning cofounded the online travel magazine World Hum. The site features a daily weblog and publishes some of the Internet’s best travel writing. Its stories have been featured in Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Travel Writing anthology and it has won Lowell Thomas awards from the Society of American Travel Writers, including, in 2006, the gold award for best Internet site. Publications far and wide, from Newsweek International and Men’s Journal to the San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, have praised World Hum.

The Travel Channel acquired World Hum in May 2007. Since then, Benning has been working on the site, as well as TravelChannel.com, full-time.

Back to top

Joann Biondi

Freelance writer, author

Joann Biondi has worked as freelance writer for over 20 years. She began her journalism career as an obituary writer for the Miami Herald. Fortunately, she learned a lot while working the Dead Beat and is happy to report that it is much, much easier to write about living, breathing people.

For about 10 years she wrote primarily about travel, publishing ten guidebooks and hundreds of articles in dozens of publications including The New York Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, USA Today, National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, Travel + Leisure, Islands, Conde Nast Traveler, Caribbean Travel and Life, and Cooking Light. As well as writing a great deal about Florida, her travel assignments took her to Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Martinique, The Cayman Islands, Dominica, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Italy, France, Finland, Holland, Russia, Poland, Honk Kong, and Thailand.

In recent years she switched gears and now mostly writes profiles, biographies, and oral histories. She has interviewed countless people from all walks of life including Nobel laureates, Zen masters, presidents, musicians, athletes, architects, airline pilots, ship captains, farmers, fishermen, racecar drivers, strippers, comedians, and murderers. This year she published an oral history about the early days of NASCAR. In 2006 her book Miami Beach Memories: A Nostalgic Chronicle of Days Gone By was published.

Along with writing, Biondi has taught at both Miami-Dade College and Florida International University.

Back to top

Tom Cash

Executive Managing Director, Kroll Business Intelligence and Investigations division

Thomas V. Cash is an expert in a variety of investigative and intelligence services, including international anti-narcotics matters, money laundering, corporate fraud, internal investigations, due diligence, bank fraud and kidnapping and ransom matters. He is an Executive Managing Director of Kroll’s Business Intelligence and Investigations division in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to his regional work, Mr. Cash has overseen complex investigative matters in Europe, the Middle East and Africa where his fluency in German has been beneficial.

Prior to joining Kroll, Mr. Cash held executive positions in the U.S. Justice Department’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for over twenty five years. He served as Special Agent in charge of DEA’s Florida and Caribbean Division, the largest DEA office in the world. He has participated in many international Money Laundering conferences and he is currently serving on several banks Advisory Boards.

Back to top

Damien Cave

Miami bureau chief and former Iraq war correspondent, The New York Times

Damien Cave became the New York Times' Miami bureau chief in March. In 2006
and 2007 he was a Baghdad correspondent for the Times, writing extensively
about Iraqi daily life and the impact of the American troop surge. He was among the team of Times' reporters in Iraq who were finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in International reporting. He and Diana Oliva Cave, a video journalist, and his wife, also led a video and multimedia project assessing more than a dozen Baghdad neighborhoods, which won the 2007 Overseas Press Club award for best international coverage on the Web. Prior to joining the New York Times, he was a staff writer and editor at Rolling Stone magazine and at Salon.com. Raised in Worcester, Mass., he has a B.A. from Boston College and an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Back to top

Diana Oliva Cave

Freelancer, contributor for the New York Times

Diana Oliva Cave is a video and multimedia journalist working primarily for the New York Times. Currently a regular Times contributor and freelancer based in Miami, she spent all of 2007 working in the Times' Baghdad bureau, as part of the team that was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her video work from Iraq has been shown on NBC Nightly News and was honored with a 2007 Overseas Press Club Award for best international coverage on the Web. Before joining the New York Times, she worked in post-production on independent films and at Focus Features in New York. The eldest daughter of Cuban immigrants, Diana grew up in New Jersey, Mexico City, Miami and Chicago; she has a B.A. from Boston College and an M.F.A. in film from Columbia University.

Back to top

Roy Peter Clark

Writing coach, The Poynter Institute

Roy Peter Clark has a Ph.D. in medieval literature and is widely considered one of the most influential writing teachers in the rough-and-tumble world of newspaper journalism. He has gained fame by teaching writing to children, and he has nurtured Pulitzer Prize-winning writers such as Thomas French and Diana Sugg. He is a teacher who writes, and a writer who teaches. That combination gives his most recent book, "Writing Tools," a special credibility.

More credibility comes from Clark's long service at The Poynter Institute. Clark has worked full-time at Poynter since 1979 as director of the writing center, dean of the faculty, senior scholar and vice president.

Clark was born in 1948 on the Lower East Side of New York City and raised on Long Island, where he attended Catholic schools. He graduated from Providence College in Rhode Island with a degree in English and earned a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1977 Clark was hired by the St. Petersburg Times to become one of America's first writing coaches. He worked with the American Society of Newspaper Editors to improve newspaper writing nationwide. Because of his work with ASNE, Clark was elected as a distinguished service member, a rare honor for a journalist who has never edited a newspaper.

Clark is the author or editor of 14 books on journalism and writing.

Back to top

Eric Deggans

TV/Media Critic, St. Petersburg Times

Born in Washington D.C. but raised in Gary, Ind., Eric Deggans came to the St. Petersburg Times after serving as music critic for the Asbury Park Press newspaper in New Jersey. He also held municipal reporting jobs at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Press newspapers in Pennsylvania. His work also has appeared in the Washington Post, Village Voice, VIBE magazine, Detroit News, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Seattle Times, Hispanic magazine, Newsmax magazine, Smart Computing magazine, Rolling Stone Online and the MusicHound series of album guides.

Eric serves as TV/Media Critic for the Times, a position he assumed - or, resumed -- in August 2006. The job is a modification of a position he assumed in August 2005 as Media Critic, filling a job the newspaper created specifically for him. Before serving as media critic, he sat on the newspaper’s editorial board and wrote bylined opinion columns, specializing in race issues, pop culture, media and national affairs. From 1997 to 2004, he worked as TV critic for the Times, crafting reviews, news stories and long-range trend pieces on the state of the media industry both locally and nationally.

A Times employee since November 1995, he originally joined the paper as music critic. Now serving as president of the Tampa Bay area chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and the alumni board of the Indiana University School of Journalism, he has also served on the board of directors for the national Television Critics Association and on the board of the Mid-Florida Society of Professional Journalists.

In 2008 and 2005, he was selected to lecture at Columbia University’s prestigious Graduate School of Journalism as a winner of the school’s Let’s Do It Better! Awards honoring coverage of race and ethnicity. He also was invited to speak at the 2008 National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis and the 2008 UNITY: Journalists of Color Convention in Chicago, Ill. In 2008, he also won top honors in criticism in the Society of Professional Journalists Sunshine State Awards, and in 2007 was given first place honors in Minority News reporting by the Florida Press Club. In 2005, he spoke at the National Critics Conference in Los Angeles and won top honors for commentary writing in the National Association of Black Journalists’ Chuck Stone Awards. A recipient of a 2003 ethics fellowship at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, he served as an instructor in the program the following year. As a past vice president at NABJ chapters in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, he spearheaded creation of minority affairs reporting positions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper in 1993 and the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press newspaper in 1994. He has also developed a training program on racial sensitivity for recruits at the Pennsylvania State Troopers Academy.

As a guest lecturer and adjunct professor, he has taught at the University of Tampa, the University of South Florida, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg College, Indiana University and many other schools. Additionally, he worked as a professional drummer in the 1980s, touring and performing with Motown recording artists The Voyage Band throughout the Midwest and in Osaka, Japan. He continues to perform with area bands and recording artists as a drummer, bassist and vocalist. He has contributed as a pundit or essayist to many media outlets, including: CNN’s "Reliable Sources"; CNN Headline News; Fox News Channel’s "Hannity and Colmes" and "Fox and Friends"; CBS Radio; MSNBC; CBS' Public Eye blog; "The Tavis Smiley Show" (Black Entertainment Television); "Morning Edition," "All Things Considered," "Tell Me More" and "News and Notes" (National Public Radio); "Livelyhood" and "The Calling" (PBS); and "Crosscurrents" (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). Eric has also appeared on a host of local and regional TV and radio shows.

Eric and his wife Barbara live in St. Petersburg with their four children, a dog, a cat, and a house they lovingly call "the Money Pit."

Back to top

Jane Dystel

President, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management

Jane Dystel has been an agent since 1986. Her publishing career began at Bantam Books. She then moved to Grosset & Dunlap, where she was a managing editor and later an acquisitions editor. From there, she went on to become Publisher of World Almanac Publications, where she created her own imprint.

When she joined the agency that would soon become Acton and Dystel, Inc., she quickly developed a reputation for honesty, forthrightness, hard work, and real commitment to her authors and their writing careers. In 1994, with a growing roster of clients, she founded Jane Dystel Literary Management, which became Dystel & Goderich Literary Management in 2003.

Born in Chicago, Jane grew up in Rye, New York. She is the daughter of publishing legend, Oscar Dystel, who is currently a consultant for DGLM. In her teens, she was an accomplished figure skater.

Jane received her BA from New York University and attended Georgetown law school for one year before leaving for her first job in publishing. She has an abiding interest in legal subjects.

She is married to Steven Schwinder and has a daughter, Jessica, and a son, Zachary. She lives in New York City with her family and two dachshunds and is a tenacious golfer.

For more information, check out www.dystel.com

Back to top

Mark Fainaru-Wada

Author, Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports and reporter for ESPN

Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams were reporters on the investigative team at the San Francisco Chronicle. Together, they broke a series of exclusive stories on the BALCO scandal and earned a string of national honors, including the George Polk Award, The Edgar A. Poe Award of the White House Correspondents’ Association, The Dick Schaap Excellence in Sports Journalism Award and The Associated Press Sports Editors award for investigative reporting.

Fainaru-Wada has written on subjects including the expanding influence of sports agents; scam artists using athletes to lure investors into bogus business ventures; and the controversial owners of the Golden State Warriors and San Francisco 49ers. Besides BALCO, his work has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors and the Best of the West competition, as well as by various local associations.

Born in California, he graduated from Northwestern University. Before joining The Chronicle, he worked as a reporter at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the Los Angeles Daily News, the National Sports Daily, Scripps Howard News Service, and the San Francisco Examiner. He now works for ESPN.

Back to top

Carlos Frías

Sports writer, Palm Beach Post

Carlos Frías is a natural observer who spent his formative years as a journalist traveling the South, primarily as a sports reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This “Southern Fried Cuban” has known the country on an intimate level, painting portraits of America’s most recognizable sports figures and reporting on the hotly debated topics in sports.

Frías, today a special projects reporter for The Palm Beach Post, says he is “assembled in America from Cuban parts.” As a child, he observed life from beyond The Border. A South Florida native who grew up just north of the Dade-Broward County line, Frías gained the perspective of a boy born of Cuban exiles, but raised among the “gringos.” He learned from watching the lights of Little Havana glitter in the distance and hearing the stories of Cuba stitched together in three decades of anecdotes.

Fully bilingual, he travels easily between those worlds and brings his unique cultural sense to his writings. In 2006, he journeyed through Cuba, where he reported a five-part series of first-person stories about his family for which he was named the Best of Cox Writer of the Year. The Post submitted his series for consideration for the Pulitzer Prize, and Simon and Schuster will publish his book, “Take Me With You,” based on the series, in November of 2008.

The Associated Press Sports Editors have awarded him eight top-10 awards in the past five years for his work on in-depth features and investigative stories, including a first-place finish in 2007. Previously, a three-day Journal-Constitution series that examined the deaths of five high school athletes was a Pulitzer Prize entry in 2003. The project spurred the state high school association to mandate standardized physicals for athletes and sparked a non-profit program to check for genetic heart disorders. Frías, 32, resides in Pembroke Pines, Fla., with his wife, Christine, and three daughters, Elise, Amelia and Catalina. Read more at www.cfrias.com

Back to top

Colin Harrison

Author

Colin Harrison is a writer and editor. He is the author of six novels,
the most recent of which is The Finder, published last April by Farrar,
Straus & Giroux. His books include The Havana Room, Afterburn, and
Manhattan Nocturne, and have been published in a dozen countries. For
fifteen weeks from May until August of this year, his serial, "Mrs.
Corbett's Request," appeared each week in the New York Times Sunday
Magazine. Other periodical pieces have appeared in the New York Times
Book Review, New York Magazine, Men's Journal, Vogue, and other
publications.

Harrison was an editor at Harper's Magazine for twelve years, the last
six of which he served as Deputy Editor. At Harper's he worked with
David Foster Wallace, Jonathon Franzen, David Guterson, Joyce Carol
Oates, Jane Smiley, Russell Banks, Paul Theroux, Katie Roiphe, David
Quammen, and dozens of other well known American writers. Since 2001, he
has served as Vice President/Senior Editor at Scribner, an imprint of
Simon & Schuster. There he edits books of fiction and non-fiction and
has worked with such best-selling writers as Anthony Swofford, Craig
Unger, Linda Fairstein, Greg Iles, Rick Perlstein, Ted Fishman, and many
others. A graduate of Haverford College and the University of Iowa
Writers Workshop, he periodically taught fiction-writing at Columbia
University for ten years.

For a review of Colin Harrison's book 'The Finder,' click here.

Back to top

Diana B. Henriques

Investigative financial reporter, The New York Times

Diana B. Henriques joined The New York Times in October 1989 as a financial reporter and specializes in financial fraud, white-collar crime and corporate governance issues.

Ms. Henriques was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting and received three other major awards - the 2005 George Polk Award for Military Reporting, the 2005 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the 2004 Worth Bingham Prize - for her articles on the fleecing of young soldiers by insurance and investment companies, a series that led to investigations, Pentagon regulatory changes and congressional hearings for legislative reforms.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Ms. Henriques worked with then Metro reporter David Barstow on the paper’s coverage of the management of billions of dollars in charity and victim assistance as part of The Times’ award-winning “A Nation Challenged” section, and chronicled the fate of Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm that suffered the largest death toll in the attacks.

Ms. Henriques was a member of a team that won the 1999 Gerald R. Loeb Award for deadline reporting, in the large newspaper division, for coverage of the near-collapse of Longterm Capital Management, a hedge fund whose troubles rocked the financial markets in September 1998. She was also one of four reporters honored for a 1996 series on how wealthy Americans can legally side-step taxes; the four reporters were finalists, in the large newspaper division, of the 1996 Gerald R. Loeb Award, and were winners of the large newspaper division prize for investigative reporting awarded by the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists.

Before joining The Times, Ms. Henriques worked for Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, a Dow Jones publication, from 1986 until 1989. While at Barron's, she handled news and feature assignments that spanned the financial scene, from precious metals to corporate profiles; her investigative reporting uncovered a variety of investor fraud and shareholder abuses in both the United States and the Canadian markets. She was a finalist in the magazine division of the 1987 Loeb awards for her examination of the explosive growth in the world's gold supply.

From August 1982 until June 1986, Ms. Henriques was a business writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, covering public finance and economic issues in the United States and abroad. In January 1985, she began covering Wall Street as The Inquirer's New York financial correspondent.From 1976 until 1981, Ms. Henriques worked as an investigative reporter and state government reporter for The Trenton (N.J.) Times. Her articles about the state's housing finance agency, Economic Development Authority and state prison medical system prompted several criminal prosecutions and statewide reforms.

From 1974 until 1976, she worked as a copy editor for the Palo Alto (Calif.) Times, and from 1971 until 1974 as a local and state government reporter for the Asbury Park Press (N.J.).

Ms. Henriques is the author of "The Machinery of Greed: Public Authority Abuse and What to Do About It," (Lexington Books, 1986); “Fidelity’s World: The Secret Life and Public Power of the Mutual Fund Giant,” (Scribners, 1995); and “The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders,” (Scribners, 2000).

Ms. Henriques is a 1969 graduate of George Washington University, Washington, D.C. She graduated with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, majored in International Affairs and was a General Motors Scholar. She now serves as chairwoman of the International Advisory Council of the university’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

In early 2001, Ms. Henriques served as an adjunct professor in the master’s program in business journalism at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York, and is a frequent lecturer for the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at the American Press Institute in Reston, Va. She has also been elected to the Board of Governors of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) and is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). Diana has won numerous awards for -- and made a difference with -- her investigative projects at the Times, Barron's, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Trenton (NJ) Times.

Back to top

Sandeep Junnarkar

Professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Sandeep Junnarkar is an Associate Professor of Journalism at The City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. He teaches interactive journalism, and reporting and writing.

Sandeep at the Freedom Foundation in Hyderabad. From March 2000 to August 2003, Sandeep was the New York bureau chief at CNET News.com, writing special reports on the strengths and weakness of the various technologies used by different industries. Prior to being promoted to bureau chief, he was a reporter for CNET News.com beginning in July 1998.

Sandeep entered the online journalism world at its infancy in 1994 as part of a team gathered to present The New York Times on America Online, a service called @times. He later became a breaking news editor, writer and Web producer when the paper went live on the Internet as The New York Times on the Web.

In April 2003, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers selected his three-day report titled “Cracking the nest egg” as Best in Business Projects Among Real-Time Publications. The series was also a finalist in the Investigative Reporters and Editors contest in June 2003. His special reports have won multiple South Asian Journalism Assocation Journalism Awards and an Online Journalism Award from the Online News Association and Columbia University.

He received a Masters in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia in 1994. He completed his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He was the recipient of the 2002 SAJA-Knowledge@Wharton scholarship to attend the prestigious Wharton Seminars for Business Journalists.

Sandeep has been a board member of the South Asian Journalists Association since 2003.

Back to top

Gary Kebbel

Journalism program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Gary Kebbel is the journalism program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, Fla. In that role, Kebbel administers the Knight News Challenge, a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to create community in a given geographic area. At Knight Foundation, Kebbel also has helped create the Knight Citizen News Network and the Knight Digital Media Center.

Kebbel directed the growth of AOL News into one of the largest news sites on the Internet, with an audience of up to 24 million people each month.

Kebbel is a Fulbright Senior Specialist in online journalism, which has allowed him to consult about the creation of a digital media curriculum in the Journalism Department at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa. He has been a trainer at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, and have consulted for various media clients, including edweek.org, helping take the site from a free to a hybrid site with premium paid content.

At AOL, Kebbel also was the director of the largest election and politics site on the Internet and the largest government consumer portal, Government Guide.

He was the front-page editor of Washingtonpost.com during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, including President Clinton’s impeachment in the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate.

Kebbel is a founding editor of USA TODAY.com and Newsweek.com.

He was deputy editor of USA TODAY.com and directed its political coverage during the 1996 presidential election – the first covered by Internet news sites.

Before moving into the online world, Kebbel was the graphics editor at USA TODAY during the Gulf War, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Kebbel is an award-winning teacher and experienced public speaker.

Click here to read his blog about current issues in journalism.

Back to top

Jonathon King

Author

Jonathon King is the creator of the Max Freeman crime series set in the Everglades and the hard streets of urban South Florida. He was a police and court reporter for 24 years with the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and the Philadelphia Daily News before turning full-time novelist.

In 2002 his first book, The Blue Edge of Midnight, won an Edgar Allen Poe Award which is considered the Oscar, Grammy, Obie of crime mystery writing. Of his novel Shadow Men, The Miami Herald said: “King has succeeded in writing a thriller with very little blood and gore, relying instead on a solid, well-paced plot and real, believable characters who persevere in spite of numerous obstacles, both physical and psychological. Sounds a bit like literary fiction, and that’s not far off the mark.”

King’s fifth novel, Eye of Vengeance, was his first standalone project and features a newspaper reporter as the protagonist. “I basically cannibalized my cop reporting days and fictionalized several true crime episodes into a fictional depiction of the worst of the worst I’d seen as a real reporter,” King said. “I’ve written seven novels and all have some basis in my experiences as a reporter.”

Back to top

Chauncey Mabe

Books editor, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Chauncey Mabe grew up in Southwest Virginia, where he fell in love with reading in order to learn more about dinosaurs, little suspecting he'd eventually become one himself. A fiercely proud autodidact, he always says he learned everything school had to teach him by the fourth grade, after which he shifted his educational attention to the library. His hero is George Bernard Shaw, who once declared that his biggest achievement was never working an honest day after the age of 20. Mabe feels the same way, as journalism is far too much fun to be considered work. Following an indifferent collegiate career at three separate institutions, he dropped out as a fifth-year sophomore to take a job as assistant to the women's page editor at the Daily Banner of Cleveland,Tenn., where, a few months later he was appointed police reporter and discovered his life's calling. He went on to the Jupiter Courier-Journal, the Palm Beach Evening-Times, and the Palm Beach Post. He came to the Sun-Sentinel in 1986, after a short stint of magazine editing with the now-defunct Halsey Publishing Co. of North Miami. For nearly 20 years, Mabe has written book reviews and literary features as the Sun-Sentinel's books editor. He's also written general cultural criticism, and helps out with TV, movies, and popular music, especially country and western, which, with its penchant for story songs, he considers the most literary of all musical genres.

Back to top

Mindy McAdams

Knight Chair of journalism technologies and the democratic process and Professor at the University of Florida

Mindy McAdams wrote the book Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages, which was published in 2005 by Focal Press/Elsevier. She teaches production and theory courses about interactive media and online journalism. She conducts online and multimedia journalism training for news organizations all over the United States. In 2004-05 she was a traditional Fulbright Scholar on a teaching/research grant in Malaysia for eight months.

A pioneer in online newspapers, she was No. 15 on the Online Journalism Review's list of 50 "Names to Know" in new media in 1998. She joined the UF faculty in 1999. Previously she was the Web strategist at the American Press Institute; an information design and online news consultant in North America and abroad; and the first content developer at Digital Ink, The Washington Post's first online newspaper. For 11 years she worked as a copy editor — on The Washington Post's Metro desk, at Time magazine, at a technology business newspaper, and at Dell Publishing in New York.

She is also co-author of the book The Internet Handbook for Writers, Researchers and Journalists (1997, 2nd ed. 2000, 3rd ed. 2002), published by Guilford Press.

Back to top

William McKeen

Professor and Chair University of Florida Department of Journalism

William McKeen is the author of Outlaw Journalist, Highway 61, Rock and Roll is Here to Stay and several other books about American music and popular culture. He is professor and chairman of the University of Florida Department of Journalism and was a newspaper reporter and magazine editor before beginning his teaching career. His next book is a collection of stories about childhood in Florida. He is a father of seven and lives with his wife Nicole, a magazine editor, on a small horse farm near Wacahoota, Florida.

Back to top

Judy Miller

Managing Director, Kroll Business Intelligence and Investigations division

Judy Miller is a managing director in Kroll’s Business Intelligence and Investigations division. In this capacity, Judy is responsible for managing a wide range of cases throughout the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America. Judy has over 20 years experience investigating public corruption for newspapers. She spent three years as managing editor, news and features reporter of the Miami Herald prior to joining Kroll in 2006. She and her team were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for an investigation she led of voter fraud in the Miami mayor’s race in 1999.

Back to top

Barbara Parker

Author

Barbara Parker gave up a career in the law to create fictional attorneys. Best known for her "Suspicion" series set in Miami, she has penned non-series novels as well, earning a place on the New York Times best-seller list. In her latest mystery, The Dark of Day, a lawyer with too many secrets is caught in the spotlight of a celebrity murder on Miami Beach. With an M.F.A. in creative writing from Florida International University, Parker has given guest lectures aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, conducted seminars at writers’ conferences, and has spoken to civic and professional groups. She lives a short walk from the ocean in South Florida.

Back to top

Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, The Miami Herald

Leonard Pitts, Jr. joined The Miami Herald in 1991 as its pop music critic. Since 1994, he has penned a syndicated column of commentary on pop culture, social issues and family life. His book, Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood, was released in May, 1999 and is being reissued in paperback in June of 2006.

Pitts has been writing professionally since 1976 when, as an 18-year-old college student, he began doing freelance reviews and profiles for SOUL, a national black entertainment tabloid. Two years later, he was its editor. In the years since then, Pitts' work has appeared in such publications as Musician, Spin, TV Guide, Reader's Digest and Parenting. In addition, he wrote, produced and syndicated "Who We Are," an award-winning 1988 radio documentary on the history of Black America, and has written and produced numerous other radio programs on subjects as diverse as Madonna and Martin Luther King, Jr. Pitts was also a writer for radio's popular countdown program, Casey's Top 40 with Casey Kasem.

Pitts was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. In 1997, Pitts took first place for commentary in division four (newspapers with a circulation of over 300,000) in the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors' Ninth Annual Writing Awards competition. The Society of Professional Journalists, the National Association of Black Journalists and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, have honored him. He is a five-time recipient of the National Headliners Award. In 2001, he received the American Society of Newspaper Editors prestigious ASNE Award For Commentary Writing and was named Feature of the Year Columnist by Editor and Publisher magazine. In 2002, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists awarded Pitts its inaugural Columnist of the Year award. Also in 2002, GLAAD Media awarded Pitts the Outstanding Newspaper Columnist award.

In 2003 and 2004, Pitts was a visiting professor teaching journalism at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. In 2005-2006 he was a journalism professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Twice each week, millions of newspaper readers around the country seek out his rich and uncommonly resonant voice. In a word, he connects with them. Nowhere was this demonstrated more forcefully than in the response to his initial column on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Pitts' column, "We'll Go Forward From This Moment," an angry and defiant open letter to the terrorists, circulated the globe via the Internet. It generated upwards of 30,000 emails, and has since been set to music, reprinted in poster form, read on television by Regis Philbin and quoted by Congressman Richard Gephardt as part of the Democratic Party's weekly radio address.

Leonard Pitts was born and raised in Southern California. Since 1995, he has lived in Bowie, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D. C., with his wife and five children.

Back to top

Les Standiford

Historian, novelist

Les Standiford is the author of the critically acclaimed 'Last Train to Paradis'e and 'Meet You in Hell,' as well as ten novels. Recipient of the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, he is director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University in Miami, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Back to top

Laurel Touby

Founder and CEO of MediaBistro.com

Laurel Touby started her career at Working Woman, moved on to Business Week as a staff editor, and in 1993 began editing and writing a column on workplace issues for Glamour. She has covered everything from travel to business to breast cancer for a variety of publications, including New York, Travel + Leisure, Self, Redbook, McCall's, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Working Mothe, and the New York Daily News. Born in Oahu, Hawaii, Laurel grew up in Miami (before South Beach existed) and graduated from Smith College with a degree in economics.

Back to top

Gene Weingarten

Columnist and feature writer at the Washington Post

Gene Weingarten is a staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine. He has been at The Post since 1990, initially as the editor of the Sunday Style section. From 1984 to 1990, Weingarten was the editor of Tropic, the Sunday magazine of The Miami Herald. A college dropout, Weingarten was somehow awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1987.

Weingarten's weekly humor column, "Below the Beltway," is nationally syndicated, and his weekly chat on washingtonpost.com, "Tuesdays With Moron," attracts a large and demented following. He is the author of three books, "The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death" (Simon & Schuster, 1998); "I'm With Stupid" (with Gina Barreca, Simon & Schuster, 2004); and "Old Dogs" (Simon & Schuster, scheduled for fall 2008). Weingarten lives in Washington D.C. with his wife, Arlene Reidy, who is a federal prosecutor. The couple have two grown children.

Back to top

Lance Williams

Author, Game of Shadows and reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle

Lance Williams is a reporter on the investigative team at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he helped break many of the newspaper's exclusive stories on the BALCO steroid scandal. With Mark Fainaru-Wada, he wrote Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports.

In 2006, Williams and Fainaru-Wada were held in contempt of court and threatened with 18 months in federal prison for refusing to testify about their confidential sources on BALCO. After litigation and Congressional intervention, the subpoenas were withdrawn.

Williams has reported on subjects including the California cocaine trade, Oakland's Black Panther Party and the career of San Francisco mayor and political power-broker Willie Brown. His journalism has been honored with the George Polk Award; the Edgar A. Poe Award of the White House Correspondents' Association; the PEN-USA First Amendment Award; the Gerald Loeb Award for financial writing; the California Associated Press' Fairbanks Award for public service; and, on three occasions, the Center for California Studies' California Journalism Award for political reporting. He was the Society of Professional Journalists' Northern California Journalist of the Year in 1999 and in 2006.

Born in Ohio, he graduated from Brown University and the University of California-Berkeley and attended University College, London, U.K. Before joining the Chronicle, he worked as a reporter at the Hayward Daily Review, the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner.

Back to top

Sponsored by:

			The Poynter Institute