Jacqui Banaszynski
Pulitzer Prize winner and Knight Chair in Editing, University of Missouri School of Journalism
Jacqui Banaszynski holds the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism and is on the visiting faculty of The Poynter Institute. She has worked as a reporter and editor for more than 30 years, most recently as Associate Managing Editor of the The Seattle Times, where she was in charge of special projects and staff development.
She spent 18 years as a beat and enterprise reporter, then worked as a projects editor at newspapers in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. While at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, her series "AIDS in the Heartland" - an intimate look at the life and death of a gay farm couple - won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and a national SPJ Distinguished Service Award.
She was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting for coverage of the Ethiopian famine, and won the national AP Sports Editors deadline writing contest with a story from the 1988 Summer Olympics.
Her work has exposed a fraudulent developer, explored the plight of Kurdish refugees in Iraq and followed a dogsled expedition across Antarctica.
She has edited several award-winning projects, including work that won the 1997 ASNE Best Feature Writing Award and the 2003 Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Writing. In 2004, she edited a four-part investigative series on the failure of public defense that was a finalist for the Goldsmith Award and for the Selden Ring Award. That same year, a series she edited on the global economy won the prestigious Leob Award for economic journalism.
Banaszynski, a native of a Wisconsin farm village, is a 1974 graduate of Marquette University. She leads workshops for editors and reporters around the world, is a regular presenter at APME NewsTrain and the National Writers Workshops, has taught at API, the University of Kansas and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and has served as a Pulitzer juror.
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Dave Barry
Best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, The Miami Herald
Dave Barry is a humor columnist. For 25 years he was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Many people are still trying to figure out how this happened.
Dave has also written a total of 30 books, although virtually none of them contain useful information. Two of his books were used as the basis for the CBS TV sitcom "Dave's World," in which Harry Anderson played a much taller version of Dave.
Dave plays lead guitar in a literary rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members include Stephen King, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson and Mitch Albom. They are not musically skilled, but they are extremely loud. Dave has also made many TV appearances, including one on the David Letterman show where he proved that it is possible to set fire to a pair of men's underpants with a Barbie doll.
In his spare time, Dave is a candidate for president of the United States. If elected, his highest priority will be to seek the death penalty for whoever is responsible for making Americans install low-flow toilets.
Dave lives in Miami, Florida, with his wife, Michelle, a sportswriter. He has a son, Rob, and a daughter, Sophie, neither of whom thinks he's funny.
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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 a team of reporters that were finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in
International reporting while his video and multimedia work from Iraq --
produced with his wife Diana Oliva Cave -- won an Overseas Press Club award
for best international coverage on the Web. He lives in Miami beach and is
thrilled to have traded desert sand for beach sand.
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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.
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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 are 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Martin Merzer
Senior writer, The Miami Herald
Martin Merzer was born on July 8, 1947, in New York City,
served in the Army from 1966 to 1968 and graduated from
Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1973 with a
bachelor's degree in English.
After six years as a general assignment reporter and
business news writer for The Associated Press in Miami and
New York, Merzer joined The Miami Herald in 1979 as a
business writer. He became The Herald's Jerusalem bureau
chief in late l983 and later served as a national correspondent
and as a member of the newspaper’s enterprise team.
He now is The Herald's senior writer, and has primary responsibility
for hurricane coverage.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, he moved to
Washington for four months and served The Herald and parent
company Knight Ridder Newspapers as the primary anchor of
the 9/11 and war on Afghanistan stories.
He later spent a month in Israel reporting on the wave of suicide
bombings and retaliatory actions there.
In 2003, he served as Knight Ridder’s main anchor for the Iraqi
War, again spending four months in the Washington bureau. He twice
returned to Washington in 2005 to anchor the company’s coverage of
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Merzer has covered the civil war in Beirut, the famine in Ethiopia
and the Sudan, the Challenger disaster and the space shuttle’s
return to flight, Hurricane Andrew, the Gulf War, the assassination
of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Mars Pathfinder
mission, the John Glenn mission and a wide variety of other stories.
In 1992, his work during Hurricane Andrew helped The Herald win
the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2000, his work during the Elian
Gonzalez affair helped The Herald win another Pulitzer Prize.
He is the main author of The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held
Hostage, a book published in June 2001 by St. Martin’s Press.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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