Speaker Bios
Hannah Allam covers the Middle East and Islamic world as the Cairo bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers. Previously, she spent more than two years reporting on the war in Iraq as McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau chief. Her dispatches from Iraq won the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award for best newspaper reporting from abroad, the John S. Knight Gold Medal and other honors. Born in Oklahoma to an American mother and Egyptian father, Allam grew up in the Middle East including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. She returned to the United States for her senior year of high school and stayed on to attend the University of Oklahoma, graduating with a degree in journalism. She is a 2009 Nieman Fellow.
Thorne Anderson has been covering international news with Corbis/Sygma since 1999. He has worked in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, the United States, Israel and Palestine. As an assignment photographer, his work has appeared in a wide range of publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Rolling Stone, People, Playboy, Paris Match, and Stern. He is co-author/photographer of “Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.” Anderson formerly taught journalism and mass communication at the American University in Bulgaria and has been a guest lecturer at several universities in the U.S. and Europe. He is currently studying documentary film at Harvard as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism where he is an editorial advisor for the Nieman Narrative Digest, an online narrative journalism site. He just returned from a month-long journey through Afghanistan’s Uruzgan and Kunduz provinces on assignment for the German magazine Stern.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, www.niemanlab.org, a Web-based effort to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet era. Before spending a year as a 2008 Nieman Fellow, Benton worked for a decade as a newspaper reporter and occasional foreign correspondent, most recently at The Dallas Morning News, where he won a top prize from Investigative Reporters and Editors and five first-place national awards. He began blogging during the Clinton years and coded his first web pages in 1994. Benton is in great demand as a speaker and commentator on media issues and the future of journalism.
Bob Giles became the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 2000 after working for nearly 40 years in newspapers. Previously, he had been editor and publisher of The Detroit News. From 1977 to 1986, Giles was executive editor and then editor of the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union in Rochester, N.Y.
Before joining the Nieman Foundation as curator, Giles was a senior vice president of The Freedom Forum, where he served as editor-in-chief of The Freedom Forum’s Media Studies Journal. His career began in 1958 at the Akron Beacon Journal. As managing editor in 1970, he directed coverage of the campus shootings at Kent State, for which the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize. Also under his editorship, The Detroit News won a Pulitzer in 1994 for the paper’s disclosures of a scandal in the Michigan House Fiscal Agency.
Giles is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize juror and is the author of “Newsroom Management: A Guide to Theory and Practice.” He is a graduate of DePauw University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1966. He received an honorary doctorate in journalism from DePauw in 1996 and also won the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Distinguished Journalism Citation in 1978 for “outstanding public service in the cause of the First Amendment.”
Constance Hale is director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University where she oversees the annual Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, teaches narrative writing to fellows and edits the Web-based Nieman Narrative Digest, an online resource for nonfiction storytellers. Hale has worked as a reporter and editor at the Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, Wired, and Health, and her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic Monthly, and National Geographic Adventure, among other publications. She edits books for Harvard Business School Press and appears in print and on radio as a language commentator. Her two books, Sin and Syntax and Wired Style, led one reviewer to describe her as “Marian the Librarian’ on a Harley, or E.B. White on acid.”
David Jackson is an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune and a 2009 Nieman fellow. He was a musician and cook in his 20s, and then became a journalist, working first for alternative weeklies in Chicago. Later, he was a senior editor at Chicago magazine from 1987-1991, and then went on to join the Chicago Tribune as an investigative reporter. He has been with the paper since that time except for a break in 1998, when he joined the investigative team at The Washington Post.
His notable work includes a 2005 five-part Tribune series on mortgage fraud that resulted in legislative reforms, and the indictments of several attorneys and mortgage brokers and a 1999 series on the privatization of juvenile prisons and foster programs that was a Pulitzer finalist for national reporting. At The Washington Post in 1998, Jackson joined three reporters to produce a series that identified patterns of reckless shootings by D.C. police officers. Among his contributions were articles on investigations riddled with errors and omissions that led to the U.S. Attorney staffing a new civil rights section to oversee cases, and District police revamping internal shooting investigations. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for public service. Jackson’s 1995 Tribune series on the finances of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, co-authored with William Gaines, led to the imprisonment of former Chicago Housing Authority chief Vince Lane for bank fraud, and was a Pulitzer finalist for investigative reporting.
Andrew Meldrum is GlobalPost’s Senior Editor and Regional Editor for Africa. Meldrum brings his extraordinary depth of experience to GlobalPost coverage of a region that is vastly under-covered by the American press. In addition to overseeing GlobalPost coverage of the region, he contributes his own analysis to the site. An award-winning journalist, Meldrum has 27 years experience in Africa. He served as Zimbabwe correspondent for The Economist and most recently as Southern Africa correspondent for The Guardian, before being illegally expelled by the Zimbabwean government, which objected to his reports exposing state torture. He has also been deputy bureau chief and acting bureau chief of the Agence France-Presse bureau in Zimbabwe, where he covered eight countries including civil wars in Mozambique and Angola. Meldrum is author of “Where We Have Hope,” a memoir of his 23 years in Zimbabwe, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic and on NPR. Meldrum was a 2008 Nieman Fellow at Harvard before joining GlobalPost.
Alan Murray is a deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and executive editor for the Journal Online. He also has editorial responsibility for Wall Street Journal television, books, conferences, and the MarketWatch Web site. Previously, he was author of the paper’s award-winning “Business” column. He also spent a decade as the Journal’s Washington bureau chief and during his tenure there, the bureau won three Pulitzer Prizes, as well as many other awards.
Murray is a regular contributor to CNBC and author of several books, including, most recently, “Revolt in the Board Room: The New Rules of Power in Corporate America.”
From 2002-2004, Murray served as CNBC’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief and was co-host of the nightly show, “Capital Report with Alan Murray and Gloria Borger.” While working at CNBC, he also wrote the Journal’s weekly “Political Capital” column.
Murray has received two Overseas Press Club awards for his writings on Asia, as well as a Gerald Loeb award and a John Hancock award for his coverage of the Federal Reserve. He received the Society of American Business Editors and Writers “Best in Business” award for his “Business” column.
Murray began his journalism career in June 1977 as the business and economics editor of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times. He joined the Congressional Quarterly in Washington as a reporter in June 1980, and the following year became a reporter at the Japan Economic Journal in Tokyo on a Luce Fellowship.
He serves on the Governing Council of the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and is a member of the Gridiron Club, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Economic Club of New York. He has served on the Board of Visitors of the University of North Carolina and the Board of Trustees of St. Patrick’s Episcopal School.
Charles Sennott is the executive editor, vice president and co-founder of GlobalPost, the first U.S.-based Web site dedicated solely to international news. He is an award winning journalist and author with a distinguished career in international reporting for both print and broadcast news organizations.
A longtime foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, Sennott served as the Globe’s Middle East bureau chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and as Europe bureau chief based in London from 2001 to 2005. After spending a year as a 2006 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Sennott returned to the Globe newsroom as a staff writer for special projects.
As early as 1993, Sennott was reporting on Islamic militancy and the birth of what became known as Al Qaeda. After September 11, 2001, he was among the first reporters on the ground in Afghanistan to cover the U.S. military response. In 2003, he reported from the front lines of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Much of Sennott’s multimedia work has focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the devastating impact they have had on returning combat veterans. Providence College recently awarded him with an honorary doctorate for “years of courageous coverage of faith amid conflict.”
Sennott began his career as a contributor to National Public Radio and moved into print journalism, becoming a regional reporter for The Bergen Record of Hackensack, New Jersey and later a special assignment reporter and a city editor for the New York Daily News.
In 1994, Sennott joined The Boston Globe as an investigative reporter and produced signature coverage of everything from the Big Dig to the U.S. weapons industry. His reporting has won numerous journalism prizes including the prestigious Livingston Award for National Reporting and he was named a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center.
Throughout these years, Sennott has been a frequent analyst of the Middle East and religious extremism for the BBC, CNN and NPR. He has also produced a series of reports on Pakistan and Afghanistan for “The World,” which is a partnership of the BBC and Public Radio International. He is the author of several books, including “Broken Covenant” about a priest sex abuse scandal in New York and “The Body and the Blood: A Reporter’s Journey Through the Holy Land.”