Speaker Bios

Jonathan Blakley has worked as a producer on NPR’s Foreign Desk since 2007. As a producer he has traveled numerous times to Baghdad helping to manage one of the network’s larger bureaus. He also has helped produce some of NPR’s coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya, as well as stories from Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Blakley began working at NPR in 2001. Prior to that he worked at the AP Broadcast Center in Washington, ABC Radio in New York, and CBS-owned WWJ in Detroit. In 2002, Blakley was a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Ghana-Legon teaching broadcast journalism. He has earned a number of awards, including a Gabriel Award and a Unity Media Award in 1997, and a handful of awards from the National Association of Black Journalists. Blakley is a native of Detroit and graduate of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and Wayne State University in Detroit. When he’s not working, you might find him banging on his djembe or live-streaming Detroit Tiger broadcasts. He is a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
David Cook is senior editor and Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor, a position he has held since August 2001. He oversees the Monitor’s eight-person bureau in the nation’s capital, hosts the Monitor’s newsmaker breakfasts, and writes for csmonitor.com.

When Monitor correspondent Jill Carroll was held captive in Iraq for 82 days in 2006, Cook served as the Monitor’s spokesperson and appeared on numerous national broadcasts including Today, Good Morning America, Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, and the Larry King Show.

Cook served as editor of The Christian Science Monitor from August 1994 through July 2001. During his term, the Monitor’s print edition was redesigned, csmonitor.com was launched, and the paper won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. From 1991 to 1994, Cook was editor of Monitor Broadcasting which produced daily radio news programs heard on 200 public radio stations. Earlier, he was managing editor of the Monitor’s Emmy award-winning nightly television news program “World Monitor.”

Cook specialized in business reporting in the Washington bureau where he was based from 1974-1977 and from 1982-1988. For several years in the late 1970’s, Cook worked for McGraw-Hill where his assignments included being a Detroit-based correspondent for Business Week. In 1977 Cook was awarded a Bagehot Fellowship in Business and Economic Journalism by Columbia University. He is a graduate of Principia College, attended the Advanced Management Program at Michigan State University, and served in the U.S. Army. He is also a member of the Gridiron Club, Washington’s oldest journalistic organization. 
Kevin Douglas Grant is the deputy editor of special reports at GlobalPost. A native of Chicago, he holds an M.A. in online journalism from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School and is the former operations director of Web news enricher Inform.com. He was formerly the executive editor of Annenberg’s thriving 24/7 news site NeonTommy.com. He continues to write about Internet technology and social media at the Cape Town-based Memeburn.com. Grant also holds a B.A. in international studies from DePaul University and has been published by Salon.com, American Public Media, Religion News Service, Huffington Post, and Truthdig.
Hanna Ingber is GlobalPost’s editor of breaking news and social media. She recently returned from India, where she covered Mumbai for GlobalPost for close to two years. Ingber was formerly the founding world editor of the Huffington Post. She launched the section in the winter of 2008, and she won InterAction’s 2009 Award for Excellence in International Reporting in recognition of the site’s world coverage. Ingber is a multimedia journalist with experience working in Burma, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nepal, Malaysia and Thailand. Her work has appeared in publications such as NYTimes.com, The Independent of London, LA Weekly, Washingtonpost.com and the Hartford Courant and on PRI’s “Dispatches” and NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “Day2Day.” Ingber received her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and her master’s in journalism from USC Annenberg, where she was a Dean’s Scholar. She blogs at Hannaingberwin.com. Follow Hanna on Twitter:@HannaIngber.
Maggie Jones is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. She writes about social issues, including immigration, poverty, education, children and race. She has also written for The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mother Jones, Salon and Slate. She has been awarded fellowships from The Japan Society, The International Reporting Project and The Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy. In addition to her work throughout the United States, she has reported from Japan, Thailand, Burma and Guatemala. She graduated from Vassar College and is a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
David Joyner is vice president of content for Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., of Montgomery, Ala., and works with editors and reporters at newspapers and news websites serving 150 communities in 23 states. He is a veteran editor, having led the news staffs of community newspapers in Massachusetts including The Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, The Salem News and the Gloucester Daily Times. Previously he was projects editor for four Massachusetts dailies and reported for newspapers in Massachusetts, Georgia and Alabama, as well as news organizations in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of George Washington University, where he studied political communication. He is a former officer of the Alabama professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and is currently a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Dina Kraft is a freelance journalist who was most recently based in Tel Aviv covering Israeli and Palestinian politics and society. Her reporting has ranged from covering children caught in the crossfire of the conflict to solar technology, Bedouin genetic diseases and Israeli and Palestinian women dieting together. She has regularly contributed to The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph and served as Israel correspondent for JTA, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Her work has appeared in O Magazine, The Washington Post, Slate, and The Village Voice. A former Associated Press correspondent in Jerusalem and Johannesburg, she’s reported throughout Africa and from Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Tunisia, Russia and Ukraine. She is a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Lisa Mullins is co-anchor for the international news magazine “The World,” which is produced by the BBC, Public Radio International and WGBH. The program is broadcast weekdays on more than 300 radio stations in the United States and Canada and is podcast on the Web. Lisa has conducted thousands of interviews from the studio in Boston and in the field. Her foreign reporting has taken her to Hong Kong, Turkey, Egypt, Cuba, Northern Ireland and North and South Korea. In 2009, she received the top Clarion Award for her story on her 24 hours at a North Korean tourist resort. This May, Lisa will be in Los Angeles to receive a Gracie Award in the category of outstanding anchor in news or a news magazine. Lisa was a 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and spent that summer in the United Kingdom as a Templeton Fellow, studying issues around religion and science. Prior to working at "The World," she produced radio documentaries for Far Reaching Communications on the links between diet and disease. Before that, she spent several years rising at 3:18 a.m. to anchor the local morning drive news at WBUR in Boston. Her first job in radio was at WEIM in Fitchburg, where she was news director and anchor. Her alarm those days went off at 2:50 a.m.
Raquel Rutledge is an investigative reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Watchdog Team. Her series “Cashing in on Kids” exposed widespread fraud in Wisconsin’s child-care subsidy program, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and endangering children. The stories prompted sweeping reforms, new laws and a crackdown on unscrupulous child-care providers. The “Cashing in on Kids” series won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting as well as a George Polk Award, the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism. Rutledge joined the Journal Sentinel in 2004 after spending more than six years at The Colorado Springs Gazette where she covered City Hall, education and the military. She is a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Paul Salopek has lived and worked in the developing world for most of his life. His reporting has appeared in National Geographic, the Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, The American Scholar, Conservation, Foreign Policy and many other publications. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes; the George Polk Award; the National Press Club Award; the Overseas Press Club Award; the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage in Journalism and other honors. In 2013, he is embarking on a narrative walk that will last seven years and retrace our species’ original migration across the planet. Salopek recently joined the 2012 Nieman Fellows at Harvard to conduct research for his project.
David Skok is the managing editor, digital, of Global News Online, the Web division of one of Canada’s largest broadcast news companies. GlobalNews.ca. has pioneered innovative online coverage of many large local, national and international stories and is now Canada’s fastest growing news and information site. Skok began his career at ABC’s “Nightline,” and joined Global News in 2003, where he served in increasingly senior production roles in broadcast news, helping to create and produce several of the station’s leading news programs and special events.

In 2009, David co-created the GlobalNews.ca network, consisting of 13 national and local news websites with an umbrella national site. As managing editor, he oversees all the editorial coverage of local, national and international events, and has pioneered many innovative ways of telling stories, utilizing open data, data visualization, video interactives and social media. GlobalNews.ca’s coverage has been nominated for several new media awards. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Skok immigrated to Canada in 1988.  He is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario (BAH 2001) and Ryerson University’s journalism program (2003), where he was awarded the Joe Perlove scholarship for the best graduating student.  He is a frequent commentator on the future of media and journalism and is currently a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
A.C. Thompson is a staff reporter at ProPublica, where he focuses on poverty, human rights and criminal justice. Thompson’s reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina helped to uncover a string of alleged hate crimes against African Americans and revealed the link between New Orleans police and the killing of local resident Henry Glover. In the wake of the stories, federal prosecutors opened multiple investigations, eventually charging a private citizen for an allegedly racially motivated shooting, and five active or ex-officers in connection with Glover’s slaying.

Thompson has worked as a full-time journalist since 1998. He began his career at alternative weeklies, first as a reporter with The San Francisco Bay Guardian for eight years and then as an investigative reporter for SF Weekly in 2006-2007. His stories led to the exoneration of two San Francisco men wrongly convicted of murder. Thompson’s work also has appeared in a number of national magazines and he is co-author of the book “Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights.”

Before joining ProPublica, Thompson co-founded The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaborative effort by print, radio, television and Web reporters to examine the 2007 killing of Chauncey Bailey, a news editor in Oakland, California. Thompson has received a number of awards for his reporting including two George Polk Awards, three Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards, the James K. Batten Medal from ASNE and the Molly Ivins Award, among others.

Before working in journalism, Thompson taught writing to juvenile offenders in locked detention facilities in San Francisco and Alameda counties in Northern California, an experience he says greatly influenced his career as a reporter.
Jeff Young is senior correspondent for PRI’s “Living on Earth,” a weekly public radio program focusing on the environment. His coverage focuses on energy choices and climate change. Young covered environmental policy and politics for six years on Capitol Hill as Living on Earth’s Washington correspondent. Before that he covered the coal, chemical and timber industries in his home state, West Virginia.  He is a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.