Speaker Bios

Laura Norton Amico is founder and editor of Homicide Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based website for data-driven coverage of violent crime that was recognized as a notable entry in the 2011 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and won the 2012 ONA Knight Award for Public Service. She began her career as an education reporter for the Register-Pajaronian in Watsonville. Calif. Later, she joined The Press Democrat’s newsroom in Santa Rosa, Calif. as their crime reporter. She received a New York Times Chairman’s Award, and held fellowships with the Online News Association and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America. Amico is a board member of Criminal Justice Journalists and writes for The Crime Report and blogs about crime reporting and entrepreneurial journalism at One Reporter’s Notebook. She is a 2013 Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation.
Chris Amico is a journalist and web developer with experience in local newspapers, national news organizations and media start-ups. He runs the technology side of Homicide Watch and helps out with editing and data-driven storytelling. Beyond Homicide Watch, his award-winning projects include Patchwork Nation, a local-national collaboration between the PBS NewsHour and The Christian Science Monitor, and Gulf Oil Leak Meter, a simple JavaScript widget that kept a running tally of how much oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank. The NewsHour’s oil spill coverage was nominated for an Emmy for innovative storytelling. Since February 2011, Chris has worked as an application developer for NPR’s StateImpact project. He is a Nieman Affiliate in the class of 2013.
Chris Arnold is a Boston-based NPR correspondent who covers the economy and the housing market. He joined NPR in 1996 and has reported on subjects ranging from Katrina recovery in New Orleans to immigrant workers in the fishing industry to new table saws that prevent injuries. In 2001, following the Sept. 11 attacks, Arnold contributed to the NPR coverage in New York that won Overseas Press Club and George Foster Peabody Awards. He also earned a 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for his series “The Foreclosure Nightmare” and the Newspaper Guild’s 2009 Heywood Broun Award for broadcast journalism. He is the 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Business Journalism.
* KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Bob Cohn is editor of Atlantic Digital. In this role, he oversees all editorial components of The Atlantic’s digital and mobile properties, including TheAtlantic.com, The Atlantic Wire, and The Atlantic Cities, as well as the presentation of the print publication’s content on digital platforms.

Prior to joining The Atlantic in January 2009, Cohn was executive editor of Wired, where he helped the magazine find a mainstream following and earn a national reputation. He supervised a staff of 40 and under his leadership, Wired was nominated seven times for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence and won three times.

During the dot-com boom, Cohn was executive editor at The Industry Standard, a newsweekly covering the Internet economy. He was in charge of editorial special projects, including the company’s extensions into television, radio, international publishing, and new domestic magazines. During the late 1990s, he worked as editor and, later, publisher of Stanford magazine, and as editorial director of the Stanford Alumni Association.

Cohn began his journalism career at Newsweek, where he worked in the Washington bureau for 10 years. He served as the magazine’s legal affairs correspondent, with responsibility for the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and the FBI, and later was named the magazine’s White House correspondent, covering the presidency of Bill Clinton from 1993 to early 1996.

Since his arrival in 2009, Atlantic Digital has received numerous journalistic honors. For the past three consecutive years, The Atlantic has been named a National Magazine Award finalist for “General Excellence, Digital,” among other categories. The Atlantic was also named a finalist for Magazine of the Year (print and web combined) in 2010 and 2011.

During his tenure at Wired, the magazine was nominated for 11 National Magazine Awards and won six, including the three citations for General Excellence. At Newsweek, he was honored with the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for coverage of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation process. He has received a number of other national journalism awards and honors throughout his career.

Cohn graduated from Stanford with high honors. He later spent a year studying public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School before earning a master’s degree in the Study of Law from Yale Law School as a Ford Foundation Fellow. A native of Chicago, he lives with his wife and two daughters outside Washington, D.C.
Borja Echevarría de la Gándara is the deputy managing editor at El País, Spain’s largest daily. Since 2010, he has guided his newsroom toward a digital-first strategy, a move that allowed El País to become the most-visited Spanish-language news site. Previously, Echevarría founded Soitu.es, a news start-up that received numerous honors including two Online News Association awards. He began his newspaper career at El Mundo in 1995, reporting on science, social issues and sports prior to serving as sports editor and then international editor and deputy managing editor for online news. He is a 2013 Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation.
Alexandra Garcia is a multimedia journalist for The Washington Post. She reports, shoots and edits video stories on topics ranging from health care and immigration to fashion and education. Awarded eight regional Emmy Awards, a national Edward R. Murrow Award and top honors in the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism contest, she also was named 2011 “Video Editor of the Year” by the White House News Photographers Association. She has been a teaching assistant at National Geographic Photo Camps in Chad and Botswana and a judge for the Best of Photojournalism contest. She is a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
Yaakov Katz is the military reporter and defense analyst for The Jerusalem Post and the Israel correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly. He has covered Israeli military operations over the past decade including the pullout from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009. His writing focuses on defense planning, intelligence analysis and military technology. He co-authored “Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War,” which was published in the United States in May 2012. Originally from Chicago, he moved to Israel in 1993 and has a law degree from Bar-Ilan University. He is a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
Ann Marie Lipinski is curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, a position she assumed in 2011. Before coming to Harvard, Lipinski served as senior lecturer and vice president for civic engagement at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, she was the editor of the Chicago Tribune, a post she held for nearly eight years following assignments as managing editor, metropolitan editor and investigations editor.

As a reporter at the Tribune, Lipinski was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for stories she did with two other reporters on corruption in the Chicago City Council. While editor of the paper, she oversaw work that won the Tribune Pulitzers in several categories including international reporting, feature writing, editorial writing, investigative reporting and explanatory journalism. Lipinski was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 2003-2012, the last year as co-chair. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in the class of 1990.
Jennifer B. McDonald is an editor at The New York Times Book Review, where she assigns reviews of fiction and nonfiction and occasionally writes. Her beats include linguistics, race, popular history, dance, science and technology, sex and gender, art and media, and graphic novels and reportage. Since 2008, she has been on the faculty of the Times’s Student Journalism Institute, an intensive training program for undergraduate and graduate-level journalists. She joined the Times as an editor on the national desk in 2005. She was previously an editor at The Washington Post and at CNET News.com in San Francisco. She is a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
Paula Molina is the anchor and editor of a prime-time program on Cooperativa, Chile’s leading radio news station. Since 1999, she has conducted daily interviews and has broadcast the news live, covering events such as the aftermath of the 2010 Chilean earthquake and tsunami, the miner’s rescue in the Atacama Desert and massive student protests in 2011. With 20 years of journalism experience, Molina has been part of both new and established projects in print, television and radio. Her radio program has received awards for its coverage of poverty, social exclusion and environmental issues. She holds a master’s degree in public policy. She is a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
Betsy O’Donovan is a freelance writer and editor based in Omaha, Neb., and Durham, N.C. In 2010, she became the first female editorial page editor for The (Durham) Herald-Sun and she serves as a mentor-editor for The Op-Ed Project, a nonprofit effort to increase the diversity of voices in public commentary. After graduating from Wake Forest University, she wrote and edited for newspapers in North Carolina, Idaho and Alabama, helped to create the first SportsCenter spin-off on ESPN, and launched a weekly newspaper in Waxhaw, N.C. She is the 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Community Journalism.