2015 Georges Conference on College Journalism

Jill Abramson spent the last 17 years in senior editorial positions at The New York Times— the first woman Washington bureau chief, managing editor and executive editor. Before joining the Times, she was, during nine years, deputy Washington bureau chief and an investigative reporter covering money and politics at The Wall Street Journal. Her three books include “Strange Justice,” co-authored with Jane Mayer, and “The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout.” Before joining Harvard’s English department as a lecturer teaching nonfiction narrative writing, she taught writing seminars at Yale and Princeton. Abramson and journalist Steven Brill are launching a new journalism start-up that will produce substantial, longer-than-magazine-length articles. @JillAbramson

Read more about Abramson in this recent Harvard Gazette story: “For Jill Abramson, journalism comes full circle: Former New York Times editor teaches her craft at Harvard, where she learned its rudiments”

Melissa Bailey is managing editor of the New Haven Independent, a pioneering, not-for-profit news website all about New Haven, Connecticut. Since 2006, she has helped the Independent grow from an under-the-radar blog into a national leader among new media startups that are changing the face of local journalism. She has covered New Haven’s nationally watched school-reform drive in depth, with her stories also appearing in Time, The Christian Science Monitor, The Hechinger Report and The Huffington Post. Bailey is a former Knight-McCormick Leadership Fellow and an active member of the Education Writers Association. She previously was the lead reporter for the Middletown (Conn.) Press. @melissammbailey

Joshua Benton is director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, which he founded in 2008. Nieman Lab is an online newsroom about online newsrooms, tracking journalism innovation and how the news — how it’s reported, distributed, discovered, consumed, and paid for — is changing. Before coming to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow in 2007, he was a reporter, columnist, and occasional foreign correspondent in newspapers, primarily The Dallas Morning News. He started building websites and online communities in as a college student in 1994. @jbenton

Gabe Bullard is the director of news and editorial strategy at the public radio station WFPL News in Louisville, Kentucky. He started his career online as an editorial assistant for a St. Louis politics blog before joining WFPL as a reporter. He later served as online editor and news director and in his current role, oversees all aspects of the station and its website. Under his guidance, the station’s web traffic has grown significantly and the station has become a local news leader. Bullard has won numerous awards for his work and the station’s reporting on LGBT issues has earned national recognition. @gbullard

Audrey Cerdan is a multimedia journalist at the French news website Rue89 (honored by ONA in 2012 for General Excellence in Online Journalism), where she has worked since its creation in 2007. As a trained photojournalist, her focus is on visual storytelling on the Web. In addition to her reporting work, she is the deputy editor of the tablet edition of Rue89. Before joining the site full time, she worked with publications like Le Monde and British Vogue. She graduated in 2008 from the ENS Louis Lumière photography school. @audreycerdan

Elaine Díaz Rodríguez  is a journalist, blogger and professor at the University of Havana. She has written about digital communication, tech infrastructure and the digital divide for Cuban media. As the digital editor at the Cuban bureau of Inter Press Service, she created Cuba 2.0, a project dedicated to increasing Cuban voices on the Internet. She also has directed multimedia work on sexual rights, gender violence and political issues. Díaz Rodríguez is the sole Cuban author for Global Voices Online and has blogged for La Polemica Digital (The Digital Controversy) about social problems and the politics of online expression in Cuba. @elainediaz2003

Kitty Eisele is supervising senior editor at NPR’s Morning Edition. During her 15 years at NPR, she has served as a writer, editor and producer, including work as supervising editor for “Weekend All Things Considered.” She began her career with filmmaker Ken Burns and received an Emmy Award for her work as a producer on “The Civil War” series. She also has contributed to radio and film documentaries on political and cultural figures and is a past fellow of the Japan Society, the French-American Foundation and the Salzburg Seminar. She teaches a journalism seminar every other year at Georgetown University. @nprkitty

Celeste LeCompte writes from San Francisco and Guangzhou, China, about innovation, the environment and entrepreneurs. She also is the startup columnist for Robotics Business Review and co-founder of Climate Confidential, an experiment in reader-funded journalism about the intersection of environmental issues and technological innovation. Previously, she was the managing editor and director of product for Gigaom Research, one of the first subscription products offered by a major blog network. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Smithsonian, Outside, BusinessWeek and The New York Times. Her experience includes working as a researcher, product manager and content strategist. @celrae

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 and served as co-chair during her last year. @AMLwhere

Alan Murray is the editor of Fortune, overseeing the magazine, its conferences and its digital properties. Prior to assuming this post in August 2014, Murray was president of the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. He was previously at The Wall Street Journal, where he served as deputy managing editor and executive editor, online. Murray spent a decade as the Journal’s Washington bureau chief, during which the bureau won three Pulitzer Prizes; and he subsequently served as CNBC’s Washington bureau chief, co-hosting “Capital Report with Alan Murray and Gloria Borger.” At various times, he wrote the Journal’s weekly “Business and Political Capital” columns, and won numerous awards for his writing on economics and international issues. He began his journalism career as the business and economics editor of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times. Murray also worked at the Congressional Quarterly in Washington as a reporter and at the Japan Economic Journal in Tokyo on a Luce Fellowship. He is the author of four books. @alansmurray

Denise-Marie Ordway is a senior reporter who covers higher education at the Orlando Sentinel. She previously worked as a correspondent at The Philadelphia Inquirer and wrote news for a newspaper and two radio stations in Central America. She has won several top journalism awards for her education reporting and has covered topics ranging from the problems caused by mold in public schools to the plight of migrant workers. She also led a team of reporters covering violent hazing in the Florida A&M University marching band, work that was chosen as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013. @DeniseOrdway

Laurie Penny is contributing editor at The New Statesman, editor-at-large at The New Inquiry and a contributor to The Guardian, Vice,The Nation and other publications. She has reported from the front lines of the new social movements in Britain, Canada, Greece, Spain, Egypt and the United States and is the author of four books on politics and culture, most recently “Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet.” She blogs atPenny Red and is a regular commentator on youth politics and women’s issues for the BBC. Penny graduated from Oxford University with a degree in English literature. @PennyRed

Dina Rudick is a three-time Emmy-award winning photojournalist, videographer and documentary filmmaker based in Boston. She has worked for The Boston Globe as a staff photographer since 2002, where she’s covered news events such as the Asian Tsunami of 2004, maternal mortality in Bolivia, U.S. aid in Pakistan, Haiti’s devastating earthquake as well as stories in Boston’s own backyard. Rudick won the 2012 Outstanding Documentary Emmy for her first documentary, “Practice: Change” — a story about yoga in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. She is the creative director of Anthem Multimedia, a production company that specializes in web-optimized video storytelling for nonprofits and socially motivated for-profit institutions. From 2011-2013, Dina hosted and produced “The Back Story,” the BostonGlobe.com’s first online talk show in which journalists discuss their reporting process. In addition to working at The Boston Globe, Rudick is an adjunct professor at Boston University’s College of Communication and Harvard Extension School’s Graduate School of Journalism. @dinarudick

Alicia Stewart  is an editor at CNN.com. She joined the news organization in 2007 to launch and build Engage, the unit that identified and incorporated under-covered news stories into network coverage. She later worked as a senior producer/editor for the “In America” documentary unit and edited the award-winning In America blog. Prior to CNN, she worked as a documentary and online producer for the PBS series “African-American Lives.” Stewart has also produced news and developed programming at NBC, ABC, Oxygen and Women’s Entertainment Television. She began her career as a radio and television reporter/anchor in Columbia, Missouri. @aliciastew

Dawn Turner Trice is a columnist and specialist reporter for the Chicago Tribune who writes about people and issues that fly below the radar. She has written commentary for National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” as well as for television in Chicago, and was a regular analyst on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.” She moderated the Tribune’s online forum/blog “Exploring Race,” which she designed to encourage readers to discuss racial issues. Turner Trice also is the author of two novels, “Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven” and “An Eighth of August.” She also received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. @dawnturnertrice

Nabil Wakim is the digital editor-in-chief and online managing editor of Le Monde in Paris. In that role, he is in charge of transforming the newsroom from a primarily print-centric publication to a digital news enterprise. During the 2012 French presidential campaign, he was Le Monde’s political editor, leading a new Web and print department. Before that, he was the paper’s political correspondent. He launched the crowdsourced fact-checking blog “Les decodeurs” in 2009 and is the co-creator of “A Political Primary,” a political news game released in 2011. He teaches at the journalism school at Sciences Po in Paris. @NabilWakim