Speakers
Bob Calo is a senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. He co-directs the video storytelling and reporting program there and is currently the executive editor of Richmond Confidential, one of three hyper-local news sites run by the school. In the 20 years before joining the faculty at Berkeley in 2001, Calo was a broadcast producer for NBC News in New York, a producer for the ABC News program “Prime Time Live” and a news and documentary producer at KQED-TV in San Francisco. In 2008, while on leave from Berkeley, he served as national coordinator for News21, the 12-university collaboration for innovative digital journalism sponsored by the Knight Foundation and Carnegie Corporation. He is currently the senior producer for “Sound Tracks,” a PBS series in development about the intersection of music, culture and politics. Currently a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Calo is looking at the cultural, political and demographic roots of audience disengagement and mistrust. The working title for his paper is “Disengaged: How Journalists Repel the American Audience and How Reporters Can Win Them Back.”
Kevin Doyle is the editor-in-chief of
The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, where he has lived for more than 13 years. The first English-language daily newspaper in Cambodia,
The Cambodia Daily is a not-for-profit publication dedicated to strengthening a free press and training a new generation of Cambodian journalists. Doyle has been arrested in pursuit of his work in Cambodia: Most recently, he was convicted on charges of defamation in 2009 for publishing the comments of a member of the country’s opposition party that were critical of high-ranking military officials. Prior to his appointment as editor-in-chief, Doyle worked for Reuters in Phnom Penh and has written on Cambodia for
Time magazine and several other international publications. A graduate of the M.A. in journalism course at Dublin City University in Ireland, he is currently a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Jennifer Eccleston is a 2011 Nieman Fellow who served as a CNN international correspondent, based in Rome, Italy immediately before coming to Harvard. After joining CNN in 2005, Eccleston spent much of her time covering the aftermath of the war in Iraq and was twice nominated for an Emmy Award for her reporting there. She was part of the CNN team covering the death of Pope John Paul II in April 2005 and the subsequent election of Pope Benedict XVI and she reported on the London bombings in 2005. She spent several tours in Afghanistan and covered the war on terror and political turmoil in Pakistan, including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the elections of 2008. Eccleston joined CNN from NBC where she was Rome correspondent but primarily reported on the war in Iraq. She was part of the network’s coverage of the Asian tsunami, the Beslan Massacre in Russia and the 2004 U.S. election. She also covered civil wars in Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia. Prior to NBC, she reported on the first days of the war in Iraq for Fox News, and she covered North Korea’s decision to drop out of the Non Proliferation Treaty. Eccleston began her career in journalism working for the BBC’s Washington bureau as a researcher for “Newsnight.” Several years later, she became a stringer in Vietnam for National Public Radio. She has also worked as a freelance producer for ARD German TV, APTV and CNN International. She graduated from Catholic University and Georgetown University with a consortium degree in politics and philosophy. She also studied for a master’s degree in comparative European governments at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at Harvard University’s
Nieman Journalism Lab, a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. She was formerly a staff writer at the
Columbia Journalism Review, where she reported on education, politics, culture, and news innovation for the magazine and its website. Megan has discussed press performance on NPR, the BBC, al-Jazeera English, MSNBC and other outlets, and has served as an adjunct professor of media criticism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Originally from Carmel, California, she holds an honors B.A. in English from Princeton University and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University, where she graduated with the school’s Criticism Award. Her essay “Common Knowledge,” on the political implications of a fragmented media world, won a 2010 Mirror Award for excellence in media coverage.
Bob Giles has been curator of the
Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard since 2000. Immediately prior to joining the foundation, Giles was senior vice president of the
Freedom Forum and executive director of its Media Studies Center in New York City. 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. His career began in 1958 at the
Akron Beacon Journal. As managing editor there 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 1966 Nieman Fellow. 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.”
Ted Gup is the author of “A Secret Gift,” (Penguin Press, 2010), and two previous books: “Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life” (Doubleday, 2007), winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and the bestseller, “The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at The CIA”(Doubleday, 2000). He is a former investigative reporter for
The Washington Post and worked under Bob Woodward. He later wrote for
Time magazine, covering Congress and the environment, and serving as Washington investigative correspondent. Since 2009, he has been professor and chair of the journalism department at Emerson College in Boston. Gup has also taught at Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Case Western Reserve, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He has been an invited speaker at numerous venues including leading universities and national organizations. Additionally, he has been a guest on news programs airing on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS and NPR and has written for a wide range of newspapers and magazines. Gup has been a Pulitzer finalist in national reporting, and recipient of the George Polk Award, the Worth Bingham Prize, the Gerald Loeb Award, the National Conservation Achievement Award and the Book-of-the-Year Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors (for “The Book of Honor”). He has been a grantee of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fulbright Scholar in China. Gup studied classics as an undergraduate at Brandeis University and Trinity College, Dublin. Later he studied law at Case Western Reserve University and was admitted to the D.C. bar.
Maggie Mulvihill is the co-director and senior investigative producer of the
New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR). Mulvihill is an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years experience in both print and broadcast reporting in New England specializing in investigative journalism. A former media lawyer, Mulvihill has worked at WHDH-TV, WBZ-TV, the
Boston Herald, The Associated Press and as a legal affairs writer for a variety of law-related publications. She has worked at the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington D.C. and as a 2004-2005 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, she focused on government secrecy and its implications for news organizations. Mulvihill is active in freedom of information and open government issues and serves on the board of directors of the New England First Amendment Coalition. Mulvihill has taught journalism at the Harvard University Summer School program and is a clinical professor of journalism at Boston University.
Alan Murray is deputy managing editor and executive editor, online, for
The Wall Street Journal. He has editorial responsibility for the newspaper’s websites, including WSJ.com and MarketWatch, as well as the paper’s books, conferences and television operations. Previously, Murray was assistant managing editor of the
Journal, and author of the paper’s weekly “Business” column. He also served as CNBC’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief and was co-host of “Capital Report with Alan Murray and Gloria Borger.” While working at CNBC, he also wrote the
Journal’s weekly “Political Capital” column. Murray joined the
Journal in 1983, as a reporter covering economic policy. He was named Washington deputy bureau chief in 1992 and became bureau chief in 1993. During his tenure there, the Washington bureau won three Pulitzer Prizes and many other awards. Murray is the author of three best-selling books: “Revolt in the Boardroom, The New Rules of Power in Corporate America” (HarperCollins, 2007); “The Wealth of Choices: How the New Economy Puts Power in Your Hands and Money in Your Pocket,” (Random House, 1991); and “Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform,” co-authored with Jeffrey Birnbaum (Random House, 1987). “Gucci Gulch” received the American Political Science Association’s Carey McWilliams Award in 1988. Murray also garnered 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. Murray began his journalism career in June 1977 as the business and economics editor of the
Chattanooga 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. Murray received a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina and earned a master’s degree in economics at the London School of Economics. In 2005, he completed the Stanford Executive Program.
Joshua Prager is a journalist and author whose writing George Will has described as “exemplary journalistic sleuthing” and whom Doris Kearns Goodwin has called “a master storyteller.” His work has appeared in publications including
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
The New Republic, “Best American Sports Writing” and
The Wall Street Journal, where he was a senior special writer for eight years and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times. The New York Times Book Review wrote of his first book: “‘The Echoing Green’ is a revelation and a page turner, a group character study unequaled in baseball writing since Roger Kahn’s ‘Boys of Summer’ some three decades ago.’” Prager is a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. In the fall, he will be a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Jerusalem where he will write a book about his recovery from quadriplegia after breaking his neck in a bus accident. Prager was born in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. He grew up in New Jersey and lives in New York. He is a 2011 Nieman Fellow.
Rob Rose heads up the business investigations unit at the
Sunday Times, South Africa’s most widely read newspaper. Most recently, his work has included exposing South Africa’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme, which conned international investors by offering huge returns on HIV/AIDS drugs. Last year, he wrote extensively on the Soccer World Cup, which was held in South Africa. He also contributed to the book “Player and Referee: Conflicting interests and the 2010 FIFA World Cup,” which described undisclosed contracts between South African government entities and football’s governing body, FIFA, and revealed shady deals struck by FIFA with its suppliers. Other recent stories involve Zimbabwe’s illegal diamond smuggling trade and kickbacks in South Africa’s $10 billion arms deal. A law school graduate, Rose was named South Africa’s financial journalist of the year in 2010 as well as the investigative journalist of the year. He is a 2011 Nieman Fellow.
Charles M. Sennott, an award-winning journalist and author, is executive editor, vice president and co-founder of
GlobalPost. Through nearly 25 years as a reporter and on-air analyst, Sennott has been on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in 15 countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Algeria, Colombia, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. He has covered a wide range of stories from religious extremism and the global arms trade to the papal transition in Rome and the oil industry in Saudi Arabia. A longtime foreign correspondent for
The Boston Globe, Sennott served as the paper’s Middle East bureau chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and as Europe bureau chief based in London from 2001 to 2005. Sennott has received numerous awards, including the Livingston Award for National Reporting, “Story of the Year” by the Foreign Press Association for his coverage of Iraq, and he was named a finalist for Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. In 2005, Sennott returned to his native New England to begin a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. In fall 2006, he returned to the Globe newsroom as a staff writer for special projects. In early 2008, Sennott left the
Globe to join Philip Balboni as a co-founder of GlobalPost. As executive editor, Sennott oversaw the design and development of the site and traveled the world to build a team of some 70 correspondents in 50 countries. He also assembled the team of eight full-time editors at GlobalPost’s headquarters in Boston. The site launched in January of 2009. GlobalPost has developed strong editorial partnerships with CBS News, the PBS NewsHour and NPR Digital. It also has syndication agreements in place with some 50 newspapers worldwide. Sennott holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by Providence College for reporting on religion and religious extremism in the Middle East. Sennott writes a column for GlobalPost and blogs at
http://groundtruth.
Alan Taylor created the news photo blog “
The Big Picture” for
The Boston Globe in 2008. He ran the site for two years before joining
The Atlantic to start “
In Focus,” another photojournalism blog, in January 2011. Several times a week, Taylor posts entries featuring collections of images that tell a story. His goal is to use photography to do the kind of high-impact journalism readers have come to expect from
The Atlantic. He covers a range of subjects, from breaking news and historical topics to cultural highs and lows. Sometimes he simply showcases amazing photography. Taylor grew up on the West Coast, primarily in Washington, but lived and worked in California and Alaska as well. Taylor says that when he was young, he wanted to grow up to be an astronaut or astrophysicist, and after college he thought he wanted to be a writer. Ultimately he ended up finding a career as a web developer and claims he found himself to be in the right place at the right time. He has combined his love of storytelling, photography and photojournalism with the skills he has developed over nearly 15 years and has created a new platform for telling visual stories online. In addition to his work for
The Boston Globe and
The Atlantic, he has worked for MSNBC.com and Amazon.com.
Gwen Thompkins is a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Before coming to Cambridge for her fellowship, she was an NPR foreign correspondent covering East Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. On assignment, she covered the countries, people and happenings from the Horn to the heart of Africa. After arriving in Africa in 2006, Thompkins reported on the toppling of the Islamic Courts Union government in Somalia, ethnic violence in Kenya, insecurity in Darfur and Sudan’s first nationwide elections in a generation. She also wrote a series on the Nile River, traveling from the shores of Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea. Heading south, she has reported stories from South Africa and Antarctica. From 1996 to 2006, Thompkins was senior editor of “Weekend Edition Saturday.” Working with Scott Simon she learned — among other things — that when a horse walks into a bar, the bartender has to say, “So, why the long face?”While at “Weekend Edition,” Thompkins also reported from her hometown of New Orleans. In the months following Hurricane Katrina, she and senior producer Sarah Beyer Kelly filed stories on the aftermath of the storm and the rebuilding efforts. Before joining NPR, Thompkins worked as a reporter and editor at
The Times-Picayune. A graduate of Newcomb College at Tulane University, she majored in history and Soviet studies. While on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, she was in Eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall fell. Fortunately, she says, she was not injured.