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Bryan Monroe has been deputy managing editor at the San Jose Mercury News in California, where he was in charge nearly 200 journalists and a $12 million budget. After completing his Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in June 2003, he will return to Knight Ridder as the incoming assistant vice president/ news, responsible for the journalistic operations of all 32 Knight Ridder properties nationwide. Monroe joined Knight Ridder in 1987 as director of graphics and photography at The (Myrtle Beach, S.C.) Sun News. From 1989 to 1991 he was assistant project director for Knight Ridder's 25/43 Project, an effort to design a newspaper specifically for readers in that key demographic, based at the Boca Raton News. He joined the San Jose Mercury News in 1991 as design director, also serving as a reporter and assigning editor. Among many duties there, Monroe led redesigns of the Mercury News in 1992 and again in 2000. This year, the paper was named one of the five world's best-designed by the Society for News Design. He worked earlier in his career as a photographer at The Seattle Times, The Roanoke Times & World News and United Press International. Monroe is vice president/print of the National Association of Black Journalists and immediate past president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association. He has taught frequently for The Poynter Institute, the American Press Institute and many other organizations.

As the executive producer of news for USATODAY.com, Jody Brannon handles breaking news and coordinates prime-time programming. She is the former executive producer for Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive where she oversaw projects and partnerships. For two years, Brannon served as managing editor for washingtonpost.com during which time the site was judged winner of the EPpy (Editor & Publisher's awards honoring the best new media services from the newspaper industry) for best news section in a newspaper online service. Brannon was editor of Sports Etc., a Seattle-based magazine, and has been a reporter, columnist and editor for The Seattle Times and The Tacoma News Tribune. Brannon received her Doctor of Philosophy in Mass Communication, from the University of Maryland, Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 1999; her dissertation was entitled, "Maximizing the Medium: Assessing Impediments to Performing Multimedia Journalism at Three News Web Sites." An adjunct at various Seattle-area universities before pursuing her doctorate, Brannon taught news writing classes to undergraduates while at the University and will teach the spring capstone course in American University's weekend master's program in digital journalism. Brannon's other journalism degrees are from Seattle University (BA) and AU (MA).

Chris Harvey has worked as an online editor, a magazine editor, a newspaper reporter and a journalism teacher. She left her job as managing editor at American Journalism Review in August 2000 to help build the online curriculum at the College. She created and now edits the College's online newsmagazine, Maryland Newsline, which is staffed by students. She also teaches an introductory online journalism course. Before coming to AJR, Harvey worked as an associate Metro editor at washingtonpost.com. There, she led a content redesign of the Metro section and edited news and feature stories. She earlier taught reporting and editing at the College and ran the College's student-staffed Capital News Service bureaus in Washington and Annapolis. She has held reporting and editing jobs at several papers, including The Washington Times, and has free-lanced for The Washington Post and Congressional Quarterly's "Politics in America."

Mark Hinojosa
Associate Managing Editor, Electronic News
The Chicago Tribune

Mark Hinojosa joined The Chicago Tribune in 1991 as an assistant photo editor. In 1994 he was promoted to Director of Photography. He was again promoted 1999 to Associate Managing Editor for Photography. In 2000 Hinojosa filled the newly created position of A.M.E. for Electronic News. In his new role in Electronic News, Hinojosa works as a liaison between the print, broadcast and the Internet, facilitating the development of stories across these different media. In his capacity as A.M.E. for photography, Hinojosa was responsible for a staff of 68, which included photographers, photo editors and lab support staff. Hinojosa is the first person at the Tribune to hold both A.M.E. Positions.

Prior to joining The Chicago Tribune, Hinojosa worked as a staff photographer at New York Newsday and as a photographer/photo editor for the Kansas City Star. He has won awards for both his photography and photo editing and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times.

Born in Los Angeles in August 1956, Hinojosa has lived in Kansas City, Mo. and in three of the five boroughs of New York City. He holds a bachelorÕs degree in Mass Communication from Pepperdine University in Malibu, Ca. Hinojosa serves on the board of the National Association of Hispanic Journalist and the board of Street Level Youth Media, an organization committed to teaching media awareness to urban youth. He is married to a freelance journalist, with whom he has three children, and, when time permits, is an avid flyfisher.

Thomas Kunkel is dean of the College and president of American Journalism Review, a national monthly magazine published by the College. At Maryland he has served as director of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, and as editor and director of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper. A writer and editor, Kunkel has spent most of his career in newspaper management. Most recently he was deputy managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News. Prior to that he worked for the Miami Herald, The New York Times and the Cincinnati Post, and he was editor and publisher of Arizona Trend magazine. When he was named executive editor of Knight-Ridder's Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer, he was, at age 29, the youngest top editor in company history.

Mike McCurry is a veteran political strategist and spokesperson with 25-years experience in Washington, D.C. He began his affiliation with Grassroots Enterprise as a member of the board of advisors in January 2000. Since then, McCurry has become chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors, leading the strategic development of the company and its software and services.

McCurry served in the White House as press secretary to President Bill Clinton (1995-1998). He also served as spokesman for the Department of State (1993-1995) and director of communications for the Democratic National Committee (1988-1990). McCurry has also held leadership roles in several national campaigns, including national press secretary for the vice presidential campaign of Senator Lloyd M. Bentsen (1988), and spokesman and political strategist in the presidential campaigns of Senator John Glenn (1984), Governor Bruce Babbitt (1988) and Senator Bob Kerrey (1992). McCurry began his political career on the staff of the United States Senate, working as press secretary to the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources and to the committee's chairman, Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr. (1976-1981). He also served as press secretary to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1981-1983).

McCurry remains a principal of Public Strategies Group, LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs and strategic communications consulting firm, where he has practiced since leaving the White House. He also serves on boards or advisory councils for Share Our Strength, the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Council for Excellence in Government, the Junior Statesmen Foundation, the Wesley Theological Seminary, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

McCurry received his bachelor of arts from Princeton University in 1976 and a master of arts from Georgetown University in 1985.

Harrison "Lee" Rainie is the Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a research center that examines the social impact of the Internet - or, how people's Internet use is affecting families, communities, health care, education, civic/political life, and work places.

Since its creation in early 2000, the project has issued 48 reports about Americans' use of the Internet. The research findings often center on the Project's regular monitoring of online life, including the ways in which their behavior changes as they gain more experience on the Internet. In addition, Project reports have dealt with such topics as: the impact of people's use of email on their key relationships, the way that Internet users act on the health information they get online, the impact of the Internet on campaigns, elections, and Americans' civic life, how broadband connections change people's online lives, the way teenagers and college students use the Internet, the durability and usefulness of online communities, the reasons why people do not have Internet access, how email use has changed U.S. workplaces, and the way people used the Internet after the September 11 terror attacks and their views about online information on government Web sites. The project's work can be found at http://www.pewinternet.org/.

Jan Schaffer is the executive director for J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, a new center at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism that will help newsrooms use innovative computer technologies to develop new ways for people to learn about important public issues. She is the former Executive Director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, an incubator for more than 120 journalism projects that created new ways of reporting that helped engage people better in public life. Schaffer, a former Business Editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer, directed the reporting and editing of two investigative series that were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, one on pharmaceutical pricing and one on abuses in the nation's non-profit sector. As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series of stories that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of the Philadelphia homicide detectives involved in the investigation. The articles won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service, the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Public Service Award, the Roy W. Howard Medal for Public Service and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel. Also while covering federal courts, she broke the Philadelphia Abscam story about the FBI sting operation that used agents posing as Arab sheiks. She was sentenced to jail for six months for refusing to reveal her sources; the sentence was stayed on appeal. Schaffer has been a journalism fellow at Stanford University and has taught journalism courses at Temple University and workshops at the American Press Institute. The Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million project created in 1993, was the first journalism-related initiative funded by the Pew Trusts. Since then the Trusts have supported several other journalism-based projects.

Participating in judging for 2004:

Dale Peskin
Co-Director
The Media Center

Dale Peskin is co-director of The Media Center at API. He was the executive director of NDN, which merged with The Media Center in September 2003. Prior to joining NDN, he was a vice president of Belo, the Dallas-based media company, where he launched the company's initiatives in new media and media convergence. At Belo, Dale served as editor of Dallasnews.com and as an assistant managing editor of The Dallas Morning News. He was a founding officer of Belo Interactive, Belo's network of news Web sites.
Dale has served as deputy managing editor of The Detroit News and The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, and managing editor of the Tribune Chronicle. Dale's awards include NAA's Digital Edge Award for Pioneering Online Journalism, the Sigma Delta Chi Award, and four Gold Medals from the Society for News Design. He was part of the team at The Detroit News that won the Pulitzer Prize.

Susan Moeller
Assistant Professor
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
University of Maryland

Susan Moeller is the former director of the journalism program at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. and a former senior fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She has held positions as lecturer in American Foreign Policy at Princeton's History Department; Fulbright Professor of International Affairs in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Bangkok, Thailand; and as visiting assistant professor in the Department of History at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Her book, "Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death," investigates how American print and broadcast media cover international crises. An earlier work, "Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat" analyses how the photographic images of war in the 20th century reflected and affected American attitudes toward war.

J-Lab is a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism. It is a spin-off of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism (www.pewcenter.org). © 2004 University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism