J-School Entrepreneurship Bootcamp: Speaker Bios

Sponsored by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.
Supported by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation
and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Rich Gordon is an associate professor and director of digital media in education at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where he launched and has overseen the school’s graduate program in interactive publishing. Gordon leads a graduate student multimedia Locative Journalism project covering Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics. He is also a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner, for a project to offer new media scholarships to computer scientists. Prior to joining Northwestern, he spent two decades working for newspapers in Virginia and Florida. Gordon was hired to establish a graduate major in new media journalism in Medill’s master’s program. In addition to teaching and research into new media journalism, Gordon has spoken widely to professional and industry groups.

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Retha Hill is the director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University. Hill joined the faculty last summer after nearly eight years at Black Entertainment Television, where she was vice president for content for BET Interactive, the most visited site specializing in African-American content. In that senior role, she was in charge of content strategy and convergence with the television network. Before joining BET, Hill was executive producer for special projects at washingtonpost.com, developing new products for The Washington Post’s Web site. She joined The Post’s early online operations in 1995 as the editor for local news, arts and entertainment.

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Jody Brannon recently became the national director of the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. From 2006 to 2008, Brannon was senior editor at MSN.com, where she was its first ombudsman and directed home page experimentation. Before that she spent six years as executive producer of news for USATODAY.com, where she handled breaking news and coordinated prime-time programming. She was previously the executive producer at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, where she oversaw projects and partnerships. Brannon chairs the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism Advisory Board.

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Barbara Iverson teaches and writes about blogging, citizen media, digital technology and online media publication at Columbia College of Chicago. With the help of fellow professor Suzanne McBride and funding from J-Lab’s New Voices program, Iverson launched a community news Web site that publishes local news and citizen journalism. ChicagoTalks.net embeds students in central Chicago neighborhoods to cover news that cannot be found in the mainstream Chicago media. Iverson has been teaching for 30 years and has been blogging since 1999. A pioneer of multimedia, Iverson produced her first Webcast from an American museum in 1998.

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David Poulson is the associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University where he teaches environmental, investigative and computer-assisted reporting. He also leads workshops for professional journalists covering the environment. His students created and currently operate GreatLakesWiki.org, a J-Lab supported citizen journalism site that was recognized with a Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. They also operate an environmental news aggregator called Michigan's Echo. Poulson joined the Knight Center more than five years ago after a 21-year career as a newspaper reporter and editor, mostly covering the environment.

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Cheryl Gibbs is the assistant director of journalism at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she teaches a variety of journalism courses. Gibbs is a recipient of a 2008 New Voices citizen media grant to develop the Miami-Whitewater Public Media Project. She is the co-author of “Getting the Whole Story: Reporting and Writing the News.” Before she joined the Miami faculty in 2004, Gibbs was the director of the journalism program at Earlham College and advisor to the student newspaper, The Earlham Word, for 11 years. She has collaborated with journalists and journalism educators in Colombia, South America, and has been a guest lecturer in post-graduate courses and seminars for journalists at universities in Bogotá and Medellín.

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Jeff Jarvis blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism. He is consulting editor of Daylife, a news startup, writes a new media column for The Guardian and also consults for media companies. Until 2005, Jarvis was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications. Prior to that, Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, TV critic for TV Guide and People, columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, assistant city editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and reporter for Chicago Today. He says he is at work on a book.

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Amy Eisman is director of writing programs for mass communication classes in SOC at American University. She teaches reporting, editing and writing for convergent media and created an online course called Media @ the Millennium. Prior to coming to AU, Eisman was an editor with Gannett for 17 years. She co-authored several unique online training modules for Gannett's 5,500 newsroom employees. She also co-authored a six-chapter module for the Knight Citizen News Network (KCNN.org), which focuses on tools for citizen journalists, including tips on crowdsourcing, partnering with traditional media and management.

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Jan Schaffer is executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and one of the nation’s leading thinkers in the journalism reform movement. She brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to her work. Schaffer is a former Business Editor and Pulitzer winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer. J-Lab helps journalists use digital technologies to develop new ways for people to participate in public life with projects on innovations, entrepreneurship and citizen media.