Jan Schaffer (moderator), J-Lab Travis Henry, YourHub.com Catherine Shen, BlountCountyVoice.com Steve Safran, NECN

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Jan Schaffer, J-Lab’s Executive Director, left daily journalism to lead pioneering journalism reform initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive journalism and participatory journalism.

She launched J-Lab in 2002 to spotlight new forms of digital storytelling that engage citizens. J-Lab (www.J-Lab.org) rewards novel ideas through the $15,000 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. It funds cutting-edge citizens media ventures through its New Voices (www.J-NewVoices.org) project and it provides technical support for community news projects through www.J-Learning.org.

Schaffer previously directed the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million, 10-year initiative that funded more than 120 pilot news projects that engaged people better in public life and provided training workshops and resources for newsrooms and classrooms.

A former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, she brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to her work. As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of six Philadelphia homicide detectives and won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. 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. She also held a range of reporting and editing positions on the city desk, the national desk and the business news department.

She earned both her bachelors and masters degrees from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

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Travis Henry is managing editor of YourHub.com but wasn’t hired until a month before the Web site first went live on April 28, 2005, according to Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple.

Though produced by the Rocky Mountain News and distributed by the Denver Newspaper Agency (print editions are featured once a week and delivered to subscribers of the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News), YourHub.com is run by 11 of its own full-time editors, led by Henry. He oversees nearly 40 individual Web sites that make up YourHub.com, each covering a city or town in the Denver metro area.

Residents have the opportunity to contribute news about events, stories and photos, and staff members also write occasional pieces for YourHub.com. Additionally, YourHub.com links to other publications that feature stories about YourHub.com’s cities.

In discussing the value of YourHub.com as a community effort, Henry told Editor & Publisher that he expects the community members who contribute to YourHub.com will eventually “scoop” the newspaper that produces it.

Henry is a Colorado native who graduated from the Metropolitan State College of Denver with a journalism degree and had worked at both weekly and daily newspapers, including The Daily Times-Call in Longmont, CO., as the editorial page editor.

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Catherine Shen is vice president of strategic development for Horvitz Newspapers Inc., responsible for the company’s weekly newspaper division, which includes nine newspapers for which she is publisher. She is also responsible for content and business development for the company’s newspaper web sites. She has been with Horvitz since 1994. Based in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Horvitz also owns two dailies in the area and one in Tennessee.

Shen recently helped The Daily Times newspaper in Maryville, TN., develop the citizens’ media effort known as BlountCountyVoice.com, modeled after the NorthwestVoice.com in Bakersfield, CA.

Shen has served as publisher of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, deputy managing editor of the LIFE section at USA Today and associate publisher of the Marin (Calif.) Independent Journal. She was also with the San Francisco Chronicle for 11 years, serving in many newsroom roles, and has been communications director for the San Francisco Foundation.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College and her master’s degree from Claremont Graduate School. She was among the first group of McCormick Fellows in 1998.

In comparing her stints with papers large and small, national and local, Shen told Seattle’s Northwest Asian Weekly, “Local is one of the best niches to be in if you produce content … because no other outlet has it.”

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Steven Safran is director of digital media and an executive producer at NECN, New England Cable News, the Boston area’s only 24-hour news channel. He is also managing editor at NECN.com and appears on-air doing segments from the Web office several times a day.

On July 15, 2005 NECN launched “Video New England,” which allows viewers to upload digital video that might later be used on the Web site or broadcast on television.

Safran told The Boston Globe that this would take blogging to the next level. He hopes these kinds of efforts will bring trust back to the journalism industry after numerous scandals have undermined the media’s credibility.

Safran graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and holds a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from the Boston University College of Communications.

An advocate of using a variety of media to tell a story, Safran wrote atthe Poynter Institute, “I mine the Web for information and report on-air the useful news we find. I am honored to be a ‘convergence journalist’ because convergence makes for better journalism.”

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