Panelist Bios
Maureen Mann, Editor, The Forum, Deerfield, NH, moved to rural New Hampshire six years ago and found it difficult to find out about local issues, candidates or events. Media coverage of any kind was almost nonexistent. With the encouragement of others, she applied for a “citizen journalism” grant from J-Lab and with a group of volunteers, she launched forumhome.org. Prior to moving to New Hampshire, she taught social studies, English and psychology in a public high school for over 30 years. In 2006, because of her work in starting The Forum, she was presented the Sherburne Award for service to the community.
Jeremy Iggers, Founder, Twin Cities Daily Planet, is the restaurant critic for the Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul), where he previously wrote an ethics column and was creator of the paper’s Minnesota’s Talking Roundtables. In 1990, his series of articles about global food issues, “Feeding a Hungry Planet,” was awarded the Overseas Press Club of America’s Madeline Dane Ross award. In 1994, his series “The Neighborhood Tool Kit” was recognized by the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce with a Quality of Life Award. He has been the recipient of several fellowships, including the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship (1997), which enabled him to pursue a second career as a public philosopher. His books include “Garden of Eating: Food, Sex and the Hunger for Meaning” (Basic Books, 1996) – winner of a Minnesota Book Award and “Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest” (Westview, 1998). He has taught courses in philosophy and journalism at Metropolitan State University and the University of Minnesota.
Barry Parr is Editor and Publisher of Coastsider.com, a community Web site for coastal San Mateo County, California. Parr is also a media analyst covering news and information at Jupiter Research and writes the media weblog MediaSavvy. Parr was one of the architects of the San Jose Mercury News and News.com Web sites. Formerly, he was vice president of news at CNET.
Lisa Williams is the Founder of H2Otown, a news site for people who live in Watertown, Mass., where she lives with her husband and two children. Among her interests, she is writing a satirical novel set in the year 2035. She has made a couple of short movies, about H2OTown and about podcasting. She is an active member of the Berkman Center’s regular bloggers’ meetings. She is conducting research into the emergence of “placeblogs” across the U.S. And she is very involved in the OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) community and is writing a manual for OPML, which is an XML format for outlines that is being adopted for other uses, including to exchange lists of RSS feeds between RSS aggregators.
Mary Lou Fulton is vice president of audience development at The Bakersfield Californian, where she led the start-up of The Northwest Voice, one of the first participatory media publications in the newspaper industry. She started as a print journalist, working for the AP and the Los Angeles Times, and moved to the online world in 1995 where she has held leadership positions at washingtonpost.com, America Online and GeoCities.com. She returned to newspapers in 2003, joining The Californian to lead new product development efforts, including its award-winning social media platform that powers participation for the Northwest and Southwest Voice, Bakotopia.com and its flagship site, Bakersfield.com.
Steve Yelvington, Vice President, Strategy & Content, Morris Digital Works, is a strategist for the new-media unit of Georgia-based Morris Communications Co., a privately held multimedia company. Morris operates 27 daily newspapers from Alaska to Florida, 33 radio stations, book publishing, magazines, outdoor advertising and other media-related holdings throughout the United States and in Europe. Previously he was executive editor and editor of online services at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune. He is the founder of BlufftonToday.com. In 2001, He received the 2001 EPpy Award for outstanding individual achievement from Editor & Publisher magazine.
Travis Henry, Editor, YourHub.com, is leading the editorial team at the online initiative of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Newspaper Agency that provides citizen-generated content for 44 communities in the Denver metro area. YourHub has recently expanded to communities in Colorado Springs and Los Angeles and to the states of Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida. Henry is a Colorado native and Denver Broncos fan, and a community journalism pioneer.
Liz George, Co-editor and Co-owner, Baristanet, joined Baristanet.com in October 2004 and has helped lead the hyper-local site in broadening and expanding both its content and reader base. As co-editor and co-owner of the site with founder Debbie Galant, she has overseen the implementation of food and real estate pages as well as additional features that have increased traffic and participation on the site. In addition to her involvement with the site, George works as an editor and writer, contributing to shelter, food and women’s magazines, and the New York Daily News. She spent the first five years of her journalism career as an editor at Weight Watchers Magazine. George is author of “Your Dream Kitchen: Stylish Solutions for the Home” (Hearst, 2005).
Richard Anderson, President and Founder, VillageSoup, spent 34 years in elementary and high school education, as a math teacher and then a curriculum developer working with such national text book publishers as Houghton Mifflin, Macmillan/McGraw Hill and Prentice Hall. In 1996, he and his son moved to Maine full time and embarked upon creating VillageSoup. VillageSoup has now grown to add weekly newspapers to its online sites for Knox and Waldo Counties in Maine.
Courtney Lowery is managing editor and co-founder of NewWest.Net, an online magazine and blogging network covering the culture, economy and politics of the Rocky Mountain West. Before moving to Missoula, Mont., to launch New West in 2005, she worked as a reporter for Lee Newspapers and the Associated Press in Helena, Mont., and Omaha, Neb. With the help of a J-Lab New Voices grant, she also recently founded — with her alma mater, the University of Montana — a citizen journalism effort to create an online rural news network for small Montana towns that have lost their newspapers.
Rosemary Danon, Vice President – Online and New Media, Pappas Telecasting, directs interactive marketing and media campaigns for Pappas Telecasting’s group of stations and is developing content for their digital broadcast channels. Before joining Pappas, she held senior management positions for Liberty Media subsidiaries, most recently as Vice President, Interactive Services Group for Liberty’s Ascent Media unit, where she created a new division for the development and implementation of interactive television. Previously, she was Executive Vice President / General Manager of International Channel Networks, where she created a cable channel from inception to launch. She was also Vice President and General Manager for KSCI Media Group’s television stations KSCI / Los Angeles and KIKU / Honolulu. Danon is an Emmy Award recipient and has been nominated nine times.
Moderator Bios
Jan Schaffer is the Executive Director of J-Lab, which funds and spotlights pioneering initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive and participatory journalism and citizen media. J-Lab spotlights new forms of digital storytelling on www.J-Lab.org. It rewards innovative practices through the $16,000 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. It funds cutting-edge citizen media start-ups through its New Voices project (www.J-NewVoices.org). It has built a Web tutorial on how to launch community news sites (www.J-Learning.org). Schaffer previously directed the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million project that funded 120 pilot newsroom projects. She is a former business editor and Pulitzer Prize winner for the Philadelphia Inquirer. There, 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.
Chris Harvey is the Director of Maryland Newsline and a Lecturer at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland. Harvey teaches online journalism classes and directs and edits the college’s online news bureau, where students create and package multimedia stories for the award-winning online news magazine, Maryland Newsline. Previously, she was managing editor of the American Journalism Review and acting metro editor for washingtonpost.com. She is also former director of both the Annapolis and Washington bureaus of the college’s Capital News Service. She is an Advisory Board member for the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.
Adam Glenn, journalist and online editor, has worked in almost every kind of newsroom and medium as a reporter, editor and news manager. He joined the online world in 1997, and spent more than seven years at ABCNEWS.com, wearing many hats including that of senior producer. He is a consultant on new-media initiatives and an organizer of many journalism workshops and programs. He is co-publisher of iReporter.org with Amy Gahran, author of Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits daily briefing. He also earned a mid-career master’s degree in global affairs.
Susan Brenna is a freelance journalist, author, consultant and an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. She has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, New York magazine, New York Newsday, and many other publications. She’s done research and writing for many nonprofit organizations and recently became director of communications at The After-School Corporation in New York City.
