Speaker Bios
Kelly McBride (facilitator)Kelly McBride is the ethics group leader at The Poynter Institute, where she helps journalists strengthen their ethical decision-making skills and improve their writing, reporting and editing. She has been on the Poynter faculty since 2002. In addition to running the Ethics Department, Kelly directs the Poynter Ethics Fellows program, which gathers 16-20 editors, producers and reporters to address ethics issues of the day. Twice she has traveled to South Africa to lead advanced reporting and writing seminars geared toward reporters working in a young democracy. Before coming to Poynter, Kelly worked as a reporter for 15 years, spending most of that time at The Spokesman-Review newspaper in Spokane, Wash. She covered crime and courts for six years and faith and ethics for eight years. Ms. McBride has a BJ from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and an MA in religious studies from Gonzaga University.
Bob Steele (facilitator)Bob Steele led The Poynter Institute’s ethics program for 13 years, facilitating hundreds of seminars and newsroom workshops and assisting thousands of journalists. In 2003, he was named the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values. Mr. Steele joined the faculty of his alma mater, DePauw University in 2008 as the Eugene S. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism and as scholar-in-residence at DePauw’s Janet Prindle Ethics Institute. In addition to writing for Poynter Online, he has written case studies, handbooks and articles for many professional organizations and academic journals. He was a co-author of Doing Ethics in Journalism: A Handbook With Case Studies. Mr. Steele has a B.A. in economics from DePauw, an M.S. in television-radio from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in journalism ethics. Before joining Poynter, Mr. Steele had been a reporter, executive producer and news director for television stations in Maine, Wisconsin and Iowa.
Henry Blodget (speaker) UNOFFICIAL BIO from HuffPostHenry Blodget writes and speaks frequently about the Internet, investing, and the financial markets. His commentary has appeared recently in Fortune, Euromoney, New York, The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Newsweek International and other publications, and he is an occasional guest on CNBC, CNN and NPR. He is the president of Cherry Hill Research, a business research firm, and edits Internet Outsider, an Internet business blog. Mr. Blodget worked on Wall Street from 1994-2001. In 2000, he was voted the Street’s top Internet analyst by Institutional Investor and was one of the most-read analysts on Wall Street. After the dotcom crash, Henry had the dubious honor of being the first executive keelhauled in connection with an investigation into conflicts of interest between the research and banking divisions of Wall Street firms.
Lauren Rich Fine (speaker and facilitator)Lauren Rich Fine is practitioner in residence at Kent State University, a position she has held since fall 2007. Before joining Kent State, Ms. Fine, CFA, was a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch in equity research. She joined the department in 1988 and covered the publishing, information, advertising and online industries. She was a ranked member of the Institutional Investor All-American Research Team since 1994. Ms. Fine has an MBA from the Stern School of Management (NYU) and a BA in Psychology/Economics from Tufts University. Ms. Fine is on the boards of the Cleveland Film Society, the Chautauqua Foundation, and Urban Community School, a not-for-profit school for low-income families in Cleveland. She is on several other advisory boards and committees in Northeast Ohio. Ms. Fine blogs at huffingtonpost.com and at paidcontent.org.
Susan Goldberg (speaker)Susan Goldberg was named editor of The Plain Dealer in May 2007. Prior to that she was the executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News from 2003-2007, after working as managing editor at the paper for four years. From 1989-1999, Ms. Goldberg worked at USA Today, serving as a deputy managing editor of the News, Life and Enterprise sections. Previously she worked as a reporter and editor at the Detroit Free Press. She began her career as a reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A Michigan native, Ms. Goldberg has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University. She is active in professional journalism organizations, serving on the board of directors of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She also is co-chair of the Medill School of Journalism’s Board of Visitors at Northwestern University.
Jay Rosen (speaker) NOTE: UNOFFICIAL BIO from NYU Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University, where has been on the faculty since 1986. Rosen is the author of PressThink, a blog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org). Mr. Rosen also blogs at huffingtonpost.com. Mr. Rosen is a member of the Wikipedia Advisory Board. In 1999, Yale University Press published his book, What Are Journalists For?, about the rise of the civic journalism movement. From 1993 to 1997 he was the director of the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation. He has published in The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and others. Online he has written for Salon.com, TomPaine.com and Poynter.org. He has a Ph.D in media studies from New York University and has been a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University.
Robin Sloan (speaker)Robin Sloan is the new media strategist at Current, a participatory media company based in San Francisco and co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt. Current produces news by collaborating with its audience; it runs a cable and satellite TV network, available in 56 million homes around the world, and a Web site, current.com. Before Current, Robin worked at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school and think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla. There, he co-produced EPIC 2014 (http://robinsloan.com/epic), a viral video view of the future of media. Mr. Sloan graduated from Michigan State University, where he majored in economics and minored in wasting time on the internet.
Jon Talton (speaker)Jon Talton is a journalist and author living in Seattle. He writes the “On the Economy” column for the Seattle Times and is proprietor of the blog Rogue Columnist (www.roguecolumnist.com). For more than 20 years he has covered business and finance. Mr. Talton has been a columnist for the Arizona Republic, Charlotte Observer and Rocky Mountain News, and his columns have appeared in newspapers throughout North America on the New York Times News Service and other news services. He has been a regular guest on CNBC. Mr. Talton was business editor for several newspapers, including the Dayton Daily News, Rocky Mountain News, Cincinnati Enquirer and Charlotte Observer. Mr. Talton also is the author of seven novels, including the David Mapstone mysteries, among them Dry Heat and Cactus Heart.
Dawn Turner Trice (speaker) is a metro columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She is the moderator for the Tribune’s online forum, “Exploring Race,” at www.chicagotribune.com/race. A regular commentator for WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” show, Trice’s commentary also has appeared on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” program. She has written two novels, Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven (Random House, 1997), which is being made into a movie, and An Eighth of August (Random House, 2000). She is the recipient of the 2008 Studs Terkel Media award, two Illinois Arts Council awards, an American Library Association Alex award and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She lives outside Chicago with her husband of 19 years and their 13-year-old daughter.
Jerry Ceppos (speaker) has been dean of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, since February. Before that, Jerry spent most of his journalism career with Knight Ridder, at the time the second-largest publisher of American newspapers. He worked at the Miami Herald for nine years, leaving as assistant managing editor for news, and then joined the company’s San Jose Mercury News. There he served as associate editor, managing editor and executive editor/senior vice president. After leaving the Mercury News, Jerry was vice president for news of Knight Ridder, the top news position in the company. He oversaw news content of Knight Ridder’s 32 daily newspapers as well as its Washington and foreign bureaus and content of the Knight Ridder Tribune news service.
Jerry has been active in journalism education for years. He has served on the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications for 17 years, six of those as president. He has been chair of the journalism-education committees of both national editors’ groups. He received the Gerald Sass Award, the top honor of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication. Immediately before joining the University of Nevada, Jerry was a fellow in media ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and an adjunct lecturer at San Jose State University.
Jerry is a former president of the Associated Press Managing Editors and of the California Society of Newspaper Editors. Among other honors, he received the Ethics in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Carr Van Anda Award for “enduring contributions to journalism” from the University of Ohio. He is a “distinguished journalism alumnus” of the University of Maryland.
