These visual news innovators will be speaking at the September 19 “Reinventing TV News and Video” conference, sponsored by the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
SPEAKERS:
Joe Alicata is Director of Video Product for Vox Media Inc. He joined recently after a year at Chartbeat as Principal Product Owner and several impressive years as ESPN’s Senior Director of Product Development. At ESPN, Joe led teams that created a variety of innovative desktop/mobile apps and video platforms that vastly expanded the scope of ESPN’s digital presence. His experiences bring a progressive, industry insider’s perspective to his responsibilities leading video across all Vox Media properties. Joe is also a mentor for TechStars NYC, which helps early-stage startup companies achieve accelerated goals over the course of 12 weeks. Joe holds a B.S. in Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Hartford.
Steve Alperin is the Chief Business Officer at Vocativ, the hot new company using software from the intelligence world to innovate in the news business. He is responsible for the company’s business operations and television programming initiatives. Steve is an executive with an excellent track record driving audience growth and profitability for established media brands and early stage companies. He was responsible for growing ABCNews.com into a site serving more than 20 million users. As the Managing Editor in charge of the site, he deployed an innovative social media strategy that generated exponential traffic growth, and his team broke numerous stories that drove the national news agenda. Revenues for the site doubled under his leadership. Prior to that, Steve worked with Peter Jennings as the Head Writer and Producer for World News Tonight. Steve began his career doing strategic planning at CNN. He is the recipient of the Dupont and Murrow awards for outstanding journalism, and has been recognized with two awards from The Writers Guild of America. He holds an M.B.A. from Columbia and a B.A. in Government from Harvard.
Sarah Bartlett is the Dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She joined CUNY in 2002 as the Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College, and moved to the J-School in 2006 after serving on its founding curriculum committee. She created and oversaw both the Urban Reporting and the Business & Economics subject concentrations and helped found the school’s Center for Community and Ethnic Media. For several years, she was also the host of U$A Inc., a half-hour, weekly show on CUNY-TV, and she remains a board member of CUNY TV’s foundation. Dean Bartlett’s journalism career began in 1979, when she joined a documentary film company in London as a research assistant. In 1981, she returned to the United States and began covering business as a researcher/reporter at Fortune magazine. She then moved to BusinessWeek, where she served as a staff reporter and an associate editor from 1983 to 1988, and an assistant managing editor from 1992 to 1998. She was also a reporter at The New York Times from 1988 to 1992, covering urban affairs, business and financial issues; a contributing editor at Inc. magazine; and the editor-in-chief of Oxygen Media.
Jim Brady is the CEO of Stomping Ground, a mobile-focused local news startup that will launch its first site, Billy Penn, in Philadelphia this fall. Jim is the former Editor-in-Chief of Digital First Media, where he oversaw the 75 daily newspapers, 292 non-daily publications and 341 online sites that are owned by Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group. Before joining DFM, Jim served as general manager of TBD, a new local news operation dedicated to comprehensive coverage of the Washington, D.C. region that combined the values of traditional journalism and the power of citizen journalism. He joined TBD after more than four years as executive editor of washingtonpost.com, where he led the site to numerous awards and accolades, including a national Emmy award for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and a Peabody Award for its “Being a Black Man” series. As general manager of TBD, he was responsible for the business operations and editorial oversight of both TBD.com and TBD TV, a 24-hour local cable news station. Jim also spent spent more than four years at America Online, serving as Group Programming Director, News & Sports; Executive Director, Editorial Operations; and Vice President, Production & Operations. During his time at AOL, Brady was in charge of the service’s coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2000 presidential election. He earned a B.A. in Print Journalism from The American University in 1989.
Mark Briggs is the author of Entrepreneurial Journalism, a book about the rise of journalism startups and how to create one that was published by CQPress in October 2011. Mark also wrote Journalism 2.0: How to survive and thrive in the digital age, which was published by J-Lab and the Knight Citizen News Network in 2007 and downloaded as a PDF more than 200,000 times in English, Spanish and Portuguese. An updated version of the book, Journalism Next, was published by CQPress in December 2009, and a French translation was released in late 2013. Mark is currently director of digital media for KING5 Television in Seattle and served as a Ford Fellow in Entrepreneurial Journalism at The Poynter Institute from 2010-2012. Previously, he co-founded Serra Media, a Seattle-based technology company, and spent nine years running newspaper websites in Everett and Tacoma, Wash. As part of his mission to help journalists transform in the digital age and leverage the power of digital/social/mobile media, Mark has served as a speaker, trainer and consultant for various projects around the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. He spoke at SXSW Interactive in Austin from 2010 through 2013, and in May 2010 was named one of 20 Journalists to Follow by Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Rahul Chopra is the Senior Vice President of Video for News Corporation, where he is responsible for video expansion across all of the company’s properties worldwide. He is also now Chief Revenue Officer of the recently acquired Storyful. Prior to joining News Corp., Mr. Chopra oversaw video globally across Dow Jones, including for WSJ Live, The Wall Street Journal’s video initiative, which generates more than four hours of live video per day and is available on more than 30 platforms, including Apple TV, Roku and YouTube. Mr. Chopra held multiple roles within business development at Dow Jones, primarily focusing on the Journal’s video, mobile and tablet expansion strategy, as well as developing external strategic partnerships to expand reach and distribution. Before joining Dow Jones, he worked in investment banking for several years with Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York. Mr. Chopra holds an M.B.A. from the HEC School of Management in Paris and a B.S. in Economics from Rutgers University.
Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money and economics writer for the NY Times Magazine. His radio documentary on the housing crisis, “The Giant Pool of Money,” received several major awards, including the Peabody, DuPont-Columbia, and the Polk. Before Planet Money, he was international business and economics correspondent for NPR and pitched in during crises, such as reporting from Indonesia’s Banda Aceh just after the tsunami, New Orleans post-Katrina, and Paris during the youth riots. Prior to coming to NPR, Davidson was Middle East correspondent for PRI’s Marketplace. He spent a year in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2003 to 2004, producing award-winning reports on corruption in the US occupation. Davidson has also written for The Atlantic, Harper’s, GQ, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines.
Daniel Eilemberg was named Chief Digital Officer and Senior Vice President of Fusion in January 2014. In this role he oversees all of the company’s digital, mobile, and social media platforms. Before joining Fusion, Daniel founded Animal Politico, Mexico’s first news platform to launch exclusively on Twitter in 2010 and has built it into one of the leading political news and social media properties in the country. Prior to founding Animal Politico, Daniel served as Editor of PODER Magazine, a premier business magazine focusing on influential and innovative leaders in the fields of business and politics. Daniel also served as Editor of Hispanic Magazine and LOFT Magazine, which earned the prestigious Eddie Gold Award for Best Lifestyle Publication at the FOLIO awards. From 2002 to 2005, he worked in the creative department of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Daniel is the Founder and Managing Director of the ABC Fellows program. He was most recently a visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Adam B. Ellick is a Senior Video Journalist at The New York Times who reports on the world in video and print. Towing a backpack and small camera, Ellick has visited more then 70 countries. He witnessed the Asian Tsunami from Indonesia, covered Hugo Chavez’s violent land reforms in Venezuela, and road-tripped across Iran documenting the views of ordinary Iranians. He was the first reporter to “discover” Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in 2009 when he brought her story to the world in a documentary shot over six months alongside her family. Ellick’s coverage of Pakistan was awarded the 2010 Daniel Pearl Award, and he has also won consecutive Overseas Press Club awards. Ellick is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has taught journalism in many countries. For the past year, he worked full-time on a small innovation committee at The Times that published the Innovation Report.
Christian Fahrenbach is a journalist and communications strategist from Germany. He was a fellow of the Tow-Knight Program for Entrepreneurial Journalism in 2014 and founded achdarumgehts.de, a series of animated explainers providing the background and context of news. Christian works for various media outlets, including the German wire service dpa, Spiegel Online, and Germany’s most successful journalism crowdfunding project to date, Krautreporter. His work focuses on media startups and the changes in the industry on the East Coast and in Germany. He has a Ph.D. in social science and wrote his thesis about how organizations try to influence the way they are perceived.
Adriano Farano is co-founder of Watchup, a startup that reinvents the way we watch news with an app that gives users personalized newscasts. Previously, Adriano was an entrepreneur in residence at StartX, the Palo Alto, California startup accelerator, and a 2011 Knight fellow at Stanford, where he researched new ways to augment the news experience on mobile devices and tablets. He previously served as VP of Business Development at OWNI, which the Online News Association twice awarded the best non-English news site. From 2001 to 2009, Adriano co-founded and ran cafebabel.com, a pan-European online media outlet available in six languages with offices in 35 cities. As a journalist, he has worked for Le Figaro, Le Monde, Courrier International, Radio France Culture, Project Syndicate and other media outlets.
Fred Graver is the Creative lead for the global TV Team at Twitter. The team is responsible for integrating Twitter into broadcasts and networks, extending the reach of shows and talent, innovating new ways of storytelling, and giving millions of Twitter users a new way of enjoying television. Fred’s career spans comedy writing and producing (Late Night With David Letterman, Cheers, In Living Color, Jon Stewart), interactive producing (The MY Vh1 Awards, ZoogDisney), and creating shows that span the Web and television (Best Week Ever). He has seven Emmy Nominations (including one for the post-9/11 “Concert for New York City”) and three Emmys, as well as an NAACP award and a Webby. Fred’s Twitter team also won an Emmy for Technical Achievement for advancing the way TV audiences interact with programming.
David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster. His recently submitted six-year doctoral research is a historical and developmental analysis of mass and evolving media, focusing on a new form called videojournalism-as-cinema. He has worked professionally within radio and TV (the BBC’s Newsnight, Channel 4 News, ABC News South Africa) since 1988, and has received awards including a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism for his website, viewmagazine.tv, and an award at the International Videojournalism Awards held in Berlin. David is an artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre in London, and Chair of the jury panel for Broadcast Innovation at the Royal Television Society. He has also been a member of Chatham House, or The Royal Institute for International Affairs, for 20 years.
Jenni Hogan is the Chief Media Officer at Tagboard and Founder of TVinteract, an iPad app that allows on-air talent to interact with viewers live. Jenni has been incorporating social media on air for over six years as a talent and specializes in releasing the power of viewers through their mobile devices and second screens. The live shows she has produced and hosted have trended worldwide online while airing in a local market. At Tagboard, she leads broadcast and media strategy, creating tools for on-air hosts and producers to find the best conversations happening live online, then quickly highlight that content and take it to air in seconds. Jenni has also created interactive multi-platform content campaigns targeted at the millennial generation and digitally savvy viewers for Target, GMC, Microsoft and other Fortune 100 companies. The Huffington Post calls her a “visionary in her industry,” and Forbes declared her a “socially savvy journalist” as the most followed local TV personality on social media in America.
Jeff Jarvis directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of the upcoming “Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News” and a cohost of the podcast “This Week in Google.” In prior lives, he was a TV critic for TV Guide and People.
Tom Keene is an editor-at-large for Bloomberg News. He provides an economic and investment perspective to Bloomberg’s various news divisions. Tom created the chart of the day article and the Bloomberg on the Economy radio show, and he hosts the show “Bloomberg Surveillance” on Bloomberg Television, and co-hosts the radio show of the same name on Bloomberg Radio. Tom also writes about economics, finance and investment on the EconoChat blog for Businessweek.com, and he edited Flying on One Engine: The Bloomberg Book of Master Market Economists. Tom is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and is a member of the CFA Institute, the National Association for Business Economics and The Economic Club of New York.
Rob King is Senior Vice President, SportsCenter and News, at ESPN, where he oversees all of ESPN’s newsgathering operations. Previously at ESPN, King was responsible for all content and the overall editorial direction of the company’s leading portfolio of digital and print sports properties, and worked with its many news, information and programming units to develop greater cross-platform integration and development of cross-media franchises. In 2004, as Senior Coordinating Producer, King was responsible for ESPN’s award-winning NBA studio programming; its award-winning nightly series, “Outside the Lines”; and ESPNEWS, its 24-hour sports news television network. Before joining ESPN, King worked as a graphic artist, a reporter, a director of photography, and in various editorial positions for newspapers including the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Fast Company named King among its “Most Creative People 2014.”
Julian March is a journalist, cyclist, drummer, father, husband, and Englishman in New York, and a Senior Vice President at NBC News.
Sean Mills is President of NowThis, a socially distributed video news company. He was previously CEO at Nerve Media and President at The Onion.
Riyaad Minty is the founder of AJ+, the new digital-only experience from the Al Jazeera Media Network based out of San Francisco. Prior to his new role, Riyaad was one of the first employees to join the network’s New Media team in 2006, from which he built network-wide strategy as the Global Head of Social Media.
Jason Mojica is the Editor-in-Chief of VICE News. He has been contributing to VICE since 2007. Before joining the company full time in 2011, he worked for Al Jazeera English as a producer on the network’s weekly media analysis program, The Listening Post, and as a field producer for Josh Rushing’s series, On War. Since joining VICE he has produced documentaries for the web and for the company’s Emmy Award-winning HBO series in more than 30 countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, El Salvador, the Philippines, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mojica holds a B.A. in Political Communication from George Washington University.
Matt Mrozinski is the chief photojournalist at Dispatch Broadcasting Company’s WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, IN, and is also recognized around the globe as the founder/CEO of the popular journalism network known as Storytellers, a learning platform that touts nearly 6,000 professional members who promote and teach one another the craft of video storytelling. As a photojournalist and producer, Mrozinski is a nine-time Emmy award winner, and since 2010, has been named a finalist for the National Press Photographers Association’s Ernie Crisp Television News Photographer of the Year award. Every March, Mrozinski teaches journalists from around the world as a faculty member of the legendary NPPA News Video Workshop in Norman, OK. He’s also taught at the Kentucky News Photographers Association Workshop, Seattle University, and the Ignite Your Passion Workshop in St. Paul, MN.
Michael Rosenblum has promoted video literacy and the rethinking of how television and online video can be made and controlled for more than 25 years. His work has included the complete transitioning of the BBC’s national network (UK) to a video journalist-driven model, and the conversion of the Voice of America from short wave radio to television broadcasting and webcasting. Mr. Rosenblum has also designed and built video journalist-driven news channels around the world, including Time Warner’s NY1 News, Switzerland’s TeleZuri, and Sri Lanka’s SLBC. He has produced or overseen production on more than two thousand hours of programming for both network and cable television, and conducted video-journalist training classes from Thailand to Morocco. Mr. Rosenblum is an adjunct professor of communication at New York University, where he teaches “Television and the Information Revolution,” and is the author of Videojournalismus (Germany) and iPhone Millionaire.
Fred Seibert formed Frederator Studios, an independent TV production company, in 1998. He is the executive producer of six animated series on Nickelodeon’s networks, including The Fairly Oddparents, Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, and Random! Cartoons, and is developing animated feature films at Sony Pictures Animation and Paramount Pictures. In 2005, Frederator Studios created the first cartoon network especially for portable digital devices, and in 2012, Frederator Networks, Seibert’s media division, launched Cartoon Hangover, a YouTube distributed channel with original animated series and shorts. Its series, Bravest Warriors, became the most watched scripted series in YouTube’s funded channels project. Before forming Frederator, Seibert was President of Hanna-Barbera; the co-founder of Fred/Alan Inc., a consulting and advertising agency for the TV industry; and the first creative director of MTV. (You can read about his role in the making of that animated, mutating logo here.)
Jason White manages Facebook’s partnerships with news organizations. Based in New York City, he works with news and publishing companies on their Facebook strategies, helping them leverage the world’s largest social network to achieve business objectives. This work ranges from platform integration to publishing techniques to on-air tie-ins around special events.