National Conference for Media Reform 2011, Call for Suggestions

Presenters

• Craig Aaron

  Incoming President and CEO, Free Press

  

  Craig Aaron is the new president and CEO of Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund. He joined Free Press in 2004 and previously served as managing director, senior program director, and communications director of the media policy and advocacy organization. He works in the Washington office and speaks across the country on media, Internet and journalism issues. Craig is a frequent guest on talk radio and is quoted often in the national press. His commentaries also appear regularly in the Guardian and the Huffington Post. Before joining Free Press, he was an investigative reporter for Public Citizen's Congress Watch and the managing editor of In These Times magazine. He is the editor of two books, Appeal to Reason: 25 Years In These Times and Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age.

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home, Opening Plenary: Better Media Starts Here
• Cheryl Contee

  Fission Strategy

  

  Cheryl Contee, a partner at Fission Strategy, specializes in helping nonprofit organizations and foundations use social media to create social good. She is also the co-founder of one of the top 10 black blogs, Jack and Jill Politics, and writes under the pen name "Jill Tubman." Cheryl is included in The Root 100 list of established and emerging African-American leaders, and the magazine Fast Company has named her one of their 2010 Most Influential Women in Tech. She has over 13 years of award-winning interactive expertise and previously served as vice president and lead digital strategist for Fleishman-Hillard’s West Coast region in San Francisco.

  Cheryl has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Magazine, and on the BBC and CNN, among others. She is also proud to serve on several boards and advisory committees: Netroots Nation, BlogHer, Blogging While Brown, Applied Research Center, and CommonGoods.Net. She received her B.A. from Yale University and has an International Executive M.B.A. from Georgetown University. In her spare time, Ms. Contee enjoys hiking, yoga, movies and tai chi sword.

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home
• Kim Gandy

  Feminist Majority

  

  Kim Gandy is vice president and general counsel at the Feminist Majority and the Feminist Majority Foundation. She previously served as president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and chair of the NOW Foundation and political action committees. Gandy also served as NOW's principal spokeswoman and is a well known media commentator on women's rights. After leaving NOW, Gandy accepted a resident fellowship at Harvard University's Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government. She was one of the lead organizers of the 2004 March for Women's Lives and a key organizer of the 1989 and 1992 marches. Gandy’s expertise in mass actions ensured that 1.2 million activists made the 2004 march for women's reproductive freedom the largest and most diverse grassroots mobilization in our nation's history. In 2011, Gandy became chair of the Free Press board of directors.

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home
• Ben Huh

  Founder, Cheezburger Network

  

  Ben Huh is the CEO and founder of the Cheezburger Network. He's a former journalist turned "dot com" entrepreneur who has a knack for nailing the zeitgeist and has been credited with bringing Internet memes to the mainstream and popularizing Internet culture. The success of the Cheezburger Network (http://icanhascheezburger.com/) is attributed to Ben's knowledge of memes, viral content and crowd sourcing. Ben graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home
• Rick Karr

  Blueprint America

  Rick Karr is correspondent for Blueprint America. He also teaches radio journalism at Columbia University and regularly contributes stories on technology and culture to NPR News.

  Through 2007 and 2008, he was correspondent for the weekly PBS public affairs show Bill Moyers Journal. Prior to that, he was correspondent and regular contributor to Weekend America.

  From 1999 to 2004, he was NPR's lead arts correspondent in New York, focusing on technology's impact on culture. Prior to that, he hosted the NPR weekend music and culture magazine show Anthem, and even earlier in his career, worked as a general assignment reporter and engineer at NPR's Chicago bureau.

  Rick was nominated for an Emmy award for his 2006 PBS documentary Net @ Risk, which made the case that the United States is falling far behind other nations with regard to the speed and power of its Internet infrastructure. He's also reported for the PBS shows NOW and Journal Editorial Report.

  Rick is a member of the songwriters' collective Box Set Authentic. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with his wife, artist Birgit Rathsmann.

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home
• Craig Newmark

  craigslist

  

  A Web-oriented software engineer by training, with 30 years of IT experience at companies such as IBM and Bank of America, Craig now spends his days working as a customer service rep at craigslist. In 1995, while Craig was working at Schwab, he started craigslist as an e-mail list for friends and co-workers about events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1999, Craig retired from IT consulting to work full-time on craigslist. What started as a fun side project in Craig's living room has since grown into one of the busiest sites on the Internet. Craig continues to embrace his inner nerd (although he no longer wears thick black glasses that are held together with tape, and he retired the plastic pocket protector some years ago). Craig is involved with in a variety of community efforts and is particularly interested in organizations promoting public diplomacy, Mideast peace and new forms of media such as participatory journalism. He's on the boards of the Sunlight Foundation, OneVoice, Consumers Union, FactCheckED, and VotoLatino.

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home
• John Nichols

  The Nation, Capital Times

  

  John Nichols is The Nation’s Washington correspondent and the editorial page editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. He is the author of The ‘S’ Word: A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism; The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism; Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire; Jews for Buchanan and Dick: The Man Who Is President and co-author, with Robert McChesney, of It’s the Media, Stupid; Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media; Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections and Destroy Democracy; and, most recently, The Death and Life of American Journalism.

  Sessions

  On Wisconsin: Taking the Pulse of the Labor Beat, Closing Plenary: Taking It Home, Journalism and Democracy: Rebuilding Media for our Communities , Book Signings
• Alexis Ohanian

  Reddit.com

  

  After graduating from UVA, Alexis Ohanain started reddit.com with Steve Huffman. Today, reddit is a top social news website, with more than 14 million unique visitors and one billion page views monthly. He also founded Breadpig, which creates geeky things, sells them, and gives away all the profits ($175,000 so far). Alexis is publisher of xkcd; angel investor at Das Kapital Capital, LLC; and marketing dude at hipmunk. TechCrunch calls him “one of the more passionate and audacious young entrepreneurs in tech.”

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home
• Ramya Raghavan

  News and Politics Manager, YouTube

  

  Ramya Raghavan is the news and politics manager at YouTube where she oversees political and social change programming. Previously, Ramya worked at the Center for American Progress and at Advocates for Children of New York. She blogs regularly at www.citizentube.com

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home
• Rinku Sen

  Publisher of Colorlines.com

  

  Rinku Sen is the president and executive director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and publisher of ColorLines Magazine.

  A leading figure in the racial justice movement for the last 20 years, Rinku has positioned ARC as the national home for media, research and activism. She has extensive practical experience on the ground, with expertise in race, feminism, immigration, economic justice, philanthropy and community organizing. Over the course of her career, Rinku has woven together journalism and organizing to further social change.

  Rinku is the vice chair of the Schott Foundation for Public Education and a board member of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. She is the chair of the Media Consortium and sits on the boards of Restaurant Opportunities Center-United and Working America. She is also a Prime Movers fellow through the Hunt Alternatives Fund.

  Previously, Rinku served as the communications director and the director of the Transnational Racial Justice Initiative at ARC. Prior to that, she held various leadership roles at the Center for Third World Organizing, a national network of organizations of color, where she trained new organizers and crafted public policy campaigns from 1988-2000. Rinku started her organizing career as a student activist at Brown University, fighting race, gender and class discrimination on campus. She received a B.A. in women's studies from Brown in 1988 and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in 2005. A native of India, Rinku grew up in the Northeast USA.

  Sessions

  News for All: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, Closing Plenary: Taking It Home, Book Signings
• Deanna Zandt

  Media technologist and author

  

  Deanna Zandt is a media technologist and the author of Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler, June 2010). She is a consultant to key progressive media organizations, including AlterNet and Jim Hightower's Hightower Lowdown, and is a research fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University.

  Zandt specializes in social media, is a leading expert in women and technology, and is a frequent guest on CNN International, BBC Radio, Fox News and more. She works with groups to create and implement effective Web strategies toward organizational goals of civic engagement and empowerment, and uses her background in linguistics, advertising, telecommunications and finance to complement her technical expertise. She has spoken at a number of conferences, including Netroots Nation, SXSW Interactive, Personal Democracy Forum, the National Conference on Media Reform, Facing Race, Web 2.0 Expo, Bioneers, America's Future Now (formerly "Take Back America,") Women Action & The Media, and provides beginner and advanced workshops both online and in person.

  In January 2009, Deanna was chosen as a fellow for the Progressive Women's Voices program at the Women's Media Center. She also serves as a technology advisor to a number of organizations, including Feministing, The Girls & Boys Projects and Women Action & the Media. She is on the board of the Applied Research Center, a racial justice think tank and home for media and activism.

  Sessions

  Closing Plenary: Taking It Home, Book Signings