MARK BOWDEN is a national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly and author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) – an international bestseller that spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bowden also worked on the screenplay for Black Hawk Down, a film adaptation of the book, directed by Ridley Scott.  His recent work for The Atlantic includes more than a dozen feature articles covering various aspects of the “War on Terror.”

ALAN BRINKLEY is Provost and the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, and the country’s preeminent pre-eminent historian of the New Deal. His books include Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982), which won the 1983 National Book Award; The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995); and Liberalism and Its Discontents (1998). He is also the author of two widely used college American history textbooks. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in scholarly journals and in such other publications as the New York Times Book Review and Magazine; the New York Review of Books; the New Republic; the New Yorker; the Times Literary Supplement; the London Review of Books; Time; Newsweek; Harper's; and The Atlantic Monthly.

NEIL BROWN is Executive Editor of the St. Petersburg Times, the largest-circulation newspaper in one of the most competitive newspaper markets in the country.  Brown joined the Times in 1993 as world editor, overseeing coverage of Washington and national politics, as well as foreign coverage. Before that he spent five years in Washington, D.C., at Times affiliate Congressional Quarterly, including nearly four years as CQ's managing editor. He also worked for eight years as a reporter and editor at the Miami Herald.

DAVID CARR has been writing about media as it intersects with business, culture, and government for the past 25 years. He currently writes a column for the Monday Business section of The New York Times that focuses on media issues including print, digital, film, radio and television. He also works as a general assignment reporter in the Culture section of The New York Times covering all aspects of popular culture.  He has been a contributing writer for The Atlantic Monthly and New York Magazine, the media writer for Inside.com, and editor of the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in Washington D.C. In 1997, WCP received first place in the media category of the Association of Alternative Weeklies annual awards for “Good News ”

JOHN CARROLL served as editor of the Los Angeles Times from 2000 until 2006 when he quit rather than impose cost cutting measures insisted upon by the Tribune Co., the paper’s corporate parent.  Under Carroll's leadership, the Times took home 13 Pulitzer Prizes – five of which came in 2004, an accomplishment surpassed only by the New York Times, which earned seven Pulitzers for its coverage immediately following the 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center. Carroll has received both the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Leadership Award and the Committee to Protect Journalists award for lifetime achievement in defense of press freedom.  He is widely regarded as one of the best newspaper editors in America.

DAVID GREENBERG is an assistant professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University specializing in American political and cultural history. His first book, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (2004) won the Washington Monthly Political Book Award, the American Journalism History Book Award, and Columbia University’s Bancroft Dissertation Award. Last year he published Calvin Coolidge for the American Presidents Series and Presidential Doodles. A columnist for Slate and a contributing editor at The New Republic, Greenberg has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The Journal of American History and other scholarly and popular publications. Before pursuing his PhD, he served as Acting Editor and Managing Editor of The New Republic and as the assistant to author Bob Woodward, on The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (1994). He holds a BA from Yale and a PhD in history from Columbia. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children. 

ELLEN HUME is Director of the Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she is also a Senior Researcher and teaches an undergraduate course on News Media and Political Power.”  She is also a former White House and political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, former executive director of the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and former director of PBS’s Democracy Project.  Hume has an extensive background in journalism at the local, national and international levels, as well as a 20-year career in teaching and media analysis. She appears frequently as a media analyst on radio and television and trains journalists in American and foreign newsrooms for the Committee of Concerned Journalists and the U.S. Department of State. Her recent work is on her website, ellenhume.com.

JOE LOCKHART served as Chief Spokesman for President Clinton and the Clinton Administration from 1998-2000, where he conducted daily press conferences for White House journalists and briefed the President and senior members of his Administration on all press matters.  Lockhart is also a veteran of numerous political campaigns. Before joining the White House in 1997, he was National Press Secretary for the Clinton/Gore '96 re-election campaign. He was the Deputy Press Secretary for the Dukakis/Bentsen '88 presidential campaign, traveling with the nominee. In 1984, he was Assistant Press Secretary for the Mondale/Ferraro campaign and during the 1980 Carter/Mondale campaign he was a Regional Press Coordinator.  An award-winning journalist, Lockhart has held key positions at SKY Television News of London, Cable News Network (CNN), and ABC Network News. At SKY Television News, Lockhart served as foreign producer for Europe's first 24-hour television direct broadcast news service and contributing reporter/producer to the International Business Report. As Deputy Assignment Manager for CNN, he tracked Washington-oriented news stories involving the White House, Congress, and Federal agencies. Lockhart was also an Assignment Editor for ABC Network News.

 

SAMANTHA POWER won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for her book “A problem from Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide.  “Dying in Darfur,” her New Yorker essay on ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of Sudan, won the National Magazine Award for reporting in 2005.  She is the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (1998-2002). From 1993-1996, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Economist. Power is the editor, with Graham Allison, of Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She spent 2005-06 working in the office of Senator Barack Obama and is currently writing a political biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN’s special representative in Iraq who was killed in Baghdad in 2003.

TODD PURDUM is national editor and a political correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of A Time Of Our Choosing, America’s War in Iraq.  Previously, he served as diplomatic and White House correspondent for The New York Times. From 1997 to September of 2001, he was The Times bureau chief in Los Angeles, responsible for coverage of Southern California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii.  Before joining the Washington bureau in 1994, Purdum was chief metropolitan political correspondent in New York. Before that, he was City Hall bureau chief where he supervised the paper's coverage of the Mayor and city government. His coverage of New York's fiscal crisis won a first place award from the State Associated Press editors in 1991. In 1997, he received The Aldo Beckman Memorial Award of The White House Correspondent's Association for his coverage of President Clinton. Purdum is married to Dee Dee Myers, the former White House Press Secretary and now a political commentator.

ANTHONY SHADID is Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post and recipient of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and The Atlantic Monthly’s Michael Kelly Award for his remarkable reporting from Iraq. An American of Lebanese descent, Shadid speaks and reads Arabic, offering him insights not available to most Western journalists working in the Middle East. His book Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (2005) tells the story of the war in Iraq from the perspectives of ordinary Iraqis from all walks of life. Prior to joining the Post, Shadid worked for two years in Washington with the Boston Globe, where he covered diplomacy and the State Department. Since September 11, he has traveled to Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Europe, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel and the Palestinian territories. Prior to working for the Globe, he was news editor of the Los Angeles bureau of The Associated Press. Shadid worked as a Middle East correspondent for the AP in Cairo from 1995 to 1999, reporting and writing from most countries in the region. 

ANDREW SULLIVAN is a popular bloggers and provocative social and political commentators. A blogger for The Atlantic Monthly on line, a columnist for the Sunday Times of London, and senior editor at The New Republic, he also is the editor of andrewsullivan.com, which features informed commentary on international affairs, domestic politics, religion and faith, culture. The former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Sullivan was the youngest editor in its history and was acknowledged for making the magazine more relevant to readers of his generation. He is known for pioneering coverage of gay rights, the Supreme Court and affirmative action, and for his acclaimed reporting and writing on the Bosnian War. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Esquire. He is also a regular guest on The Chris Matthews Show, Charlie Rose, Meet The Press, and NPR’s Fresh Air. Sullivan’s book, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, was the first to argue for civil marriage rights for gay couples. He is also the author of Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival.  His most recent book is The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back.

MARGARET TALBOT is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. She has written for The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, where she published numerous cover stories as a contributing writer from 1999 to 2003, and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. Her essays have been anthologized in several books, including The Best American Science Writing 2002 and Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write about Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves (2005). She is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award. At the New America Foundation, Talbot explore such themes as the changing contours of family life, women’s work, and children’s culture in the 21st century, and politics and moral debates as they intersect with both science and the law.

MARCY WHEELER is a citizen journalist, blogger, and author of The Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy, a comprehensive examination of the Valerie Plame affair. She blogs under the name “emptywheel” at the political blog The Next Hurrah and she was the primary liveblogger for FireDogLake’s groundbreaking coverage of the Scooter Libby Trial. Her PhD and academic background — relating to citizen journalism at times of heavy propaganda — bring a unique perspective to her blogging. Several of her posts have scooped the mainstream media’s coverage of the CIA leak case, including her coverage of Scooter Libby's NIE leaks. She is a self-employed business consultant based in Ann Arbor, MI.