Adrian Holovaty is a journalist and web developer in Chicago. He has developed innovative, award-winning web applications for washingtonpost.com, Lawrence.com and LJWorld.com. One of his projects, chicagocrime.org, an innovative overlay of the city’s reported crimes using Google’s online mapping technology, won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the 2005 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. He also co-created Django, an open-source web development framework. He graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001 and was named one of Crain’s “40 Under 40” in 2005.

Richard M. Anderson is president and owner of VillageSoup Inc., a company that provides places for residents to learn, share and shop in the neighborhoods, villages or towns in which they reside. Before establishing VillageSoup, he spent five years teaching and 29 years developing and publishing elementary and high school textbooks. He was co-founder and eventual sole owner of Ligature Inc., a textbook production company. Anderson is an active community member who chairs and serves on various nonprofit organization boards. He and his wife Sandy live in Camden, Maine, as do two of their three children and families. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from the University of Northern Iowa and a Ph.D. in educational administration from the University of Iowa.

Ian V. Rowe is the vice president of Strategic Partnerships and Public Affairs for MTV. His department oversees MTV’s campaigns that build awareness of issues important to MTV’s audience. He now oversees MTV’s new pro-social platform, think MTV that informs and engages viewers to take action on the domestic and global issues that matter most and affect their lives. Prior to MTV, Rowe was the director of Strategy and Performance Measurement for USA Freedom Corps at the White House, the president’s initiative on volunteer service. He is an Echoing Green Fellow and was also founder and president of Third Millennium Media, a media consulting business. Rowe spent two years with Teach for America, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science Engineering from Cornell University.

Rich Gordon is an associate professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where he directs the school’s graduate program in new media journalism. Prior to joining Northwestern, he spent two decades working for newspapers in Virginia and Florida. From 1995 to 1999, Gordon was the first director of new media for the Miami Herald Publishing Co. He oversaw the team that created The Miami Herald Internet Edition (www.herald.com), El Nuevo Herald Digital (www.elherald.com), two South Florida community guides (www.miami.com and www.broward.com) and an array of other Internet content and commerce services. He also served as newsroom technology coordinator for The Herald. He also organizes and conducts programs on new media publishing strategy for media company executives through Northwestern’s Media Management Center.

Christopher Callahan became the founding dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in August 2005. In his first 18 months, Callahan added seven award-winning journalists to the Cronkite School’s full-time faculty. He also brought to ASU the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism and created the New Media Innovation Lab and Cronkite News Service. Prior to joining the Cronkite School, Callahan served as the associate dean at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Before entering a career in journalism education, Callahan was a Washington correspondent for The Associated Press.

Geoff Dougherty is the founding editor of ChiTownDailyNews.org and the CEO of its parent company, PublicMedia, Inc. He was an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune, and served in similar roles at the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times. He has 14 years of journalism experience and has won numerous awards for his work. While at the Miami Herald, Dougherty played a key role in the newspaper’s effort to review, count and analyze discarded ballots from the 2000 presidential election. He is a graduate of Colorado College.

David Ardia is director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media. David received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Syracuse University College of Law in 1996 and expects to receive an LL.M. from Harvard Law School in June 2007. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was assistant counsel at The Washington Post where he provided pre-publication review and legal advice on First Amendment, newsgathering, intellectual property, and general business issues. Before joining The Post, David was an associate at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation. David is a former member of the Newspaper Association of America’s Legal Affairs Committee and is a current member of the First Amendment and Media Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association, the Media Law Committee of the District of Columbia Bar, and the New England Media Lawyers Group.

Gail Robinson has 25 years experience as a political journalist. She edited and wrote for an environmental magazine with an urban focus, covered education for a daily newspaper, supervised political columns for a national newspaper feature syndicate and served as executive editor of monthly magazine offering Americans global perspectives. Robinson moved to online journalism first as a freelancer for sites such as govWorks.com and joined the Gotham Gazette staff in 2000. Along with editing, she has written extensively about the recent upheaval in the New York City school system, covered local political contests and reported on issues from parades to pollution. She has worked on Gotham Gazette’s early forays into games. A resident of Brooklyn and loyal (if not native) New Yorker, Robinson became editor-in-chief of Gotham Gazette this year.

Nora Paul is director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota. She previously taught at the Poynter Institute teaching news library management, computer-assisted research, and new media leadership from 1991 to 2000. She was editor for information services at the Miami Herald from 1979 to 1991. Paul (and Hanson) are co-authors of “Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators.” She is a member of the board of the World Press Institute, and has traveled worldwide presenting seminars and lectures on research methods and on innovation in online news. Her work at the University of Minnesota focuses on evolving digital storytelling forms.

Kathleen A. Hansen is a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center (MJC) and supervisor of the school’s Digital Information Resource Center. She is a co-author (with Nora Paul) of “Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators.”