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2018 Christopher J. Georges Conference on College Journalism
Speaker Bios
Tristan Ahtone
Tristan Ahtone is associate editor for tribal affairs at High Country News. He previously served as a features reporter covering Indigenous affairs for Al Jazeera America. He has reported for “PBS NewsHour,” “Frontline,” “National Native News,” Fusion, Wyoming Public Radio, Fronteras Desk and NPR. Ahtone’s stories have won multiple honors, including investigative awards from Public Radio News Directors Incorporated and the Gannett Foundation. He additionally was part of the Al Jazeera team that received a Delta Chi Award in 2015. A member of the Kiowa Tribe, he is a past vice president of the Native American Journalists Association. At Harvard, Ahtone is studying how to improve coverage of Indigenous communities with a particular focus on creating ethical guidelines, protocols and codes of conduct.
@tahtone
Lois Beckett
Lois Beckett is a senior reporter at The Guardian US in New York, where she covers gun politics and policy and the rise of the far right. She previously worked for ProPublica, covering the intersection of data, technology and politics, with a focus on gun violence and gun policy. Her Essence magazine story on PTSD caused by gun violence, “Black America’s Invisible Crisis,” won a 2015 Deadline Award for public service and a NABJ Salute to Excellence Award in investigative journalism. With ProPublica’s Olga Pierce and Jeff Larson, she won the 2011 Livingston Award for National Reporting, which honors outstanding achievement by journalists under the age of 35. Before joining ProPublica, she covered the ways politicians use data to target voters, looking at online ad targeting and the data broker industry. Before joining ProPublica, she covered innovation in the news industry for the SF Weekly and Nieman Journalism Lab. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic and Essence, and she recently guest-hosted an episode of WNYC’s “On the Media” about the challenges of covering neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Beckett has been a frequent guest on nationally syndicated TV and radio programs, including CNN Newsroom, NPR’s On Point, KQED’s Forum and WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, and she regularly speaks about her reporting at journalism conferences. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she was a staff writer for The Harvard Crimson’s 135th guard.
@loisbeckett
Joshua Benton
Joshua Benton is director of Nieman Journalism Lab, which he founded in 2008. The Lab reports on the future of news, innovation and best practices in the digital media age. Before spending a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, Benton spent 10 years in newspapers, most recently at The Dallas Morning News. His reports there on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from 10 foreign countries, was a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and was a three-time finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. Before Dallas, he was a reporter and rock critic for The Toledo Blade. He’s a proud Cajun from small-town south Louisiana who wrote his first HTML in 1994.
@jbenton
Kerry Donahue
Kerry Donahue fell in love with radio at her college station, WOBC in Oberlin, Ohio, and has been making or training people in radio ever since. In January 2018, she started a new position as PRX’s director of training after five years as the director of the audio program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She’s been an adjunct instructor at Columbia Journalism School since 2002, starting not long after receiving her master’s degree there. Kerry was an executive producer at WNYC and, at Audible, made downloadable, on-demand audio programs long before podcasting was a thing. She also independently produced a radio documentary, “Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeffrey Schmalz.” Her work has been heard on PRX, NPR, WBGO and “Marketplace.”
@KerryDonahue
Matthew Karolian
Matthew Karolian is director of audience engagement at The Boston Globe, where he oversees the development and execution of strategies to bring the newsroom’s journalism closer to readers. During his tenure, the Globe’s social audiences have grown to more than 2 million followers and its reporting has expanded to new platforms such as Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. Karolian got his start in journalism as a stringer for C-SPAN during the 2008 presidential primaries in New Hampshire, where he documented everything from house parties to victory speeches. He is studying the impending impact of artificial intelligence on how news is reported and consumed.
@mkarolian
Sipho Kings
Sipho Kings is the Mail & Guardian’s environment reporter. He focuses on the ways human and industrial expansion affect vulnerable people and the environment and has covered topics ranging from the impact of climate change on droughts and coastal flooding to new safeguards for fragile ecosystems. He has won numerous awards for his work, including national awards for investigating the impact of air pollution on human health, and for reporting that helps to uphold the South African constitution. Now based in South Africa, he was born in Swaziland and is the first Nieman Fellow to come from that nation. Kings is studying how Africa’s carbon emitters plan to lower their emissions and help populations adapt to the changing climate. The research will compare plans to national capabilities and the feasibility of each, making alternate recommendations where possible.
@SiphoKings
Ann Marie Lipinski
Ann Marie Lipinski is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, home to an international fellowship program and an innovative group of publications about journalism, including Nieman Lab, Nieman Reports and Nieman Storyboard. Before coming to Harvard, Lipinski served as senior lecturer and vice president for civic engagement at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, she was the editor-in-chief and senior vice president of the Chicago Tribune, a post she held for nearly eight years following assignments as managing editor, metropolitan editor and investigations editor. As a reporter at the Tribune, Lipinski was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for stories she wrote with two other reporters on government corruption in Chicago. While editor of the paper, she oversaw work that won Pulitzers in international reporting, feature writing, editorial writing, investigative reporting and explanatory journalism. Lipinski is a trustee of The Poynter Institute and a past co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and sits on the executive committee of Harvard’s Center for African Studies.
@AMLwhere
Frank D. LoMonte
Frank D. LoMonte served as executive director of the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) from 2008-2017 and currently heads the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, a First Amendment think tank at the University of Florida. He has worked as a lawyer in every sector—government, private practice, nonprofit, education—after a career as an investigative reporter and political columnist. He remains an active volunteer as the Senior Legal Fellow at SPLC, where he is national co-chair of New Voices USA, a movement to pass laws in all 50 states that protect the independence of student newsrooms.
@FrankLoMonte
Christine Mungai
Christine Mungai is the Nairobi-based editor of Africapedia, a web publication that features data on key trends and major issues in the news in Africa. Her journalism career began at The East African newspaper, where she reported on politics, security, business, culture and the arts. In 2014, she joined the Mail & Guardian Africa, where her focus was broadened to a pan-African perspective, with a heavy focus on data-driven reporting. In 2015, she was named as the first runner-up for the David Astor Journalism Award, a professional development prize for East African print journalists. Mungai is studying the relationship between torture, silence and repression and how that affects a country’s political imagination and media reporting.
@chris_mungai
Aimee Rinehart
Aimee Rinehart manages training and international projects at First Draft, a project at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. First Draft fights misinformation by creating experimental journalism projects, undertaking research on those projects, and using research results to build resources and training for journalists and the wider public. Rinehart has worked online since 1996 for newspapers, magazines and nonprofits and was a digital founder at nytimes.com.
@aimeetwoee
Christine Schmidt
Christine Schmidt is a staff writer at the Nieman Journalism Lab, where she was the 2017 Google News Lab Fellow. As a student at the University of Chicago, she studied public policy. Her journalism career has been shaped by internships at The Dallas Morning News, Snapchat, the Hartford Courant and NBC4 in Los Angeles. She hails from Chicago’s Southside Irish.
@NewsbySchmidt