PoynterInstitute

Confirmed Speakers

• Sree Sreenivasan
  SREE SREENIVASAN (@sree) is a professor and dean of students affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches in the digital media program, including social media and digital entrepreneurship. He is a technology expert, specializing in explaining technology to the general public. For more than eight years, he served as technology reporter for WABC-TV and WNBC-TV in NYC - and still appears occasionally on NBC, CNN, CNBC, etc, to talk tech. During 2009-11, he was part of the founding team of DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan news site with Joe Ricketts, Ameritrade founder (and new owner of the Chicago Cubs). The site was named one of the six hottest news startups of 2010 by BusinessInsider. He has written articles for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, National Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and Popular Science. He is co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association, a group of 1,000+ journalists across the US & Canada. In 2009, he was named one of AdAge’s 25 media people to follow on Twitter and in 2010 was named one of Poynter’s 35 most influential people in social media. He is creator of such learning opportunities as Social Media Weekend, Social Media One-Night Stand and more. You can find him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sree and on Facebook at http://facebook.com/sreetips and on the web at http://sree.net
• David Carr
  David Carr is a media columnist and reporter for The New York Times. He was among the first bloggers at the newspaper as the Carpetbagger, a daily blog on all things Oscar with frequent video updates. He currently blogs at Decoder, contributes video to Timescast and is a little too active in feeding 360,000 followers on Twitter. Carr’s website for his memoir, nightofthegun.com, used a variety of multimedia elements to create an online extension of the printed version. He frequently writes about the intersection between old and new media, a gap that is closing with each passing day.
• Bill Adair
  Bill Adair is the Editor of PolitiFact and the Washington Bureau Chief for the Tampa Bay Times, formerly the St. Petersburg Times. He has worked in Washington since 1997 and has covered Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, national politics and aviation safety. Adair is the author of “The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation,” a behind-the-scenes account of how the National Transportation Safety Board solved one of the biggest mysteries in aviation. He is the winner of the Everett Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. He lives in Arlington, Va. with his wife and three children.
• Jessica Hopper
  Jessica Hopper is a music and culture critic based in Chicago. Her work regularly appears in Chicago Reader, Village Voice, SPIN and Chicago Tribune and has also been included in DaCapo’s Best of Music Writing 2004, 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011. She is also the music consultant for the public radio show, This American Life. The New York Times called her widely-anthologized essay “Emo: Where The Girls Aren’t” “influential.” Her book, The Girls’ Guide to Rocking (Workman), was named one of 2009’s Notable Books for Young Readers by the American Library Association.
• Elissa Nauful
  Elissa Nauful is founder and CEO of Ballywho Social, one of Florida’s fastest growing social media agencies. Ballywho Social helps enterprise brands who wish to increase buzz and build awareness through organic, grassroots expansion to targeted social campaigns across multiple platforms. Brands look to Ballywho Social to help them build loyal, almost cult-like followings for their brands and businesses. A new kind of company, Ballywho Social uses its revolutionary business model and custom tool — Laicos — to create and curate social content. Traditionally, these businesses were limited to utilizing expensive IT professionals or inexperienced “bloggers” within the hip, young college sect, which left them with only the hope that things were being marketed correctly within this constantly changing space. Nauful is enjoying continued success with Ballywho Social, now in its third year — located in Wesley Chapel, Florida — and boasts a portfolio of clients across multiple industries. These clients rely on the marketing and product experts at Ballywho to develop, maintain, and grow their sphere of influence. Nauful is also committed to working to give back to the community in which she lives with her two children. She contributes to a number of marketing, health, and veterans’ organizations throughout the United States. She is a member of the American Marketing Association and Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, Junior League of Clearwater advisory board in addition to serving on the board of the national nonprofit “Our Veterans, Our Heroes.” She is also a Paul Harris Fellow from the New Tampa Rotary Club and has previously served as the chair of the Tampa Bay Chapter of the American Diabetes Association and on the board of Wheels of Success. Nauful is a graduate of Clemson University, where she received a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from the College of Business and Behavioral Science.
• Burt Herman
  Burt Herman is co-founder of Storify, a platform for creating stories with social media, and founder of Hacks/Hackers, a worldwide organization bringing together journalists and technologists. Storify won the 2012 SXSW Interactive award for social media, was named one of the top 50 Web sites of 2011 by Time Magazine, and also won the grand prize in the 2011 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism, among other accolades. Burt is also a co-founder of Hacks & Hackers and previously worked as an international correspondent for The Associated Press. In his dozen years there, he served as Korea bureau chief, founded a bureau covering the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia and reported on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other assignments worldwide. Burt was a 2008-9 Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, where he also received a bachelor’s degree with honors in political science and master’s degree in Russian and Eastern European studies.
• Ben Smith
  Ben Smith joined BuzzFeed as Editor-in-Chief in January 2012. He is responsible for overseeing and expanding editorial coverage and producing original content for the first true social news organization. Prior to BuzzFeed, Smith was senior political writer for POLITICO from 2007 to 2011, where he wrote a daily blog that Time Magazine named as one of the “Five Essential Blogs in 2010.” In 2008, Smith covered the Democratic presidential primary, with a focus on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Before POLITICO, he wrote a column and a blog for the New York Daily News. He also started New York’s first Political blog, The Politicker, for the New York Observer, as well as the political site, Room Eight, after working as City Hall Bureau Chief for the New York Sun. Smith has written for many leading publications including the Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, The New York Post, The New Republic, Legal Affairs, Reason and In These Times. Smith graduated Summa Cum Laude from Yale University with a degree in Linguistics. He was born and raised in Manhattan, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
• Lisa Williams
  Lisa Williams is the CEO & founder of Placeblogger.com, the world’s largest searchable index of local weblogs. Placeblogger was a winner of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge, which gives out $5 million dollars annually to innovators with projects that aim to define the future of journalism. Ms. Williams is also a fellow at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. Her blog on journalism and learning to code is at http://lifeandcode.tumblr.com. Ms. Williams was the 2009 winner of the New Media Women Entrepreneur of the Year award and was named one of the “Top 25 Women to Watch in Tech” by AlwaysOn/Stanford Innovation Forum. She also serves on the boards of a number of journalism-related organizations, such as the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and OpenCourt.us. Williams is also a judge for the Online Journalism Awards, the New Media Women Entrepreneurs grant competition, and a mentor for the International Womens’ Media Fund startup program. She has a sustained interest in mentoring women in technology and media fields. Prior to founding Placeblogger, in 2004 Ms. Williams founded H2otown, an online community and news site by and for the residents of her hometown of Watertown, MA. H2otown became a nationally-recognized model for what came to be known as “citizen journalism,” or news created by non-journalists as a way to create a sense of community in their neighborhoods. Lisa has worked with the Boston Globe, Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media, and countless startups and media organizations. She was named Peter Jennings Fellow at the National Center for the Constitution. She lives in Watertown, MA, with her spouse and two children.
• Meredyth Censullo
  A self-described “traffic geek,” Meredyth Censullo has been covering the morning commute in Tampa Bay since 2005, and has been a member of the ABC Action News morning team since September, 2008. The morning show’s resident social-media guru, Meredyth uses the “three screens” approach to traffic reporting, by incorporating her Twitter feed, @TampaBayTraffic, and her online traffic reports (www.abcactionnews.com and the ABC Action News mobile apps). Meredyth also maintains a Facebook page under the TampaBayTraffic brand (www.facebook.com/tampabaytraffic). Prior to joining WFTS, Meredyth was the morning traffic reporter and a feature reporter for WTSP in Tampa. She also worked at WJHL, Tri-Cities TN/VA, WDBJ in Roanoke, VA, and WHSV Harrisonburg, VA, covering everything from news to weather to education.
• Michelle Royal
  For the past 17 years she has facilitated the development of the creative capacities and innovation potential within individuals and businesses both in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Her work is focused on utilizing a powerful fusion of visual and design thinking to accelerate insight and the “actionaries” making innovation come to life. Michelle is the Board Chair of Creative Tampa Bay, a Board Member of Tampa Bay WaVE, and a founding Trustee of Awesomeness with Awesome Tampa Bay.