Robert Shields has more than 30 years of experience in the news business, with most of that time spent at tabloid newspapers. After some time at The Trentonian, in 1997 he went to the New York Daily News, where he rose to executive news editor. At amNewYork, he was Editor-in-Chief for a year, before moving to Newsday in April 2017, where he is now an associate managing editor. As Shields writes, he’s “done it all, from developing film, cutting stories with a knife, stopping the presses, running social media, laying out the paper, writing some of your favorite front-page headlines, running the digital news operation, and now working planning, recruiting and helping Newsday’s new TV initiative.”
 

Neal Hirschfeld is a journalist, screenwriter and author. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, Reader’s Digest, O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, TV Guide, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, McCall’s Redbook, The New York Observer and Newsday. Hirschfeld was a recipient of the Meyer Berger Award from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has been an adjunct professor at both Columbia and New York University. He has written screenplays under contract for Warner Brothers, Tri-Star and Universal Television.

Clay Risen has been a reporter and editor at The New York Times for 13 years, most recently on the Obituaries desk. Before that he was the assistant oped editor and a senior editor on the politics desk during the 2020 presidential campaign. Risen was the founding managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (2006-2010). Prior to that, he was an assistant editor at The New Republic (2003-2006). Risen is the author of eight books, three cover American history. He is also a nationally renowned expert on whiskey, and the author of five books on the subject.
 

Over 30 years at The New York Times, Jane Karr held a host of positions, including Sunday Styles editor, deputy Arts & Leisure editor, metro presentation editor and editing education. Under her oversight, Education Life and its writers won numerous awards from the Education Writers Association as well as publishers awards. She left The Times in 2018 to teach two courses she developed at Yale.

Ken Auletta launched the Annals of Communications column for The New Yorker magazine in 1992. He is the author of thirteen books, including five national bestsellers—Three blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Super Highway; World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies; and Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It. His thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, was published in July 2022.

After graduating from the University of Iowa, Linda J. Heller worked for the Boston University Publications Department, where she wrote articles for the alumni magazine and edited the faculty/staff newsletter. Included in the articles was a profile of Aurelia Plath, Sylvia Plath’s mother, who was referenced in a biography of Sylvia Plath. Linda moved to New York in 1980. She freelanced for various magazines, including Ms. and Self. In 1980, joined the staff of Mademoiselle, where she worked until 1986. She became a contributing editor and monthly health columnist for Redbook. She freelanced for a variety of publications, including Parade, American Health, Self, The Nations, Barrons’ Executive Female and Parents
 
Harvey Araton reported on sports for four New York City daily newspapers over 40-plus years, the last 25 at the New York Times. He wrote the Sport of the Times column for 15 years, covered 10 Olympics, tennis around the world, and major events nationally, specializing in basketball and tennis. Before the Times, he worked at the Daily News, New York Post, and Staten Island Advance. Araton has been an adjunct professor in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University since 2010. He is the author, co-author and editor of nine books, including the New York Times best-seller, Driving Mr. Yogi (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) and When the Garden Was Eden (Harper Collins, 2011), a book about the 1970 and 1973 championship Knicks teams, which became an ESPN “30 for 30”, co-produced by Araton. His first novel, Cold Type, was published by Cinco Puntos Press in 2014.
 
Elaine Lafferty is a former staff correspondent for Time magazine, former editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine, and former war correspondent for the The Irish Times. She co-authored My Turn at the Bully Pulpit with Greta Van Susteren, published by Crown in 2003. She was also features editor  at MORE magazine, and her work has been published in the Nation, The Daily Beast and The New York Observer. During her tenure at Ms.(2003-2005), Lafferty led the magazine to increased circulation and financial stability. Under her leadership, Ms. won its first National Magazine Award nomination in 17 years.  Prior to joining Ms., she was a war correspondent for the Dublin-based Irish Times. At Time magazine, she covered a wide variety of subjects from the magazine’s Los Angeles bureau, including the O.J. Simpson trials and the Unabomber case. In 2011, Lafferty ran the social media for Diana Nyad’s Expedition, the Swim from Cuba to Florida, joining the flotilla accompanying Nyad on two of the attempts. Since 2014, Lafferty has worked as a ghostwriter on sever books. She is also the president of Delphic oracle, Inc., a media, speech writing and editing firm.
 
Dan Cryer, currently a freelancer, was a book critic at Newsday for 25 years. While there, he won the Publishers Award in Commentary for Criticism and an award for Best Criticism from the News Guild of New York, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. He was Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle. His books include “Being Alive and Having to Die: The Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church” and “Forgetting My Mother: A Blues from the Heartland.” His book reviews have appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He has also contributed to “Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors,” “Conversations with Louise Erich and Michael Dorris,” and others.
 
Angela Dodson was the first African American woman promoted to senior editor at The New York Times after serving as National Desk copy editor, editor for the “Living” section and head of the “Style Department”. She has written and edited for numerous other newspapers and magazines, including Essence, Heart & Soul, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Washington Star, the Rochester Times Union, The Huntington Advertiser and the Charleston Gazette, as well as for Gannett News Service, Washington Bureau.  As a teacher of journalism, Dodson has taught workshops on writing and editing for many organizations, including the National Black Writers Conference, the National Association of Black Journalists, the American Press Institute, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the Maynard Institute’s Editing Program, and has served as an adjunct faculty member at Mercer County Community College. She is the author of “Remember the Ladies: Celebrating Those Who Fought for Freedom at the Ballot Box” (Center Street, 2017), about the woman suffrage movement and women’s political gains since, and wrote the introduction to the 100th anniversary edition of “Jailed for Freedom: A First-Person Account of the Militant Fight for Woman Suffrage,” (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2020).

Claudia Dreifus has been a magazines and newspapers contributor since the late 1960s, including for The Atlantic, New York Review of Books, and The Nation.  For Newsday’s Sunday Magazine she interviewed film stars and newsmakers, and was also one of Playboy’s interviewers. Jack Rosenthal hired her to produce long form interviews for the Times’ Sunday Magazine where she introduced the Q and A format, and for the “Tuesday Science” section she wrote the “Conversation with ….” Feature.  Dreifus is author of six books, including Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do about It, which she co-wrote with her husband, Andrew Hacker. Today she actually works in higher education at Columbia University, teaching scientists how to produce journalism about their field. There she is this year’s winner of Dean’s Excellence Award for Teaching. Other awards include the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ Lifetime Achievement Award and an honorary membership to Sigma Xi, the science honors society, for her work in “transforming” science journalism.

Steven Greenhouse, was a reporter for The New York Times for 31 years, including his last 19 years there as the Times’ labor and workplace correspondent. As labor reporter, he covered myriad topics, including conditions for the nation’s farm workers, the Fight for $15, Walmart’s locking in workers at night, the 2005 New York City transit strike, factory disasters in Bangladesh and Scott Walker’s push to cripple Wisconsin’s public employee unions. Greenhouse retired from the Times in December 2014. He is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and continues writing as a prolific freelancer for numerous publications. His most recent book is Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, which Alfred A. Knopf published in August 2019. Before becoming labor correspondent, Greenhouse served as the NYT’s Midwest business correspondent based in Chicago for three years, its European economics correspondent based in Paris for five years, and in the Times’ Washington bureau for four years as an economics correspondent and then as a State Department. A native of Massapequa, he is a graduate of Wesleyan University (1973), the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1975) and N.Y.U. Law School (1982).  He is also a graduate of the Bergen Record (1976 to 1979).
 
Sylvia Helm’s diverse career in business and finance journalism included stints in writing, editing and teaching the craft. At The Village Voice in the 70’s she wrote stories like “Why Artists Starve” on the SOHO art gallery scene, and Car Theft: It’s Easier Than You Think (in which she “stole” a parked car herself). She was editor-in-chief of Info Magazine, a monthly editorial insert syndicated to 750 newspapers, wrote a column about consumer issues, syndicated by United Features, and even co-wrote “Co-ed,” a tv pilot for Scholastic. In the 80’s, Helm served as editor in chief of two insurance and banking-trade magazines, Investment Dealers Digest and Thompson Financial, and wrote stories for Venture magazine. She also served as an adjunct professor of business press journalism at NYU, and an advisor in its Gallatin School. In the 90’s Sylvia was responsible for media and publications at TIAACREF, and, before retiring from journalism in 2016, served as contract editor for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Health.
 
For thirty years, Susan Lacy, was the Series Creator and Executive Producer of the award-winning American Masters documentary series on public television. She was responsible for the production and broadcast of more than 215 documentary films about the nation’s artistic and cultural giants, earning, along the way, 71 Emmy nominations and 28 wins, including a remarkable 10 for Outstanding Non-Fiction Series, plus 12 Peabodys, three Grammys, and an Oscar. Those films included “Inventing David Geffen,” “Judy Garland: By Myself,” “Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind,” “Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note,” “Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval,” and “Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice,” and the Peabody award-winning films “Paul Simon: Born at the Right Time,” LENNONYC” and “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.” Lacy’s career in public TV began in 1979, as deputy director of performance programs at Thirteen/WNET, where she went on to be senior program executive for Great Performances and director of program development with American Playhouse. From 1984 to 1987, Lacy ran the East Coast office of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, also working as a consulting producer at Time-Life Video, and for programs at both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. After leaving PBS in 2013, she stared her own media production company, Pentimento Productions, which, in a multi-picture deal with HBO, has produced films on the lives of Steven Spielberg, Jane Fonda, and Ralph Lauren. Currently Lacy is directing a film about Billy Joel, which will premiere on HBO networks in 2024.
 
Kenneth Jones was managing editor and staff writer at Playbill.com for 13 years before turning his attention full-time to playwriting in 2013. His breakout play Alabama Story was a Finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, has been produced in more than 40 cities, and is published by Dramatists Play Service. Jones’ other plays and musicals have been developed at regional theaters throughout the U.S. Prior to moving to New York City in 1998, he was a freelance theater, arts and feature writer for newspapers in metropolitan Detroit, where he most significantly wrote for The Detroit News 1988-98, serving four seasons as chief drama critic. His work has appeared in Playbill magazine, Back Stage, A&E Magazine, The Oakland Press and The Jewish News. He interviews playwrights and promotes his own dramatic writing at ByKennethJones.com.

Judy Kuriansky, a pioneer of radio call-in advice on Z100 “Love Phones,” has been a TV feature reporter for WABC-TV, WCBS-TV, CBS, and CNBC’s “Money and Emotions,” and columnist at Huffington Post and Black Star News. Her columns have appeared in print media worldwide and her interviews in publications from People Magazine to the New York Times. At the United Nations for 18 years, Kuriansky, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, served as the main NGO representative for the International Association of Applied Psychology and the World Council for Psychotherapy, and conducted disaster recovery workshops worldwide. Besides authoring journal publications and policy statements concerning equal work rights for disabled persons, women’s rights, mental health and climate change, Kuriansky’s many books address not only relationships, but also international issues, She is an adjunct professor at Columbia Teachers College.

 
For most of her career, Joanne Mattera covered the fashion industry: as editor in chief at Fiberarts from 1981 to 1983, as editor of fashion features at Women’s Wear daily from 1983 to 1986, and as life-styles editor at Glamour magazine from 1986-1998. At WWD she coordinated the coverage of couture and ready-to-wear shows, working with of more than a dozen reporters in New York, four bureaus in the US, and European bureaus. Mattera won awards for her” Truth in Fashion” investigative column that covered consumer issues in the fashion industry: the Atrium Award from the University of Georgia’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications, and the Clarian Award from Women In Communication. As a freelancer she also wrote for New Woman magazine, the Chicago Tribune and other outlets. Since 2000, Joanne has focused on writing about art and in creating art. She has exhibited in galleries throughout the US, and is author of The Art of Encaustive Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax. Her memoir, Vita: Growing Up Italian, Coming Out, and Making a Life in Art, was published in 2019.
 
Sheryl McCarthy has hosted the “One to One” weekly talk show on CUNY-TV since 2007. In print journalism, she has been a reporter and education editor at the Daily News, a national correspondent at ABC news, and senior writer and longtime columnist at Newsday and New York Newsday. She has also written for Ms. Magazine, USA Today and The Nation. McCarthy has received numerous awards, including the Meyer Berger Award from Columbia University for her columns about New York City, and Harvard’s prestigious Neiman Fellowship. She taught at Columbia, and was Distinguished Lecturer of Journalism at Queens from 2007 to 2020. You can read a collection of her Newsday columns in Why Are the Heroes Always White, published by Andrews McMeel.
 
Melvin McCray is a filmmaker, photographer, writer and journalist. He has been president  of Media Genesis Solutions LLC, a Brooklyn-based production company from 1978 to present. He has produced and directed films for a wide variety of religious, cultural and educational organizations including NASA, Princeton University and the New-York Historical Society. For 28 years (1981-2009) McCray was a video editor for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings; he was awarded three Columbia DuPont Awards, an Emmy and the George Foster Peabody Award.  From 1974 to 1978, he was a reporter with Time, Life and Money magazines.  McCray taught broadcast journalism for 12 years as an associate adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and was the Ferris Professor of Journalism visiting professor at Princeton in 1999. In 2013 he created the Digital Media Training Program, a non-profit that provides free training to Harlem residents in video production, photography and journalism; in 2015 and 2016 his students won the White House Student Film Festival, and were awarded by President Obama (https://vimeo.com/196143196). In 2018 the Digital Media Training Program partnered with the Fortune Society in a program that offered training in journalism and film making to young men and women as an alternative to incarceration. The result was seven films and a broadcast on WNET’s public affairs program MetroFocus (http://harlemeyes.com/youth-empowerment-television-at-the-fortune-society). McCray presented his findings at the United Nations in 2019 (https://vimeo.com/319003260).  McCray is also a member of the selection committee of the George Polk Awards in Journalism, Long Island University (https://vimeo.com/697212414).
 
Jacklyn Monk is the managing editor at WSF- The Wall Street Journal Magazine, where, she explains, she “manages and advocates for the editorial team, is responsible for editorial operations, and supervises the budget.” Before joining WSJ in 2019, she was executive editor at Essence, executive editor of InStyle and deputy managing editor of Real Simple. She has held senior editorial positions at Vibe, Girl, Bridal Guide, New Woman, Beauty Digest and New Woman,where she became beauty editor at the age of 25–making her the first African American beauty editor at a major general-audience women’s magazine. Monk‘s work has also appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Heart & Soul, Cosmopolitan and Ladies Home Journal.  Throughout her career, she has received industry accolades, including a Folio Top Women in Media Award, Black Women in Media: Literature & Publishing Award and ColorComm: Women of Color in Communications Award.
 
Sandra Peddie, Newsday investigative reporter, has won more than 75 awards for her work, including the $35,000 Selden Ring Award for stories on pension fraud and abuses in special government districts that led to changes in New York State law. Before becoming an investigative reporter, she was an assigning editor and reporter for Newsday. During that time, she was a finalist for the Public Service Pulitzer for stories on police misconduct (2014) and was a reporter on the paper’s 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning police disability fraud series. In 2011, she was named Long Island’s Outstanding Journalist of the year. She also has won two New York Emmys, most recently for the documentary, “American Gangster.” Earlier in her career, she worked at the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a reporter and editor, and before that at the San Jose News in Costa Rica as managing editor.  Peddie served on the board of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and has taught journalism at Hofstra and Stony Brook universities. She is author of two books: The Repetitive Strain Injury Sourcebook (1997) and SONNY, the Last of the Old-Time Mafia Bosses, John Sonny Franzese (March 2022), Kensington Publishing).
 

Garry Pierre-Pierre, a leading voice on Haiti, the Haitian diaspora and community media, is publisher of The Haitian Times, which he founded in 1999. The Haitian Times provides timely, in-depth information about Haiti and its diaspora.  From 1993 to 1999 he was a reporter at The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize.  Pierre-Pierre is a recognized leader in media entrepreneurship circles. He is a Sulzberger Executive Leadership fellow at Columbia University, exploring ways to serve the Haitian diaspora worldwide and the co-founder and the first executive director of the Center for Community Media at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. In 2011, he was elected president of the New York Press Association, the first person of color to serve in that role.  Pierre-Pierre’s works include “30 Seconds: The Quake that Destroyed Haiti,” a book of photographs about Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. His contributions have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Miami Herald, Essence, The Griot, The Root and other publications. Pierre-Pierre frequently appears on major TV and cable networks, where he is called upon to provide context about Haiti. His weekly column appears on haitiantimes.com

Terry Pristin writes that before retiring, she “spent more than one-third of my 40-year career in journalism at The New York Times” as an editor and writer (3/1995 to 12/2009) “but I took a circuitous route to get there.” She worked in TV, alternative journalism, then went on to MORE, the UPI (“mainly in West Virginia, the closest I ever came to a foreign assignment),” The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and the Los Angeles Times, where she started on the Op-Ed page.  She notes that she had “a lot of different beats–among them, two state legislatures, crime and punishment in LA, the movie industry (when it was made up of colorful individuals, not just private-equity companies), the gentrification of Harlem and commercial real estate.”

Dean Warren Schomburg (on-air name: Warren Dean) spent his entire career as  radio news anchor. Before retiring in 2008 he worked as a newscaster/writer with the Wall Street Journal Radio Network for 14 years.  He also hosted a network TV program “Black Perspective on the News”, which originated at WHYY TV in Philadelphia and was carried by the Eastern Radio Network.  He was a radio news anchor for the ABC Contemporary Radio Network in New York City and also was an on-air host for New York classical radio stations WQXR and WNCN. 
Dean Schomberg, who got his MA in communications at Rutgers, is a grandson of noted bibliophile and historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, whose private collection of art and artifacts formed the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He chaired the Government Advocacy Committee of Schomburg Corp., a non-profit that raises funds for the center.  In his spare time (pre-pandemic) Dean enjoyed traveling to various points of the globe in pursuit of his love for jazz. He attended jazz concerts from Havana to Dubai and embarked on annual jazz cruises to the Caribbean, where he mixed with musicians and played his flute and alto sax during the “passenger jams.”
 
Beverly Solochek began her life in journalism and media as a feature writer at Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post. Covering trends, lifestyle, and culture, she was among the first to report on the emerging East Village and Soho scenes. As an entertainment reporter, she interviewed celebrities including Dustin Hoffman, Francois Truffaut, Shirley MacLaine, and Yves Montand. She also wrote the weekly “At Home” column which provided peeks into the homes of celebrities – along with their favorite recipes (Ruth [Mrs. Norman Vincent] Peale’s Easter lamb, Dionne Warwick’s chicken with pasta). In 1978, Solochek joined ABC-TV’s Good Morning America as a writer, and for more than a dozen years covered breaking news, current affairs, politics, culture, consumer news, education, and entertainment. As a freelancer, she wrote for New York, Seventeen, Newsday, the Daily News and The New York Times, where she regularly contributed to the Sunday real estate section. Solochek also worked as a public affairs officer in both the public and private sectors, and recently retired from the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she served as speechwriter for the president.
 
Mark Stamey had a unique career. After owning a commercial diving company for over 10 years, he decided to come above water and enter academia. After getting a BA and MA, he went  on to Columbia Journalism, earning an MS. He researched the coping strategies of destitute people and published his findings in The Journal of Consumer Research, as co-author of “The homeless in America: an examination of possessions and consumption behaviors” (1990). He continued to write on the subject for other academic publications until 1993, when he started writing as a freelancer for The New York Times, covering everything from riots and the police to education and health care in under-served communities. As “a general assignment runner,” most of his stories in the City Section were not by-lined–he’d call in the facts, plus color, and the desk would write the story, a common practice then. One story with his byline tracked the history of Dr. Angela Diaz, director of adolescent health at Mt Sinai Hospital (“One Unpaved Road to the White House,” NYT Aug. 7, 1994.)   In 1995, the New York Post hired Stamey as a full-time general assignment “runner”, focusing primarily on fires, riots, murders, the police, the courts, and more fires. He was “constantly on the go,” sometimes dressing as a janitor to enter a scene where journalists were cordoned off, or flying a drone when not allowed to approach the site of a plane crash. Brooke Gladstone profiled his work on NPR’s On the Media, first in 2001 (“The Crime Beat) and later on Nov. 24, 2005 (The Bummer Beat), after Stamey was no longer working for the Post, due to ill health.
 

Sandra M. Stevenson is associate deputy director of photography at CNN, where she manages a team of picture editors who curate the home screen, edit stories and newsletters, as well as special projects.  Prior to joining CNN in April 2021, Sandra was at The New York Times, first as picture editor (2005-2018) and then as associate editor, overseeing digital photo editors on the news desk, and working on visual content for Race/Related and the Gender sections. She also worked on projects such as “Overlooked” and “This Is 18.”  After receiving a BA in English from Syracuse University, Sandra spent four years working at NBC, first as a page and then working on various news programs. From there, she became the program coordinator for the Black Filmmaker Foundation. Stevenson returned to the news industry, joining The Associated Press, where she spent eight years moving up from photo assistant to overseeing photo news coverage for Latin America and the Caribbean. She received an advanced degree in multimedia from l’Universite Toulouse in France. Currently, she is a governor at the Overseas Press Club/America and board member of the LCU Fund for Women’s Education.

Robert E. Sullivan started as a copyboy at the Long Island Star-Journal, where he moved up to reporter. From there, Sullivan went on to the New York World Telegram & Sun, and then to UPI, where he worked on the local New York desk, before being transferred as a correspondent in Saigon, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Sullivan then returned to New York as bureau chief from 1984-8 at UPITN/Worldwide TV News. He later joined the UN News Service in New York, was assistant spokeperson for Secretaries-General Ban Ki Moon and Kofi Annan. He also served in UN missions to East Timor, Lebanon and Kosova. Sullivan has also taught journalism in Honduras, Lebanon, and at Hofstra College.

Jeffrey Tannenbaum was a reporter and editor for more than four decades, mostly at The Wall Street Journal (over 30 years) and Bloomberg, before retiring in 2012. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, he got his start in journalism on his high school and college newspapers. He had summer internships at the Ypsilanti Press, Buffalo Evening News (as it was then called) and the Washington Post before attending Columbia J School. After a brief stint as reporter for UPI, Tannenbaum joined The Wall Street Journal in 1971, where his beats included science, computers and privately owned companies. His reporting helped raise warnings about fraudsters Eddie Antar of Crazy Eddie and Steven Hoffenberg of Towers Financial. For five years, he wrote the Journal’s weekly page-one column, “Business Bulletin.” In 2004, Tannenbaum joined Bloomberg as a news editor, where he was involved mainly in coverage of health, science and education. Outside of the newsrooms, he has completed the NYC Marathon 37 times, and is a tournament chess player and the treasurer of the Marshall Chess Club.