Election ’08: Unleashing the Cyber-watchdogsAgenda | Speakers | Fellows | Resources | BlogSpeakersMorra Aarons-Mele is a blogger, political consultant and graduate student at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where she specializes in women and leadership. Between classes, she covers politics as political director for BlogHer.com, the largest site for women bloggers, with over nine million unique visitors a month. Aarons is also a columnist for the Huffington Post and TechPresident.com. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury Tribune, USA Today, Mother Jones, and the BBC, among other news outlets. Aarons is a regular commentator on CNN. Her Internet experience spans politics and the private sector. During the 2004 Presidential Election, Aarons was the director of Internet marketing for the Democratic National Committee and the John Kerry for President Campaign. She founded the interactive public affairs division of Edelman, the world's largest independent communications firm, where she developed innovative strategies for clients such as Wal-Mart and GE. Before coming to Washington, Aarons worked in various roles at leading online companies, including iVillage.com and iVillage UK. She is active in local politics, and represented Washington, D.C.'s Advisory Neighborhood Commission for Ward 2B. Aarons is an alumna of Brown University. Email: Bill Allison is a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation. A veteran investigative journalist and editor for nonprofit media, Allison worked for the Center for Public Integrity for nine years, where he co-authored "The Cheating of America" with Charles Lewis, was senior editor of "The Buying of the President 2000" and co-editor of The New York Times bestseller "The Buying of the President 2004." He edited projects on topics ranging from the role of international arms smugglers and private military companies in failing states around the world to the rise of section 527 organizations in American politics. Prior to joining the Center, Allison worked for eight years for The Philadelphia Inquirer, the last two as researcher for Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Email: Sarah Cohen is with The Washington Post. Marc Cooper is associate director of USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism, is an award-winning author and reporter who has covered politics and culture from across the country and around the world for the last three decades. His articles, essays and interviews have appeared in dozens of publications, ranging from The Atlantic and Rolling Stone to The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. He's the author of three books, including The L.A. Times best-seller, Pinochet and Me. Cooper's broadcast experience includes reporting and producing documentaries for PBS' Frontline, CBS News and The Christian Science Monitor Reports. A full-time member of the USC Annenberg journalism faculty, Cooper is also a weekly columnist for L.A. Weekly, a contributing editor of The Nation magazine and serves as senior editor of one of the most-trafficked online news sites, The Huffington Post. Email: Colin Delany is founder and chief editor of epolitics.com, a site that focuses on the tools and tactics of Internet politics and online political advocacy. His e-book, "Online Politics 101: The Tools and Tactics of Online Advocacy," can be downloaded from the site. He cut his political teeth in the early '90s in the Texas Capitol, where politics is considered a contact sport, and rode a couple of Internet-political startups into oblivion during the first Internet boom and bust. Since then, Delany has worked as a consultant to help dozens of advocacy campaigns promote themselves in the digital world, and is currently employed full-time as online communications manager at the National Environmental Trust. At the 2007 Politics Online Conference, epolitics.com was given a Golden Dot Award as "Best Blog - National Politics." Delany is a graduate of Rice University. Email: Brant Houston recently became the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Journalism at the University of Illinois after serving as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors for more than a decade. Houston was also a professor in the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, where IRE is based. He currently is developing programs in international and ethnic media investigative journalism while exploring ways to use the latest technology for investigative reporting. Houston is author of "Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide" and co-authored the fourth edition of "The Investigative Reporter's Handbook." He was a newspaper investigative reporter for 17 years at several newspapers including The Hartford Courant and The Kansas City Star, specializing in government coverage and database analysis. Houston is a graduate of Bennington College. Email: Karen A.B. Jagoda is a founder and president of E-Voter Institute (http://e-voterinstitute.com), Email: Dennis W. Johnson is professor of political management at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University where he has served as associate dean of the Graduate School and director of the master's degree program in legislative affairs. In 2000-2003, he was principal investigator of the Congress Online Project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Writings from the project included"Congress Online: Bridging the Gap Between Citizens and their Representatives" (Routledge, 2004); "Communicating with Congress," a chapter in "Congress and the Internet" (2003) and "U.S. Congress Responds to Online Communications Needs" in the Journal of Political Marketing (October 2003). Johnson has written a quarterly column on CyberDemocracy for the Journal of Political Marketing where he is senior editor. He is also an editor of The Journal of Information Technology and Politics.In addition, Johnson has written "No Place for Amateurs: How Political Consultants Are Reshaping American Democracy," 2nd edition (Routledge, 2007); chapters for five other books on political marketing, "Perspectives on Political Consulting," Journal of Political Marketing (October 2002) and "Elections and Public Polling: Will the Media Get Online Polling Right?" Journal of Psychology and Marketing (November 2002). The editor of "The Routledge Handbook on Political Management" (Routledge, August 2008), he is completing a book, "The Laws that Shaped America."Johnson has presented papers, guest-lectured and participated in seminars worldwide. He has been interviewed by television and newspaper sources such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC Evening News, Canadian Broadcasting System, C-SPAN, Public Broadcasting System, MSNBC, U.S. Information Agency, Voice of America, Middle East Television, Japan Broadcasting Corporation, and AP Television. Before joining George Washington University, Johnson was chief of staff to a member of Congress and ran his own candidate and opposition research firm, focusing on Democratic statewide candidates. He holds a Ph. D. from Duke University. Email: Larry Makinson is a pioneer of computer-assisted reporting on money and politics. He started tracking campaign contributions as a journalist at the Anchorage Daily News in 1985, using an early Apple Macintosh and version 1.0 of the database, spreadsheet and desktop publishing programs then available. After earning a master's degree in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Makinson moved to Washington, D.C., where he joined the Center for Responsive Politics and spent 15 years tracking the patterns of money going to Congress, presidential candidates, and the national parties. After leaving CRP in 2004, he tracked Pentagon contracts for the Center for Public Integrity for a year, and in 2006 served as senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, blogging regularly on the money behind the 2006 elections. The author of more than a dozen books, Makinson is currently semi-retired while continuing to consult with both Sunlight and CRP. His bachelor's degree in philosophy is from the University of Bridgeport. Email: Ellen S. Miller is the co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, non-profit organization that is using new technology to open up Congress. In just two years, Sunlight has created more than two dozen Web sites, databases, distributed research projects, tools and widgets to make information about Congress' activities more accessible through the Internet. She is the founder of two prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics -- the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign -- and a nationally recognized expert on campaign finance and ethics issues. Miller is a well-recognized public speaker, commentator and writer on the issues of money, politics, and power. Her experience as a Washington advocate for more than 35 years spans the worlds of public-interest advocacy, grass-roots activism and journalism. In addition to her more than two decades of work on the issue of money in politics, Miller served as deputy director of Campaign for America's Future, where she directed its Project for an Accountable Congress, the publisher of TomPaine.com and a senior fellow at The American Prospect. She spent nearly a decade working on Capitol Hill. Miller blogs regularly at the Sunlight Foundation site and has written frequently for TomPaine.com, The Hill, The American Prospect and The Nation. Email: Dan Newman is co-founder and executive director of MAPLight.org, a non-partisan non-profit illuminating the connection between money and politics in unprecedented ways. MAPLight.org's groundbreaking Web site reveals relationships between campaign donations and legislative votes, helping citizens and communities hold their elected officials accountable. The Sunlight Foundation called MAPLight.org "a preview of the next generation of money-and-politics reporting." Newman, an entrepreneur and political organizer, is the author of three books on speech recognition software and is the founder of Say I Can, a speech recognition firm. He co-founded the Berkeley Fair Elections Coalition and has served as a consultant to various political and non-profit groups, including the Center for Voting and Democracy, Israel Venture Network, and the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. Newman received a Bachelor of Arts in biomedical ethics from Brown University and a Master of Arts in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, where a National Science Foundation fellowship supported him. Email: Aron Pilhofer is editor of interactive news technology at The New York Times, overseeing a news-focused team of journalist/developers who build dynamic, data-driven applications to enhance The Times' reporting online. He joined The Times in 2005 as a projects editor on the paper's newly expanded computer-assisted reporting team, where he specialized in stories related to money, politics and influence for the politics desk and Washington bureau. Prior to joining The Times, Pilhofer was database editor at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, where he began an ongoing project in 2002 to track a new form of political non-profit organization, so-called 527 groups. The Center's reporting was among the first to highlight the gaping hole in federal campaign finance regulations, which allows these groups to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into elections nationwide. Before working at the Center, Pilhofer was on the national training staff of Investigative Reporters and Editors and worked for a number of years as a statehouse and projects reporter for Gannett newspapers in New Jersey and Delaware. He graduated from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Email:
Email: Paul Singer is an investigative reporter for Roll Call, a newspaper that has covered Congress since 1955. Singer joined the newspaper at the beginning of 2007. His coverage areas have included investigations of the personal finances of members of Congress; lobbying, fundraising and money in politics; and the controversial process of earmarking. Prior to joining Roll Call, Singer was the executive branch correspondent for National Journal, where he wrote about White House oversight of federal agencies and the relationship of politics to policy-making. He spent most of 2006 covering the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and investigated the distribution of more than $100 billion dollars of hurricane relief money approved by Congress. In prior incarnations, Singer served as head of the Cleveland bureau of the Associated Press, where he covered the corruption trail of then-Rep. Jim Traficant (D-Ohio), and as White House correspondent for United Press International. In 2000, working for UPI, Singer traveled with Vice President Al Gore, and covered the disputed presidential election returns from a Tallahassee motel room. Singer got his professional start at Inside Washington Publishers, and credits owner Alan Sosenko with turning an energetic but utterly green kid into a reporter. Singer started his first newspaper when he was nine years old, a one-page, handwritten sheet delivered to a few houses on his block. He has been involved in journalism to some extent ever since. Singer is an alumnus of Kenyon College. Email: Matthew Waite is the news technologist for the St. Petersburg Times/Tampabay.com. He is the principal developer of PolitiFact, a fact-checking, data-driven Web site that seeks the truth in what the presidential candidates are saying. Before developing PolitiFact, Waite was an investigative reporter for the Times. During his time as an investigative reporter, he won a half dozen state and national awards for a series of stories he co-authored on Florida's vanishing wetlands. A book based on the series will be published by the University of Florida Press in spring 2009. Waite joined The Times in 2000 after a stint at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette covering law enforcement. He is a journalism graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he began his computer-assisted reporting career at the Daily Nebraskan. Email: Margot Williams is the database research editor at The New York Times. She has more than 20 years' experience in journalism at The Times, The Washington Post, the Poughkeepsie Journal and Time Warner. Williams is the co-author (with Nora Paul) of Great Scouts! Cyberguides for Subject Searching on the Web. Recent work has involved projects on Guantanamo detainees (she compiled the first list of their names prior to names being released by the Defense Department), Iraq contracts, New York State earmarks, jihadists returning from Iraq, subprime mortgages in Newark, and CIA renditions, along with deadline reporting and research on daily stories. Williams has been a newsroom trainer and frequent speaker at seminars and conferences, including IRE, NICAR, Poynter, Global Investigative Journalism Conference, Freedom Forum, Asian American Journalists Association, Internet Librarian, NetMedia, and more. She earned her B.A. in Asian Studies from City College of New York and her M.S. in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Email: |
Vikki Porter is director of the Knight Digital Media Center and supervises Professional Development Programs for New Media journalists at USC Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles. She was the founding director of the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. During her 30-year journalism career, Porter worked in five Western states, started a newspaper, served as top editor for three community newspapers, and shared a 1986 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal as part of a five-person team while city editor of The Denver Post. Most recently, she was executive editor of The Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, CA. Porter was a Knight Professional-in-Residence at the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas in 1987-88 and a Knight Journalism Fellow in Studies of Law at Yale Law School in 1988-89, where she earned her Masters in Studies of Law. She is active in the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Associated Press Managing Editors, and has been invited to participate in conferences hosted by the Pew Foundation for Public Journalism, the Freedom Forum, Harwood and Associates and the American Press Institute. 
Copyright 2006 Knight Digital Media Center
