Eric Beecher started his career in newspapers as a journalist on The Age newspaper in Melbourne. He later worked at The Sunday Times and The Observer in London and The Washington Post in the US. In 1984, at age 33, he became the youngest -ever editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and in 1987 was appointed editor-in-chief of the Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group. In 1990 he became a founder, CEO and major shareholder in The Text Media Group, a public company which produced newspapers, magazines and books, which was acquired by Fairfax Media in 2003. In 2003 he formed Private Media Partners, which acquired Crikey.com.au in 2005. Since then he has been a founding shareholder and chairman of three further online media ventures: SmartCompany.com.au, EurekaReport.com.au and BusinessSpectator.com. In 2000 he delivered the annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture and in 2007 was awarded the Walkley Award for Journalistic Leadership.

Ralph Begleiter teaches communication, journalism, and political science at the University of Delaware and has more than 30 years of broadcast journalism experience. During two decades as CNN’s “world affairs correspondent,” Begleiter was the network’s most widely-traveled reporter, visiting some 95 countries. He continues to travel with university students and conducts media workshops in several countries under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State. At CNN during the 1980’s and 1990’s, he amongst others covered U.S. diplomacy and co-anchored CNN’s prestigious “International Hour.” In 1998, Begleiter wrote and anchored a 24-part series on the Cold War. He covered many historic events at the end of the 20th century, including virtually every high-level Soviet/Russian-American meeting, the Persian Gulf Crisis in 1990-91 or the Dayton Bosnia Accords. He has received numerous press awards including the Weintal Prize from Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Foreign Service (1994), one of diplomatic reporting’s highest honors.

Sarmila Bose is an academic and journalist with principal interest in the politics and public policy of South Asia. Her current research is on the practice of democracy in India. Her academic work is mainly based in the USA and UK and she has been a political journalist in India for many years, writing in English and Bengali. She was the inaugural Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford from 2006 to 2008 and is a member of its advisory board. She has held teaching and research positions at Harvard, George Washington University, University of Warwick and the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, and was assistant editor and a senior political writer at the ABP Group of newspapers in India.

Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in July of 2003, Professor Delli Carpini was Director of the Public Policy program of the Pew Charitable Trusts (1999-2003), and member of the Political Science Department at Barnard College and graduate faculty of Columbia University (1987-2002), serving as chair of the Barnard department from 1995 to 1999. Delli Carpini began his academic career as an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Rutgers University (1980-1987). His research explores the role of the citizen in American politics, with particular emphasis on the impact of the mass media on public opinion, political knowledge and political participation. He is author of Stability and Change in American Politics: The Coming of Age of the Generation of the 1960s (New York University Press, 1986), What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (Yale University Press, 1996) and A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life and the Changing American Citizen (Oxford University Press, 2006), as well as numerous articles, essays and edited volumes on political communications, public opinion and political socialization.

Bruce Dover has been involved in media for over 25 years. An award winning foreign correspondent and 1986 Australian Journalist of the Year, Dover has been a senior executive with some of the world’s largest media companies working across newspapers, magazines, television, radio and the Internet. He is a former Deputy Editor of “The Australian” newspaper and founding editor of “Business Asia” magazine. He was Senior Vice President, News Corporation (China) and News Corporation’s first China executive, establishing China’s first Internet joint venture and attaining “landing rights” for Phoenix television. From 1998, Dover headed up News Corporation’s Australian interactive operations. In 2001, he headed up the Asia television operations of the CNN International news network while concurrently establishing the networks’ International website operations. In 2004, Dover resigned from CNN to establish a consultancy, DoCo P/L. In August, 2007, Dover was appointed Chief Executive of Australia Network, the ABC’s international television service to Asia and the Pacific.

Terry Flew has a wide range of research interests and research experience, and has been an author of two books, six research monographs, 26 book chapters, 38 refereed academic journal articles, and has been an editor of five special issues of academic journals. He is the author of Australia’s leading new media textbook, New Media: An Introduction. New Media which was first published by Oxford University Press in December 2002. The third edition was published in 2008, with substantially new material and the inclusion of interviews and case studies. His second book, Understanding Global Media, was published by Palgrave in March 2007. He is First Chief Investigator on an ARC Linkages-Project Grant titled Investigating Innovative Applications of Digital Media for Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement in Australian Public Communication. He also heads the Audience and Market Foresight work program for Smart Services CRC and is a member of the ARC-funded Cultural Research Network.

Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best known journalists and authors. In a journalism career spanning three decades, Michael has been a political reporter, a foreign correspondent based in London and in Washington, a columnist, a feature writer, a senior editor at Time Magazine and the Editor in Chief of The Age in Melbourne from 1997 to 2004. He has won numerous journalism awards including three Walkley awards, the Australian equivalent of the American Pulitzer prizes. Michael Gawenda is the Director of the University of Melbourne Centre for Advanced Journalism.

Tom Hyland has been a journalist for close to 30 years. In his current position he reports and comments on international and defense issues, as well as editing foreign news coverage. He has held a succession of senior positions since joining The Age in 1997, including national news editor and state news editor. For five years he was the paper's foreign editor, during which time he co-ordinated the paper's coverage of the Kosovo conflict, Indonesia's transition to democracy, East Timor's independence vote, the September 11 attacks on the US, and the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has reported for The Age and The Sunday Age from Indonesia, East Timor and Afghanistan. Between 1989-1991 he was the Jakarta correspondent for Australian Associated Press. He has also worked for the BBC World Service and Radio Australia.

Christoph Lanz was appointed as Director of Television with Deutsche Welle in 2002. His journalistic career began as a reporter and editor with the public broadcaster ARD, where he notably worked for SWF. He then freelanced for various television and radio stations, working for example as correspondent in New York. His first leading position was as Deputy Head of Program for RIAS 2, which was followed by a year long stint as Deputy Program Director of FFH in Frankfurt, one of the biggest commercial radio broadcasters in Germany. Lanz returned to Berlin in 1990 to join RIAS TV, where he started working as anchor and was offered the position of editor in chief. After the political overthrow in East Germany, RIAS TV soon was dissolved and Deutsche Welle stepped in to take over the RIAS studios, facilities and employees and launched DW-TV. Christoph Lanz remained as editor in chief and was responsible for DW-TV’s relaunch in 1998, which established the station as a worldwide provider for news, information and culture.

Elias Mokua Nyatete, a Kenyan, has been both a journalist and administrator in the media industry. He has published in Kenyan mainstream media as well as in organizational journals. Nyatete worked at the Vatican Radio before moving to Northwestern Tanzania to be director of Radio Kwizera serving thousands of refugees from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). His work included the coordination of communication programs between UNHCR and its sister agencies such as UNICEF and WFP and cooperations with a number of international humanitarian organizations for refugees. He designed, among other media programs, an information campaign for the repatriation of Burundian refugees (2003-2007) which included a special news bulletin published in English and Kirundi that served to defuse tensions between refugees, local Tanzanian host communities and humanitarian organizations. A student at the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication, Nyatete specializes in media and political conflict in a globalized world.

Paul is Editor-in-Chief of The Age, Victoria's leading broadsheet newspaper. He has more than 30 years' experience in the media industry. The Age has a long and proud history of investigative and agenda-setting journalism. It is part of the Fairfax Media group, one of the largest multi-media publishers in Australasia.

Julianne Schultz AM is the editor of Griffith REVIEW, the award-winning literary and public affairs quarterly established by Griffith University in 2003 to provide a public intellectual leadership and a platform for long-form essays addressing topical issues beyond the daily news agenda. She is a Professor at Griffith’s Centre for Public Culture and Ideas. Schultz received her doctorate from the University of Sydney and is the author or editor of more than twenty books including Reviving the Fourth Estate (Cambridge Uni Press); Steel City Blues (Penguin); Not Just Another Business (Pluto), co-author of The Phone Book (Penguin) and numerous chapters on journalism and media practice. Schultz began her career as a reporter with the ABC and Australian Financial Review. She has held senior editorial roles and worked as media columnist and director of corporate and digital strategy. She was the founding director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and is actively involved in research and discussion about the future of journalism and its role in public life.

Philip Seib is Professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy, and Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. He studies linkages between media and war and terrorism, as well as public diplomacy issues. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Headline Diplomacy: How News Coverage Affects Foreign Policy; The Global Journalist: News and Conscience in a World of Conflict; Beyond the Front Lines: How the News Media Cover a World Shaped by War; Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War; New Media and the New Middle East; and most recently, The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics. He is the series editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication and is co-editor of the journal Media, War, and Conflict, published by Sage.

Valerio Veo has managed SBS News & Current Affairs Online since 2006 and is responsible for World News Australia, Dateline, Insight and Living Black. A journalist for more than a decade, Valerio started out as an ABC radio news reporter in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, moving around the country for five years before joining SBS TV news in 2002 and finally turning his technology passions into his career at SBS, then at ninemsn in 2004. There he moulded the ninemsn news website into the biggest news site in the country, before taking on current affairs where he redesigned ‘The Bulletin’ website and worked on Sunday, 60 Minutes and A Current Affair. He also enjoyed the trip of a lifetime covering The 2006 World Cup in Germany for ninemsn before being lured back to SBS. World News Australia online was relaunched with great success in November 2008, being nominated as a finalist in the AIMIA awards and honoured in the news category of this year's Webby Awards.

As Manager for Quality and Standards at SBS Radio, Christoph Wimmer is responsible for the editorial and journalistic quality of the world’s most diverse broadcaster, and for the training, monitoring and compliance of programs in 68 languages across several networks and platforms. An experienced broadcaster and newspaper, TV and radio journalist, Christoph has worked widely for media in Europe and Australia. A native Bavarian who partially grew up in South Africa, Christoph holds degrees in Philosophy, Sinology and German from Melbourne and Monash Universities, and is currently completing a PhD at Monash.

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work in the area of journalism, culture, memory and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has authored or edited eight books, including the award-winning Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago, 1998), Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992), Taking Journalism Seriously (Sage, 2004), and Journalism After September 11 (with Stuart Allan, Routledge, 2002). In 2008, she published Explorations in Communication and History (Routledge). A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Freedom Forum Center Research Fellowship, and a Fellowship from Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Zelizer is also a media critic, whose work has appeared in The Nation, the Jim Lehrer News Hour, Newsday, and Radio National of Australia. Zelizer is currently President-Elect of the International Communication Association.