The Paley Center for Media presents this program, "The Next Big Thing in Digital News Innovation." Next Big Thing is a series of quarterly gatherings designed to showcase new entrants and disruptors in the media, entertainment, and technology spaces by bringing them together with established leaders and investors in those industries. A mix of elevator pitches, open debate, and cocktail conversation, the Next Big Thing provides a forum for rising innovators and entrepreneurs to meet the pioneers and pillars of the media industry."
Bio
Christopher Burrage
Christopher Burrage is a business strategist and startup guru with business development experience across multiple startups. In an earlier life, Burrage was a management consultant with Deloitte Consulting LLP in their Strategy & Operations practice. Burrage is an enthusiastic graduate of Bowdoin College where he double majored in Economics and Government and is also an outdoor adventurer and avid skier.
Jonathan Gosier
Jonathan Gosier is a designer, software developer, and serial entrepreneur. He formerly served as director of SwiftRiver at Ushahidi, building an open-source platform for making sense of realtime data. SwiftRiver's mission was to filter streaming social content to enable users to discover relevant messages from social media sources during times of crisis. Gosier founded the African tech firm Appfrica in 2008.
William Mougayar
William Mougayar has more than 30 years of strategic, operational, and leadership experience in the technology industry, as an entrepreneur, business executive, professional speaker, management consultant and best-selling author. Engagio is his second startup, having started Eqentia in 2008. His career spanned 14 years at Hewlett-Packard in senior sales and marketing management roles, ten years as an independent thought leader, and two and a half years as global VP of Corporate Marketing at Cognizant of Teaneck, NJ. Mougayar is a graduate of the University of Washington, the University of Western Ontario, and attended the University of British Columbia’s Graduate Commerce School.
Kara Oehler
Kara Oehler is a radio documentary producer and media artist. She is cofounder and editor-in-chief of Zeega, an open-source HTML5 platform for creating interactive documentaries. This year, she is also a Radcliffe/Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University and a Rockefeller Fellow with United States Artists. Her radio stories and media projects have received Peabody, Edward R. Murrow, and Third Coast Festival awards and been exhibited at MoMA (NY).
Miral Sattar
Miral Sattar is founder and CEO of BiblioCrunch. She is also the founder of Divanee, the leading South Asian news and entertainment site in the US. She has worked in the media industry for 11 years, most recently at TIME where she launched several digital initiatives including an iPad and mobile site, mobile apps, a video and podcast channel, blogs, and SEO. Her writing has been featured in TIME, CNN, NY Daily News, among other media publications. She has a MS in Publishing (Digital + Print Media) from NYU and a BS from Columbia University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. You can follow Miral on Twitter @miralsattar.
Shane Snow
Shane Snow is a New York City-based technology writer, infographicker, and co-founder of Contently.com, a new media company that empowers journalists and brand publishers.
Melinda Wittstock
Melinda Wittstock is a serial entrepreneur, social media evangelist, and award-winning TV, radio and print journalist with 25 years of experience in New York, Washington and London. Her career spans BBC Radio and TV News, ABC News, National Public Radio, MSNBC/CNBC as well as London's Times, Guardian, and Observer newspapers. She has built companies, managed teams large and small, created award-winning content and interactive web products, driven traffic, ratings and revenue. Her grandmother was the first to tell her she was "disruptive" at age 5 with her first $100 earned on a neighborhood "cartwheel" business. NewsiT is her second company; she also founded and built Capitol News Connection to serve more than 200 public radio stations with award-winning localized coverage of Congress as its CEO. Brought up in New York and Toronto, she graduated with an Honors B.A. in political science from McGill University. At age 22 she joined the London Times as a business reporter and then media correspondent and never looked back. She is singularly focused now on transforming the news business with a new model that is 'win-win-win' for consumers, advertisers and media companies. Melinda lives in Washington D.C. with her husband Mark McDonald, their two young children, Sydney and Finn, and opinionated golden retriever, Josie.
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