The Paley Center for Media and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation present The Next Big Thing in Digital News Innovation, a series of forums in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles showcasing news and information startups for an audience of high-level media executives and investors."
Bio
Maegan Carberry
Maegan Carberry has worked in media and politics for more than ten years as a journalist, analyst, strategist, and college lecturer. Presently she is viral curator of Upworthy, a start-up from veterans of Facebook, MoveOn.org, The Onion, and other top leaders in the industry. She also co-hosts Variety's "Wilshire & Washington" podcast. Building off of her first gig as a Chicago Tribune reporter and columnist, Carberry later became Arianna Huffington's chief of staff and then went on to work as an independent journalist and web entrepreneur, where she cofounded a thriving women's lifestyle social network called TruuConfessions. Inspired by the historic 2008 presidential election, she became Rock the Vote's communications director during the 2010 midterm elections. She has a master's degree in journalism and media management from Northwestern University, where she won the school's highest honor, the Harrington Award for professional excellence. As an undergraduate she studied political science and English at UCLA.
Brad Flora
Brad Flora is founder and president of NowSpots. As a journalist he penned cover stories for Slateand covered budget cuts in Chicago. In 2008 he founded Windy Citizen, a Reddit-like social news community for Chicago. When local businesses didn't want to buy banner ads, he offered them interactive ad units that featured their latest content. Those started selling, the Knight Foundation came knocking, and soon, major players in the publishing industry. Flora splits his time between Mountain View and Chicago where he shares an apartment next to the Brown Line with an ever-changing set of roommates plucked from Craigslist.
Kristian Hammond
In addition to being Narrative Science’s chief technology officer, Kris Hammond is also a professor of computer science and journalism at Northwestern University. Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern, he founded the University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research has been primarily focused on artificial intelligence; machine-generated content and context-driven information systems. Hammond received his PhD from Yale.
Jim Spencer
Jim Spencer, president and founder of Newsy, has helped lead several successful Internet start up and established online companies. He was vice president of content and answers at Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) where he was responsible for all search queries and helped lead the company to a top fifteen website and through a successful initial public offering. Prior to Ask Jeeves, Spencer was the general manager of news and information programming at AOL (News, Sports, Health, Research and International) leading the content, business, and partnership operations for one of AOL’s major business units. He also served as director of strategic partnerships at NBC for MSNBC.com, leading the direction of the MSNBC.com website and the coordination of the newsrooms of NBC News in New York and MSNBC’s newsroom on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA. He earned his M.A. in journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia and his B.F.A. from New York University’s Film School.