Susannah Vila is a New York based journalist and founder of the community news website NYC.is. She's also a graduate student in Political Science at Columbia University, where her research areas of interest are democracy, civic engagement new media.

Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University and is a former chair of the department. He is the author of PressThink, blog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), which he introduced in September 2003. On Twitter he is jayrosen_nyu. In July 2006 he announced the debut NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. In 2007-08 he was the co-publisher, with Arianna Huffington, of OfftheBus.Net a colloboration between NewAssignment.Net and the Huffington Post. Rosen has written for The Nation, Salon, washingtonpost.com, Harpers, The Chronicle of Higher Education and many other journals and blogs.

After a dozen years supporting professional private media around the world with Internews, Persephone spent a year at the Berkman Center pondering the meltdown of US media, the orthodoxy of blogging and the future of the foreign correspondent, among other things. A collection of papers from that year is at www.mediarepublic.org. Now Persephone is back at Internews Network trying to figure out how to ensure that the best of what's happening in participatory media is incorporated into programs to support media in the developing world.

Ari Melber (www.arimelber.com) is the Net movement correspondent for The Nation magazine, columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at Personal Democracy Forum. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 Kerry Presidential Campaign. Melber has spoken at each Netroots Nation since its 2006 founding. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber appears on national television and radio, including NBC, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and FOX News. He received a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a J.D. from Cornell Law School.

Yobachi Boswell is creator and publisher of BlackPerspecitve.net and The Jena 6 Blog; as well as co-writers for a number of other community organization and activism blogs.

Mr. Boswell is a writer and activist based in Nashville, Tennessee.

He initiated the founding of the The Afrosphere Action Coalition with three other bloggers in 2007 to consolidate the net activism efforts of likeminded bloggers who were working on similar issues.

Yobachi works in market research, but also blogs, screen writes, and free lance writes for hardcopy newspapers; as well as working as a director for the Nashville Black Covenant Coalition.

Michael A. Fuoco is the chairman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette unit of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, CWA Local 38061.Since joining the Post-Gazette in 1983, he has written spot news stories, investigative pieces, enterprise stories, features and for more than a decade covered Pittsburgh police. He holds a bachelor's degree in English from John Carroll University and a master's degree in journalism from Penn State University and is a fellow of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Karl Frisch is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, the nation's premier progressive media watchdog, research, and information center. A fixture on the talk radio circuit, Frisch has also appeared on major news outlets, including ABC News, MSNBC, and CNN. His weekly column runs regularly in newspapers around the country. Over the past decade, Frisch has worked for numerous candidates and organizations at the local, state, and national level. A media critic, experienced political operative and technology enthusiast, he speaks regularly about the modern media landscape, issues of the day and the intersection of technology, media and politics.