BILL BUZENBERG, the Center’s executive director, has been a journalist and news executive at newspapers and in public radio for more than 35 years. He was vice president of news at both National Public Radio and American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio over a span of 16 years. Buzenberg is credited with launching such programs as NPR’s Talk of the Nation, APM’s documentary unit American RadioWorks, and Speaking of Faith, public radio’s signature program on religion. He also began Public Insight Journalism, an innovative use of technology to draw knowledge from the audience. Buzenberg joined NPR in 1978 as the first reporter to help start Morning Edition. For 11 years he was a foreign affairs correspondent based in Washington, D.C. He was named London bureau chief in 1986 and became NPR’s first managing editor in 1989. He began his journalism career in newspapers, serving as city editor of the Colorado Springs Sun. Buzenberg was a Peace Corps volunteer from 1968 to 1970. He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award, public radio’s highest honor. A graduate of Kansas State University, Buzenberg has also studied at the University of Michigan as part of its mid-career professional journalism fellowship program, in the master’s program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy, and as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

HODDING CARTER III is an award-winning journalist and the former president and chief executive officer of the Knight Foundation. He joined the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as a professor of leadership and public policy in January 2006. Carter held the first Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland College of Journalism, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. His journalistic career began at the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi, which his family owned. He was the newspaper’s editor and associate publisher when he was tapped to serve as assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President Jimmy Carter, a role in which he most notably became the administration’s spokesman during the Iran hostage crisis. After his government service, he was the president of MainStreet, a television production company specializing in public affairs television; he later became its chairman. Carter has won four national Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for his documentaries. He has authored two books, The Reagan Years and The South Strikes Back, and has contributed to nine others.

SHEILA CORONEL is the director of The Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. For 16 years she was the co-founder and director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. She is the author and editor of more than a dozen books and received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and the Creative Communication Arts in 2003.

ALAN J. DWORSKY is an independent investment manager based in Boston who works primarily for nonprofit institutions. He and his wife established and serve as trustees of the Popplestone Foundation.

CHARLES EISENDRATH directs two national journalism programs of professional recognition at the University of Michigan. The Knight-Wallace Fellows, which he converted to private support with a $44 million endowment drive, provides an academic year of sabbatical study to American and international journalists. As the founding director of the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, he designed and administers the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in the country. Since 2006 he has also been the chairman of the American board of the International Press Institute. Eisendrath’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Life, Sports Illustrated, The Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, and the International Herald Tribune. He is an occasional commentator for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. He has served on the international jury of the Pulitzer Prize and is a member of the Inter-American Press Association. After reporting for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Baltimore Evening Sun, Eisendrath joined Time magazine, which posted him in Washington, London, and Paris, as well as Buenos Aires, where as bureau chief he was responsible for all news operations in Hispanic South America. He moved to the University of Michigan journalism faculty in 1975, directing a master’s program that placed all graduates in internships and jobs. Eisendrath holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Michigan.

BRUCE A. FINZEN, board secretary-treasurer, is a partner in the law firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, in Washington. As a mass-tort litigator, Finzen is recognized as a highly successful manager of cases involving multistate, class-action issues, and has played a leading role in some of the most important product safety and consumer health issues of the last several decades. He was one of the partners from his firm in charge of litigation on behalf of the government of India arising out of the Bhopal gas leak disaster. He has also been in charge of several mass-tort cases involving medical devices and pharmaceutical products, including cases involving the Björk-Shiley Heart Valve, L-Tryptophan, breast implants, Gammagard, Fen-Phen, and the St. Jude Heart Valve. He has published extensively, lectured at numerous conferences on matters related to civil litigation, and testified before congressional committees. He is a native of Minneapolis.

JOANNIE FISCHER, board vice chair, is a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report. She has spent two decades covering everything from national politics to neuroscience, and was the youngest person at U.S. News to be promoted to associate editor, and later to senior editor. Fischer wrote more than 20 cover stories on such topics as the race to clone human embryos, the shortcomings of medical pain treatment due to questionable enforcement policies, and the widespread failure of clinicians to effectively treat serious depression. During this tenure, she has won several prizes and fellowships including the American Association for the Advancement of Science best young science writer award, the Woods Hole Marine Biology summer fellowship, and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Magazine Journalism. Fischer is a Harvard graduate and lives in California.

BILL KOVACH is the chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. He has been a journalist and writer for 40 years. He began his career at the Johnson City Press Chronicle in Tennessee and from 1960 to 1967 was a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, covering the civil-rights movement, southern politics, and Appalachian poverty. In 1968, after a year of study on a journalism fellowship at Stanford University, he joined The New York Times, where he worked as a reporter and later as the chief of its Washington bureau. He left the Times in 1986 and was the editor of The Atlanta Journal Constitution for two years, during which time it won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first awarded to the newspaper in 20 years. He was appointed a Neiman Fellow in the class of 1988-89 and remained as curator.

SUSAN LOEWENBERG is the founder and producing director of L.A. Theatre Works, a nonprofit organization that provides cultural programming for public radio and outreach programming for children and at-risk youth. She has produced more than 500 hours of radio dramas broadcast on National Public Radio, the BBC, Voice of America, and other outlets.

BEVIS LONGSTRETH is the chairman of the board of directors of the Fund for Independence in Journalism. A retired partner of Debevoise & Plimpton, he is a member of the board of trustees of New School University and the College Retirement Equities Fund. He was a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner, a member of the Board of Governors of the American Stock Exchange, and adjunct professor at Columbia University School of Law.

PAULA MADISON is the first African-American woman to become the general manager of a network-owned station in a top five market. In addition to being the president and general manager of NBC4 in Los Angeles, in 2002 she was named regional general manager of the three NBC/Telemundo television stations in Los Angeles. Until May 2002, Madison was the vice president and senior vice president of diversity for NBC.

JOHN E. NEWMAN, JR., a businessman with investments in information and publishing companies, is the president of The John and Florence Newman Foundation, in San Antonio, Texas. He is active in many educational, health-related, and cultural nonprofit organizations.

MICHELE NORRIS is an award-winning journalist with more than two decades of experience. She hosts NPR’s newsmagazine All Things Considered, public radio’s longest-running national program, with Robert Siegel and Melissa Block. From 1993 to 2002, Norris was a correspondent for ABC News. As a contributing correspondent for the “Closer Look” segments on World News Tonight With Peter Jennings, Norris reported extensively on education, inner-city issues, the nation’s drug problem, and poverty. Norris has also reported for The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Her Washington Post series about a six-year-old who lived in a crack house was reprinted in the book Ourselves Among Others, along with essays by Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Annie Dillard, and Gabriel García Márquez. Norris has received numerous awards for her work, including the National Association of Black Journalists’ 2006 Salute to Excellence Award, for her coverage of Hurricane Katrina; the University of Minnesota’s Outstanding Achievement Award; and the 1990 Livingston Award. In 2007, she was honored with Ebony magazine’s eighth annual Outstanding Women in Marketing & Communications Award. Norris also earned both an Emmy Award and Peabody Award for her contribution to ABC News’s coverage of 9/11. She is also a frequent guest on The Chris Matthews Show on NBC. Norris attended the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in electrical engineering, and graduated from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she studied journalism. She lives in Washington, D.C.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER, is the director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. A frequent media critic, she co-edited with Kathleen Hall Jamieson the recent book, The Press as an Institution of Democracy. Overholser was the editor of The Des Moines Register from 1988 to 1995. Under her leadership, the Register won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. She was named “Editor of the Year” by the National Press Foundation and “Best in the Business” by the American Journalism Review. In 2002 Overholser received the Anvil of Freedom Award. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Wellesley College, a master’s in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and has received honorary doctorates from Grinnell College and St. Andrews Presbyterian College. Overholser was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Congressional Fellow with the American Political Science Association.

ALLEN PUSEY is the editor of the American Bar Association Journal in Chicago and a former special projects editor for the Washington Bureau of The Dallas Morning News and Belo Broadcasting. Pusey, who was one of the first reporters to uncover the savings-and-loan scandal in the early 1980s, has received numerous awards for his coverage of local and national issues.

SREE SREENIVASAN is a leading technology expert and dean of students at Columbia University’s journalism school, where he runs the new media program. He is also WABC-TV’s “Tech Guru.” His tech reports can be seen on Thursday and Saturday mornings on Channel 7. His work explaining technology has appeared in The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science (where he’s a member of the Geek Chorus). In March 2004 Newsweek magazine named him one of the nation’s 20 most influential South Asians.

MARIANNE SZEGEDY-MASZAK, board chair, has worked in journalism for over 20 years covering issues such as the collapse of communism, the Republican Revolution, 9/11, and social policy for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Republic, Newsweek, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Psychology Today, and Newsday, among others. A former contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times health section, she was a winner of the prestigious Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship. Szegedy-Maszak was a reporter at the New York Post, an editor at Congressional Quarterly, and a professor of journalism at American University School of Communication before she joined U.S. News & World Report as a senior writer in 2000. There she covered behavioral health — psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience — writing cover stories about such disparate subjects as military mental health, the trauma of 9/11, adult and child ADD, children’s mental illness, and cancer. She wrote a prize-winning book chapter on Sigmund Freud and modern neuroscience. She has won the top journalism and media awards from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the National Mental Health Association, and the American Psychoanalytic Association. As a Pulitzer Traveling Fellow in 1986, Szegedy-Maszak lived in Hungary and covered Central Europe for Newsweek and ABC Radio. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University’s School of Journalism, she was the founding editor of the Center for Public Integrity’s award winning newsletter, The Public I, and has been an officer on the boards of the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism. She is now writing a historical memoir for Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House.