Courtney A. Lamdin is the executive editor of three weekly newspapers in northwestern Vermont. She has worked as a general assignment reporter for the last nine years, covering everything from the mind-numbing complexities of tax increment financing to the thrilling life (and death) of a pair of wild turkeys said to be terrorizing school children. Lamdin has served on the Vermont Press Association board of directors for six years and was named a New England First Amendment Coalition investigative reporting fellow in 2015. She’s most proud of her four years covering a hazing scandal on the high school football team. Her reporting won her a first- place NENPA award in 2016, helped train Vermont teachers in child abuse reporting procedures and was featured in the ESPN documentary “Outside the Lines”. More recently, Lamdin’s work investigating the shady leadership of a youth football program led police to charge the team president with felony embezzlement. As much as it sounds like she hates football, Lamdin is actually a Patriots fan and likes going to games whenever her uncle will sell her his season tickets.

Kevin Moran is the executive editor of The Berkshire Eagle (NENPA’s 2018 Newspaper of the Year for Daily and Sunday), Bennington Banner (Vermont Press Association’s 2018 Newspaper of General Excellence), Brattleboro Reformer (runner-up, VPA’s 2018 Newspaper of General Excellence), Manchester Journal (NENPA’s 2018 Distinguished Weekly Newspaper of the Year), UpCountry Magazine  (NENPA’s 2018 Distinguished Specialty Newspaper of the Year) and related publications at New England Newspapers Inc. A native of the Berkshires, Moran has served as managing editor of The Berkshire Eagle, the Brattleboro Reformer and North Adams Transcript and as news editor of the York (Pa.) Dispatch/Sunday news. A past president of the New England Associated Press News Executives Association, he also has been a mentor for foreign journalists with Alfred Friendly Press Partners.

Forged in the trenches of media company sales organizations like Community Newspaper Holdings Incorporated, News of New England, Radiate Media and dozens more, Reinig Morris, Co-Founder of Friends2Follow has the know how and background to eloquently tackle any digital sales opportunity and turn it into an actionable clinic on driving new revenue. He has worked with hundreds of media companies and motivated sales teams all over the world to drive new revenue and engage their targets. No matter the topic, when speaking, Reinig engages his audience and instills the urgency of driving digital dollars.

Doug Most is a lifelong journalist and author whose career has spanned newspapers and magazines up and down the east coast, with stops in Washington, DC, South Carolina, New Jersey and Boston. Today he is the Assistant Vice President/Executive Editor in charge of editorial content at Boston University. His features have appeared in Best American Crime Writing and Best American Sports Writing. He was named Journalist of the Year while at The Record in Bergen County, NJ, for his coverage of a tragic story about two teens charged with killing their newborn. After a stint at Boston Magazine, he worked for more than a decade at the Boston Globe in various roles, including Magazine Editor and Deputy Managing Editor/Special Projects, and he helped launch and run the Globe’s sponsored content team, BG BrandLab. His 2014 non-fiction book, The Race Underground, told the story about the birth of subways in America, and was made into a PBS/American Experience documentary. He has a B.A. from George Washington University in Political Communication.

Jill Nicholson is the Senior Director of Customer Education at Chartbeat, a content intelligence platform for publishers. She trains journalists around the world on turning metrics into action. Before that, she was a long-time Chartbeat user — curating a local news site in Westchester, NY. In her four years at Chartbeat, Jill has supplemented her newsroom experiences with best practices learned from the diverse organizations that Chartbeat serves.

A Dallas, Texas native, Sammy Papert is a graduate of St. Mark’s School of Texas and the “worst” student actually graduating from Stanford University.  The registrar will confirm that claim.

In his first legitimate venture, Mr. Papert founded, owned and operated The Executive Toy Store, a Sharper Image before its time and Mr. Papert’s “MBA of the streets”.   Again, he barely “graduated.”

From 1981 to 1997 he joined the Papert Companies, a newspaper marketing solutions firm and pushed, cajoled, begged and pleaded both advertisers and Publishers to grow the organization to 450 middle and small market newspapers across the country.

In July 1998, Mr. Papert became Chairman and CEO of Belden Associates, the one-time premier newspaper research and consultancy in North America.  At least, that’s what he told the competition.

Mr. Papert recognized a golden opportunity so started Wormhole during this country’s greatest recession to do just what the name implies – connect organizations with their business and consuming audiences in unique and fast ways by leveraging new technology.  AdSeller and saambaa are his two current clients and both are superb and getting better!

Papert is and has been involved in many civic organizations.  These include: the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Salesmanship Club, Goodwill Board, Theatre Operating Company, St. Mark’s Alumni Association, Stanford Barely Alumni Association and the Dallas Child Guidance Clinic.

Mr. Papert is finally married; enjoys swimming, tennis, reading, writing and eventually visiting all the Caribbean Islands, along with collecting space art and Hawaiian shirts.  Don’t ask how many!  His latest hair-brained scheme is to make his own wine…the word is he might have finally gotten something right!

Paul Pronovost is the Executive Editor of the Cape Cod Media Group, which includes the Cape Cod Times, CapeCodTimes.com, CapeCodOnline.com, PrimeTime Cape Cod,  The Cape Codder, Provincetown Banner, The Register, Sandwich Broadsider, Bourne Courier and The Bulletin.

Cape Cod Media Group papers have been the NENPA Newspaper of the Year many times and the Cape Cod Times has received other top prizes, including the Thomas K. Brindley Public Service Award, the NENPA First Amendment Award and E&P’s EPPY Award.  In 2016, the Times was named GateHouse Media’s Newspaper of the Year and Pronovost was named Editor of the Year.

Before coming to the Cape, Pronovost worked at several weekly and daily newspapers in Greater Boston.

An enthusiastic believer in the future of media, Paul has helped champion several efforts to evolve in the digital age, including work on the Dow Jones Future of Content project and the GateHouse Digital Next project.

Paul holds a BA in English from Saint Anselm College and a MPA from Suffolk University. He has been Pulitzer Prize juror and is past president of the Massachusetts Press Association. Paul also has been involved in ommunity leadership endeavors, including board of director seats on the Cape Cod Times Needy Fund, the Salvation Army, and the Community Leadership Institute of Cape Cod. He has been a volunteer soccer coach and Destination Imagination coach for many years.

Jason Rezaian served as Tehran bureau chief for the Washington Post and is now an opinion writer for the paper and contributor to CNN. He was taken into custody by Iranian authorities in 2014 and charged with espionage. He was detained at Evin Prison in Tehran served 544 days before his release was negotiated. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife.

Bob Sacha is a director, cinematographer, editor, teacher, photographer and, above all, a collaborator on visual journalism projects. He has created video for projects that have won the Pulitzer Prize, a National Emmy for New Approaches to News and Documentary Programming,  a Webby and the first gold medal ever given by the Society for News Design. He was the director of photography for the New York TImes series, Living City, about  New York’s infrastructure. BlindSight, a documentary short about a group of blind photographers that he directed and shot, had its world premiere at DOCNYC, the country’s largest documentary festival.

He was recently named an Associate Professor for Video Storytelling at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where for four years straight he received the Tow Foundation Grant for “teachers who have demonstrated exceptional leadership in their fields.”  Known for his innovative approach to visual storytelling and his engaging teaching style,  he received one of  the initial Journalism360 Grants for Immersive Storytelling to bring  360 video journalism to community media organizations in the NYC area.

He has lectured and taught workshops and classes at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, SVA, the International Center of Photography’s New Media Narratives, CAMERA, the Italian Center for Photography and around the world for National Geographic Expeditions.

In the hazy past, he had a long career as a photojournalist, first for The Philadelphia Inquirer, magazines like LIFE and National Geographic, then he worked as an editor/producer at the multi-award winning MediaStorm. He is currently interested in looking deeper into 360 video and spatial audio and using his iPhone to capture the world around him every day.

Tim has spent decades in various newsrooms — some print, and some broadcast. He was a sports reporter, news reporter, and then managing editor of his hometown paper, the Tonawanda (N.Y.) News, where he led an award-winning editorial page. He’s worked as an editor, staffer or longtime contributor with the Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff, the Mesa Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the alt-weekly Buffalo Current, and the Niagara Falls Gazette, where he was executive sports editor over four dailies — spearheading coverage of the Buffalo Bills and Sabres. He also worked as a weekend anchor and reporter at Buffalo’s ABC-TV affiliate, WKBW, and was the news director of WLVL-AM in the Buffalo market, where he hosted a daily two-hour talk show covering local politics and current events. He moved to Austin to join GateHouse in early 2015.