Tish Grier has spent the past two years building a one-woman problogging and social media consultancy in Western Massachusetts. Some of her efforts include the community blog for iFOCOS; Assignment Zero crowdsourced journalism project for Wired magazine, and community development at NewsTrust.net. Currently, she is building community at hyperlocal citizen journalism aggregator Placeblogger.com

Jan Schaffer, former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and one of the nation’s leading thinkers in the journalism reform movement. She left daily journalism in 1994 to lead pioneering journalism initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive and participatory journalism and citizen media ventures. She launched J-Lab in 2002 at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism to help newsrooms use innovative computer technologies to engage people in important public issues. As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of six Philadelphia homicide detectives and won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service.