Speakers

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Neal Shapiro, a graduate of Tufts University, is an award-winning and widely respected news executive with more than twenty-five years of experience working in print, broadcast, cable, and Internet media. He is president and chief executive of the Educational Broadcasting Corporation, the parent organization of WNET, the nation's largest public television station. Neal was president of NBC News from June 2001 to September 2005, during which time he led their award-winning and top-rated coverage of every significant news story in recent history -- from the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina.

Before his promotion to the front office, Neal was executive producer of Dateline NBC from 1993 to 2001. Under Neal's direction, Dateline became a cornerstone of NBC's primetime programming and the first primetime multi-night newsmagazine. Neal started at NBC in March 1993 after thirteen years at ABC News, where he served as broadcast producer of PrimeTime Live. He has won many awards for excellence in his field, including three Columbia DuPont Awards, eight Edward R. Murrow Awards, and twenty-seven Emmys.

Rob Bertsche is a partner at Prince Lobel Glovsky & Tye LLP, a Boston-based law firm. He is a nationally known media lawyer and an expert in the rights of campus journalists. He is devoted to protecting clients’ First Amendment, intellectual property, business and employment interests. A former newspaper and magazine journalist, Rob graduated from Harvard Law School in 1989.

Rob is a member of the New England Society of Professional Journalists advisory board, general counsel to the New England Press Association, founder of the New England Media Law Group, and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Since 2002, the American Society of Magazine Editors has selected Rob to present an annual day-long update on magazine law to its members. Rob also teaches “Media Law and Ethics in a Digital World” to undergraduates at Tufts University.

Born in Hawaii, Connie Hale grew up speaking the island creole. Her infatuation with “the many Englishes” started when she studied literature at Princeton University and increased when she became an editor at Wired magazine. Her first book, Wired Style, was called “The Chicago Manual of the Millennium.” Her second book, Sin and Syntax, focuses on how to write well both inside and outside the rules. Hale’s journalism has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure and Health. She edits books for Harvard Business School Press and is narrative program director at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.