Susan Bloom

Susan Bloom

Susan Bloom received her Master of Fine Arts in film production from the University of Texas, Austin. Then she moved to Hollywood, where she has worked in post production on TV shows, features and documentaries. Her current documentary work is focused on invasive species eradication and native ecology restoration on the California Channel Islands and elsewhere. She has taught video and audio production at Brooks Institute since 2009.

Linda Deutsch

Linda Deutsch is a trailblazer and role model for women journalists. As an Associated Press special correspondent, Deutsch covered some of the most high-profile cases in American legal history, including those of Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, Patty Hearst, Daniel Ellsberg, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and Phil Spector. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the University Of Missouri’s Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism and the International Women’s Media Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1992, the AP named her a special correspondent, a title bestowed on only 18 reporters in the news service’s history.

Robert Hernandez

Robert Hernandez, aka WebJournalist, has made a name for himself as a journalist of the Web, not just on the Web. His primary focus is exploring and developing the intersection of technology and journalism – to empower people, inform reporting and storytelling, engage community, improve distribution and, whenever possible, enhance revenue. He is an associate professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He has worked for seattletimes.com, SFGate.com, eXaminer.com, La Prensa Gráfica, among others. Hernandez is also the co-founder of #wjchat and co-creator of the Diversify Journalism Project.

David Horsey

David Horsey is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and political commentator for the Los Angeles Times. After graduating from the University of Washington, Horsey entered journalism as a political reporter covering national political party conventions, presidential primaries, the Olympic Games and the Super Bowl, with assignments in Europe, Japan and Mexico, and two extended stints in Washington, D.C. He has an master’s in international relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, and an honorary doctorate from Seattle University. Horsey has published eight books of cartoons. He spends a few weeks each year working as a cowboy in Montana.

Jesse Katz

Jesse Katz was an award-winning staff writer at Los Angeles Magazine and the Los Angeles Times from 1985 to 2009. He was part of the Times’  Pulitzer Prize-winning team for spot news reporting for coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake. His work regularly appears in GQ and California Sunday Magazine. Katz wrote his memoir, “The Opposite Field,” and works as an editor at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, an internationally acclaimed law firm of 700 lawyers in 15 offices worldwide.

Robert J. Lopez

Robert J. Lopez is the executive director for communications and public affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. Prior to that, he produced award-winning investigative and multimedia projects for the Los Angeles Times, where he worked for 22 years. He was part of a reporting team that received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service for exposing government corruption in Bell, a city southeast of Los Angeles. Lopez was also part of a group of Times reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. He is a former adjunct faculty member at  USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Mary McNamara

Mary McNamara is a television critic for the Los Angeles Times. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, McNamara has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. She is the author of the Hollywood mysteries “Oscar Season” and “The Starlet.”

Bill Plaschke

Bill Plaschke has written for the Los Angeles Times since 1987 and has been the Associated Press National Sports Columnist of the Year five times. He is the co-host of a 6 a.m. talk show on Beast 980, an all sports station.  He is a regular panelist on ESPN’s “Around the Horn” talk show and has written five books. Plaschke also has had roles on the HBO series “Luck” as well as in the movie “Ali.”

Courtney Radsch

Courtney Radsch

Courtney Radsch is advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists and has experience as a journalist in the Middle East and the United States. She worked for UNESCO’s Section for Freedom of Expression where she coordinated strategy in the Arab region and for Freedom House’s Global Freedom of Expression Campaign as a senior program manager where she led advocacy missions to more than a dozen countries, U.N. bodies and the Internet Governance Forum. She writes frequently about the intersection of media, technology and human rights, with an emphasis on gender and the Middle East. Besides English, she also speaks Arabic, French and Spanish.

Les Rose

Les Rose

Les Rose is a photojournalist for the CBS News bureau in Los Angeles. Prior to joining the L.A. bureau in 1997, Rose worked for 13 years at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles and from 1984-1986 he was with NBC News in Miami as a freelancer. His assignments are for “The CBS Evening News” with Scott Pelley (and Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer and Katie Couric as well), “CBS Sunday Morning,” “60 Minutes,” “48 Hours” and “CBS This Morning.” Rose’s awards include a Murrow and a DuPont with Steve Hartman, nine local Emmys, and several more.

Barry Siegel

Barry Siegel

Barry Siegel, a PulitzerPrize-winning former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, directs the literary journalism program at Univeristy of California, Irvine, where he is a professor of English. He is the author of seven books, including four volumes of narrative nonfiction and three novels set in imaginary Chumash County on the central coast of California. The unconventional narratives he wrote for The Times, many about communities struggling with moral dilemmas, took him to all corners of the nation and beyond — from the dirt-poor towns of Donalsonville and Willacoochee in Georgia to Callao, Peru, and Rio Frio, Costa Rica; from Charleston, South Carolina to the Amish region of southern Indiana.

Carole Simpson

Carole Simpson is a three-time Emmy Award-winning anchor and senior correspondent who retired from ABC News in 2006 to become senior leader-in-residence at Emerson College’s School of Communication in Boston. She is a member of the full-time faculty and teaches courses in public affairs reporting, political communication and broadcast journalism. As senior leader-in-residence, she mentors students and conducts public seminars on issues such as the First Amendment, the historic function of the press as a watchdog on government and the importance of an informed electorate. Simpson also is completing a book on her 40 years as a pioneering African-American woman in journalism.

Don Bartletti

Don Bartletti

Don Bartletti recently retired after 32 years as a photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times. In 2003 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his six-part L.A. Times photo essay, “Enrique’s Journey – The Boy Left Behind,” the saga of Central American children riding freight trains through Mexico with the dream of crossing into the U.S. and reuniting with mothers who left them behind. In 2015, he was a Pulitzer finalist for “Product of Mexico,” a yearlong investigation about the abuse of migrant workers on Mexican farms that export fresh produce to major retailers and restaurants the U.S. His work has also been recognized with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Grand Prize, the Polk Award, Scripps-Howard Award, Loeb Financial Award, Pictures of the Year International, National Press Photographers Association, World Press Photo and the Overseas Press Club.

Patt Morrison

Patt Morrison is a longtime columnist and writer for the Los Angeles Times, where she has won numerous awards, including a share of two Pulitzer Prizes. Her work as a public broadcaster on television and radio has won her six Emmys and 12 Golden Mike Awards. She has published a bestselling book on the Los Angeles River. The Los Angeles Press club awarded her its lifetime achievement award – the first time in nearly a quarter-century that a woman had won the award. Among her other honors: Pink’s, the famous Los Angeles hot dog stand, named its veggie dog after her.