Mike Allen is one of the four founders of Politico, and their chief political correspondent.

He was previously at Time magazine where he was their White House correspondent. Prior to that, Allen spent six years at The Washington Post, where he covered President Bush's first term, Capitol Hill, campaign finance, and the Bush, Gore and Bradley campaigns of 2000.

Meg Pickard is the Head of Social Media Development for Guardian News & Media, responsible for developing and supporting existing and new social web strategy and interactive experiences.

She comes from a background in social anthropology and in the mid-nineties conducted ethnographic fieldwork into community participation and cultural identity first in Bolivia and subsequently online. Since then, she has worked in New Media including a long stint at AOL, plus consulting roles with a range of small startups, global brands and charities.

Meg’s particular areas of interest are community engagement and the emergence of new forms of collaborative and participatory media, which are inspired by her ongoing curiosity about the cultural, social and psychological aspects of online interaction plus an enduring personal passion for publishing and participating online. She describes herself as a creative geek, is one of the longest-running bloggers in the UK and lives in London and online.

Cenk Uygur is host of The Young Turks, the first ever live, daily web television talk show. The Young Turks is one of the Top 100 You Tube Partners, with over 13 million views a month on their You Tube Channel.

The Young Turks recently won the Best Political Podcast 2009 at the Podcast Awards and Best Political News Site 2009 at the Mashable Awards.

The Young Turks premiered on Sirius Satellite Radio in the first quarter of 2002 as the platform’s first original program before moving to XM Satellite Radio in 2006. The show was also the first nationwide progressive radio show during its tenure at Sirius.

Cenk believes that US politics is totally corrupt and the US media is totally corrupt – The Young Turks is his journalistic response.

Cenk Uygur is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania - Wharton School of Business and Columbia University Law School. He worked as a lawyer, television writer and television host before starting The Young Turks. Cenk also blogs on Huffington Post, Daily Kos, ABC News, and Politico.

Professor Brant Houston holds the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting and teaches investigative and advanced reporting in the Department of Journalism in the College of Media at Illinois.

Houston became the Chair after serving for more than a decade as the Executive Director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a 3,500-member organization, and as a Professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Before joining IRE, he was an award-winning investigative reporter at daily newspapers for 17 years.

Houston also is the author of three editions of the textbook, Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide, and co-author of the fourth edition and fifth edition of The Investigative Reporter's Handbook.  Currently he is working on projects involving nonprofit journalism, ethnic media newsrooms, and new technologies for news-gathering. 

Houston serves at the Chair of the Steering Committee of the newly-formed Investigative News Network, a coalition of nonprofit journalism centers, and as Co-ordinator for the Global Investigative Journalism Network, which he co-founded in the year 2000. 

Brigitte Alfter is the Director ofJournalismfund.eu, which supports investigative cross-border journalism in Europe.

Since 2001 she has been covering European affairs, from 2004 to 2008 she was the Brussels correspondent of the Danish daily Information.

She is a co-founder of the www.farmsubsidy.org network, where journalists, academics and activists since 2004 have united to unveil the recipients of the 50+ billion Euro farmsubsidies by using freedom of information legislation. She also is a co-founder and editor of Wobbing.eu, a network and website for journalists who use FOI legislation as a journalistic tool.

Alfer co-founded Journalismfund.eu in 2009 in order to provide necessary means to cover Europe, where journalistic coverage is hampered by language and other barriers. In 2003 Alfter was a co-founder of the Scoop project that gives research stipendia to investigative journalists in the Balkans, Moldova and the Ukraine on a journalists-help-journalists model.

Brigitte Alfter is the Chairperson of the International Committee of the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and a Board Member in German Netzwerk Recherche.

After joining Thomson Regional Newspapers as a graduate trainee from Edinburgh University, Vicky  worked for three years on the Newcastle Journal as a news reporter and feature writer. In 1986 she joined the BBC in the Current Affairs department as a researcher and over the next 20 years worked on most of the News and Current Affairs programmes –  Breakfast,Newsnight, On the Record, Nine O’Clock News and political programmes.

For many years Vicky was a programme editor of live political programmes at the BBC, which included Election, Budget and political TV and Radio programming. In 2001 she joined the BBC News website as Editor, Interactivity, launching the User Generated content hub and pioneering the audience participation strategy for BBC News.

Vicky joined Channel 4 in November 2008 and works on taking the television News and Current Affairs brands onto the web and digital platforms. This includes web content for Dispatches andUnreported World on channel4.com and a strategy for Channel 4 News to integrate the TV and web journalism and launch some key web tools to promote the talent and content areas of the News such as politics and international coverage.

Paul Bradshaw is described by UK Press Gazette as one of the country’s “most influential journalism bloggers”.

A Reader in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University, where he teaches an MA in Online Journalism, Paul is a former magazine editor and website manager, and contributor to a number of books about journalism and the internet. He launched the Online Journalism Blog in 2004 and his‘Model for the 21st Century Newsroom’ and ‘BASIC Principles of Online Journalism’ series have formed the basis for newsroom operations and journalism education around the world.

In 2008 Paul was ranked the UK’s 4th ‘most visible person on the internet’ by NowPublic. In 2009 he launched HelpMeInvestigate.com, a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism.

Andy Nehl is the series producer of Hungry Beast, a multi-platform hybrid-current affairs program for ABC TV Australia.

Hungry Beast screens on TV, the web, mobile and third party sites. It integrates audience produced content on TV and the website, and makes significant use of social media in the research, promotion and distribution of stories.

Andy Nehl has worked as journalist, producer and director for the last three decades on current affairs, social issue, music and comedy TV programs and documentaries. Some of the TV programs and documentaries he has produced or directed have won Australian and international awards, and screened in festivals around the world.

Nehl has been the Series Producer on some of Australia’s most successful public broadcasting current affairs and satire shows including The Chaser’s War On Everything (satire on topical issues and news); and CNNNN (satire on cable news channels and news media production techniques). He was also Station Manager of Triple J, Australia’s national youth radio network, and Head of Television at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (2000-2005) where he taught television journalism, producing, directing and multiplatform/interactive producing. He has also done stints of teaching Television Journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney and New Communication Technologies, and News & Politics at Griffith University.

Links to Hungry Beast stories:

Some of the follow stories contain nudity, genital nudity, coarse language, violent images, drug references, sexual references and adult themes.

HUNGRY BEAST SERIOUS STORIES

 HUNGRY BEAST DIFFERENT APPROACH STORIES

 HUNGRY BEAST COMMENT

HUNGRY BEAST COMEDY ON POLITICS & CULTURE

HUNGRY BEAST VOXPOPS

MORE HUNGRY BEAST SERIOUS STORIES

After a decade in academia as a professor of journalism and media studies, he has spent two years researching and writing the book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia, (Hyperion 2009) the only nonfiction narrative account about the online community that has created one of the most influential Web sites in the world.

After founding one of the first dot-com companies in New York in 1994, from 1995 to 2000, he created the new media program at the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalismwhere he served as Adjunct Professor and Director of Technology for their Center for New Media. During that time, he taught new media journalists and advised New York media companies on content strategy and Web site design. He also developed the first guidelines for the Pulitzer Prizes to accept digital multimedia submissions, starting in 1999.

In 2000, he was a Principal Investigator at the Interactive Design Lab at Columbia, a collaboration between the journalism school and the School of the Arts to investigate interactive design issues for multimedia content. During its three year mandate, the IDL analyzed the process of multimedia design across industries such as advertising, news, documentary and film.

In his previous life as an engineer, from 1990 to 1993 he worked for the renowned AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, USA, designing user interfaces and software systems for telecommunications network monitoring. Afterwards, he helped formed Mediabridge Infosystems, which created the first online city guide for the Big Apple and performed online strategy and development for media firms in New York.

In 2003, he gave his research an international focus, joining the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre as Assistant Professor and Director of Technology. He taught both undergraduate and graduate classes in the use of multimedia and online technologies for participatory journalism.

His research in the social and technical dynamics of collaborative communities have made him a recognized expert on the Wikipedia project, one of the largest collaborative reference works on the Internet. He is an administrator on the English edition, and has served on the program committee and as proceedings editor for the annual Wikimania conferences. To continually cover the online community, he hosts the Wikipedia Weekly roundtable audio podcast that discusses issues related to Wikipedia and the online industry.

His regional interests include the development of information communication technologies (ICT) in Asia and their impact on peer-produced journalism. Since taking up residence in China in 2006, he has also been a sought after expert on China’s Internet development, technology and its censorship system, also known as the Great Firewall of China (GFW).

With a front row seat to observe China’s rapid development, he has also worn the hat of foreign multimedia correspondent by filing video news stories for the Wall Street Journal on topics including the 2008 Summer Olympics, Sichuan earthquake disaster relief and local economic development.

Lih’s work and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,South China Morning Post, The Standard (HK), BBC, National Public Radio (US), MSNBC and CNN International, among others. He was recognized as a Young Leader by the American Swiss Foundation in 2000 and by the Asia Society in 2007.

Lih has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, served as vice president of the AAJA Asia chapter and is an administrator in the English Wikipedia project.

Director, NOS Social Network (Amsterdam)

Originally from technical backgrounds, Robert worked in (regional) broadcasting radio stations. He ran a local city station for 6 years and had a broadcast production company for 10 years, specializing in local radio and TV news broadcasting.

National Dutch radio broadcasting came in 1998, where he anchored and edited. He started working in TV broadcasting in 2001, and became editor in chief at RTL News.

Robert worked on some TV studio shows in 2008 as a freelance collaborator, and started at NOS News public broadcaster in 2009 at the digital desk. He started NOS Net (the NOS social network) since December 2009.
 

Gijs Rademaker is the anchor of the EenVandaag Opinie Panel (OneToday Opinion Panel). He presents and analyzes the results of a weekly opinion poll held amongst viewers of news and current affairs program EenVandaag on Dutch TV.

Rademaker helped develop the Opinion Panel Project, building a national community of over 44.000 viewers who frequently answer questions from the editorial office on topical subjects. Rademaker joined EenVandaag as an editor in 2004. Before that he worked for various TV and Internet news organizations, including nu.nl and RTL Nieuws. Rademaker studied History and Journalism and holds a Masters degree from the Rijks Universiteit Groningen.

Sam Apple is the publisher and editor of The Faster Times. A graduate of the creative nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University, Apple is the former director of interactive media atNerve.com.

He has served as the editor-in-chief of New Voices Magazine and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Slate.com, among many other publications. His first book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was a finalist for the PEN America Award for a first work of nonfiction. In 2005, he received the annual Faux-Faulkner award. His second book, American Parent, was published in 2009 (Ballantine).