The Washington Journalism and Media Conference

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Speakers

Philip Murphy

Phil is a digital producer at ESPN. He anchors the “Official Visit,” a daily recruiting show on ESPN.com, and produces much of the college football and basketball recruiting content for ESPN’s RecruitingNation. He also interviews many of the athletes, coaches and entertainers in Bristol for stories on ESPN.com. Prior to joining ESPN, Phil was an anchor/reporter at DigitalSports, covering high school sports in and around Washington, D.C. for six years. He majored in both accounting and marketing at George Mason, while earning a minor in economics. Phil graduated from nearby Lake Braddock Secondary School. He is thrilled to be at the Washington Journalism and Media Conference and can’t wait to meet the promising journalists here.

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Speakers

Jennifer Bendery

Jennifer Bendery has been a White House and congressional reporter for The Huffington Post since April 2011. She covered Congress for four years for Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, and spent four years covering the Texas Legislature for GalleryWatch in Austin, TX. She also worked in book publishing for three years in San Francisco and was a health care policy re-porter for two years in Providence, R.I.

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Speakers

Tom Jackman

TOM JACKMAN

Reporter, The Washington Post

Tom Jackman is a multimedia journalist who has worked at The Washington Post since 1998. Before that he covered crime and courts for The Kansas City Star, where he also wrote a best-selling book about a serial killer, penned a weekly column and hosted a weekly TV show.  At the Post, Tom led the trial coverage of the D.C. sniper case, and he was the lead writer on The Post’s breaking news stories about the Virginia Tech massacre, which won a Pulitzer Prize. More recently he has closely covered the issue of police violence and the ongoing prosecution of those who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Post’s coverage of the Capitol riot won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for public service. Tom also writes The Post’s “True Crime” blog covering crime and justice issues nationwide, shooting photos and videos with some stories, and hosts national “Washington Post Live” interviews with top American police officials.

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Speakers

Kevin McCarthy

KEVIN MCCARTHY

Entertainment Reporter and Film Critic, Fox 5

Kevin McCarthy is a film critic and entertainment reporter in the Washington D.C. area.  Kevin reviews films locally for Fox 5, nationally for Fox and Friends and on the local D.C. radio station 106.7FM The Fan with “The Sports Junkies.” Kevin graduated from George Mason University in the spring of 2006 and majored in Communications with a concentration in Media Production and Criticism. While attending George Mason University, Kevin took an internship at CBS RADIO where he jumpstarted his film reviewing career. In the summer of 2007 after dressing up as a Washington Wizards cheerleader (yes, this is how he got the job), Kevin was hired as a freelance movie reviewer for the FOX 5 Morning News where he now also contributes as an entertainment reporter. Kevin’s job involves watching films and interviewing the filmmakers behind each project. He is known for his conversational writing style and unique rating system. If you’re wondering, his favorite films of all-time are “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “True Romance.” Kevin’s favorite filmmakers of all-time include Quentin Tarantino, Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Nolan, Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez. Kevin’s dream is to one day be a filmmaker. Kevin’s wife, Lauren Veneziani, is also a film critic in the D.C./Baltimore area. The two met in a movie theatre in 2012 and currently live in Maryland with their two dogs, Jack and Sally – named after the famous characters in Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Kevin also currently co-hosts a film podcast called “ReelBlend” where filmmakers join weekly to talk about their films. Guests on the show have included Joaquin Phoenix, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and Christopher Nolan.

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Speakers

Michael D. Shear

Mike Shear is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. He joined The New York Times in 2010 as a political correspondent, then moved to cover the White House in 2013, and is currently covering the 2016 Election. In addition to numerous front page stories, he has appeared on television, providing insight and analysis to breaking political stories. Previously, Mr. Shear wrote for the Washington Post as a metro reporter covering Virginia politics, the 2008 presidential election and the White House correspondent. He was a member of the team of reporters who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech. Mr. Shear received a B.A. degree from Claremont McKenna College and a M.A. degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University.

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Speakers

Carol Guzy

CAROL GUZY

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photojournalist

Carol Guzy is one of only four people who have won four Pulitzer Prizes. As a young girl, she always wanted to be an artist. But as she was coming of age in a working-class family in Bethlehem, Pa., such an ambition seemed impossible. Encouraged to “do something practical,” she went to nursing school and soon realized she could not be a nurse. After a friend gave her a camera and she took a photography course, her fascination with photography led to an internship and then a job at the Miami Herald. In 1988 she moved to The Washington Post. In 1990, Guzy was the first woman to receive the Newspaper Photographer of the Year Award, presented by the National Press Photographers Association. Guzy credits the nursing program with giving her an understanding of and sensitivity to human suffering and believes that her photographs would be different without that background.

Guzy spent months on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and not only documented its impact on the animals of the region, but rescued two dogs by bringing them home with her.

She has received numerous awards for her work. She has been honored twice with the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for her coverage of the military intervention in Haiti and the devastating mudslide in Armero, Colombia. She has received a third Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for her work in Kosovo and her fourth Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for coverage of the Haitian earthquake in 2010.

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Speakers

Grouchy Greg Watkins

As the Founder of the Urban website and music destination, AllHipHop.com, Grouchy Greg Watkins is fulfilling his childhood dream as an entertainment business pioneer and entrepreneur. With his partner, Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur, Watkins has built AllHipHop.com into the Internet voice of Hip-Hop culture. Born in Albany, N.Y. and raised in Newark, Delaware, Watkins was intrigued by Hip-Hop starting at the age of six. He briefly flirted with a recording career as a member of his rap group, The Outfit, and in 1993 launched his label, Oblique Recordings. While pursuing a career as a music label owner, Watkins attended the Art Institute of Philadelphia, studying audio engineering and marketing and graduating with an Associate’s degree in Music Business. AllHipHop.com officially launched in 1997, and this year Watkins and Creekmur are commemorating their 19th anniversary. AllHipHop.com has won several awards, including the Rising Star Award from Black Enterprise, as well as a coveted BET Award in 2009 and it was the first one the network awarded. The website was recently (2015) nominated for another BET Award and has been nominated every year since the category was created. Watkins has reported on various topics relating to Hip-Hop culture, has been featured on numerous radio shows and has been cited in print, and TV shows ranging from Billboard to The New York Times, as well as CNN, MTV, BET, FOX, Fuse, E!, TVone and others. Almost 19 years after forming AllHipHop.com, Watkins’ holding company Syncing Sun has launched CollegeHipHop.com.

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Speakers

Brian Lamb

BRIAN LAMB

Executive Chair and Retired CEO, C-SPAN

Brian Lamb is the retired CEO of C-SPAN Networks and now serves as Executive Chairman of its Board of Directors. He’s been at the helm of the public affairs channel since he helped the cable industry launch it on March 19, 1979.

Today, C-SPAN employs approximately 270 people and delivers public affairs programming on three television channels to the nation’s cable and satellite customers; globally to Internet via C-SPAN.org and 15 other internet sites; and to radio listeners through C-SPAN radio—an FM station in Washington that can also be heard on XM satellite service nationwide.

Brian has also been a regular on-air presence at C-SPAN since the network’s earliest days. Over the years, he has interviewed Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush and many world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev. For 15 years, beginning in 1989, he interviewed 800 non-fiction authors for a weekly program known as Booknotes. Four books of collected interviews have been published based on the Booknotes series. Currently, Brian hosts Q and A, an hour long interview program on Sunday evening with people who are making things happen in politics, media, education or technology.

Brian Lamb is a Hoosier, born and raised in Lafayette, Indiana. Interested in broadcasting as a child, he built crystal radio sets to pick up local signals. During high school and college, he sought out jobs at Lafayette radio and television stations, spinning records, selling ads, and eventually hosting his own television program.

After graduating from Purdue with a degree in speech, Brian joined the Navy. His tour included the USS Thuban, White House duty during the Johnson Administration and a stint in the Pentagon public affairs office during the Vietnam War.

In 1967, his navy service complete, Brian returned home to Lafayette. However, it wasn’t long before he returned to the nation’s capital where he began as a freelance reporter for UPI radio. Later, he served as a Senate press secretary and worked for the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy at a time when a national strategy was being developed for communications satellites.

In 1974, Brian returned to journalism, publishing a biweekly newsletter called The Media Report. He also covered telecommunications issues as Washington bureau chief for Cablevision Magazine. It was from this vantage point that C-SPAN began to take shape. Congress was about to televise its proceedings; the cable industry was looking for programming to deliver to its customers by satellite. Brian brought these two ideas together with C-SPAN, which launched with the first televised House of Representatives debate on March 19, 1979.

Brian and his wife Victoria are longtime residents of Arlington, Virginia. When he’s not reading newspapers or non-fiction books, Brian is often in hot pursuit of the latest country music release.

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Speakers

Hoda Kotb

Hoda Kotb is the co-host of the fourth hour of NBC’s TODAY alongside Kathie Lee Gifford. Since the duo teamed up in 2008, the Gifford-Kotb hour has been hailed as “appointment television” by Entertainment Weekly, “uproarious and irresistible” by People, and “TODAY’s happy hour” by USA Today.

Since joining NBC in 1998, Kotb has served as a correspondent for “Dateline NBC.” She has covered a variety of domestic and international news stories, as well as human-interest stories and features across all NBC News platforms.

A New York Times bestselling author, Kotb has penned three books: Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer and Kathie Lee; Ten Years Later: Six People Who Faced Adversity and Transformed Their Lives; and Where They Belong.

Kotb is a three-time Emmy winner, and she has also received three Gracie Awards, a Peabody Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. As an 8-year breast cancer survivor, Kotb is involved in several initiatives to raise awareness about the disease. Kotb graduated from Virginia Tech University with a Bachelor of Arts in broadcast journalism. She resides in New York City.

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Speakers

Sonya Ross

A native of Atlanta, Ga., Sonya Ross attended Georgia State University and joined The Associated Press in 1987 as a general assignment reporter in its Atlanta bureau. She went on to cover the Georgia legislature, and was promoted to The AP’s national staff in Washington in 1992 to cover civil rights, race and urban affairs. She joined the White House press corps in 1995 as the first African-American woman assigned to The AP’s presidential reporting team. Sonya became World Services editor in 2002, and helped direct The AP’s coverage of the global anti-terrorism campaign and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2004, Sonya was on the team of editors directing coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and became news editor for The AP’s Washington-based regional reporters in December 2004. In 2010, Sonya was named The AP’s first-ever race and ethnicity editor, responsible for coverage that captures the changing facets of race relations in the United States, and its effects on the experiences of the American people. The pursuit of news has taken Sonya to 48 countries and an untold number of American cities while on assignment covering Presidents William J. Clinton and George W. Bush, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell. During the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Sonya was the print pool journalist with President Bush on Air Force One as he was evacuated to safety according to procedures established by the U.S. government during the Cold War. Sonya served on the board of the White House Correspondents Association from 1999-2003, and currently serves on the board of the Washington Press Club Foundation. She is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Association of Black Journalists, and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.