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Carole Simpson
Carole Simpson is the former ABC News senior correspondent and ABC Weekend News anchor, three-time Emmy award winning journalist, and current Leader-In-Residence at Emerson College. Simpson was the moderator of the second 1992 Presidential debate and is the winner of numerous journalism awards. She serves as moderator of the "Changing the Conversation, with Carole Simpson," a program of small panel discussions sponsored by the Department of Journalism, the Department of Organizational and Political Communication, and the School of Communication. This program showcases political leaders, media experts, and journalists who are seeking to bring reasoned debate and fruitful dialogue to the public sphere.
Ronna C. Johnson
Ronna C. Johnson is a Lecturer in English and American Studies at Tufts University where she has also been Director of Women's Studies. Since writing her dissertation - "Jack Kerouac's Art: Artist as Literary Hero in The Duluoz Legend"- over twenty years ago, she has devoted her research to Kerouac and Beat movement writing as her main area of scholarly expertise, focusing on this literature as breakthrough avant-garde early postmodern writing. She has published essays on Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, and Lenore Kandel, whose seminal poetry collection, The Love Book, suffered seizure for obscenity in San Francisco in 1966, 10 years after Allen Ginsberg's celebrated 1956 trial. Johnson has also published literary and historical studies on women Beat writers as a group. Her latest book is Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (UP Mississippi, 2004), which is the companion text to her other book in that area, Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (Rutgers UP, 2002).
Gene Policinski
Gene Policinski, vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center, is a veteran journalist whose career has included work in newspapers, radio, television and online operations. Policinski oversees all operations and programs of the center, which has offices in Nashville, at Vanderbilt University; and in Washington, D.C. He also is co-author of the weekly syndicated newspaper column, "Inside the First Amendment," and executive producer/host of the touring multimedia stage production, "Freedom Sings."Policinski came to the Freedom Forum in 1996 from USA TODAY, where he was a founding editor and held various news executive positions. He began his journalism career in 1969 in Indiana, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and later as state bureau chief for Gannett News Service. In 1980, he became a correspondent in the GNS Washington bureau, reporting on Congress, politics and other issues. A lecturer and consultant on journalism issues ranging from newsroom ethics to new media, he serves as a member of the selection committee for the Diversity Institute, a program of the Freedom Forum that aims to increase the number of minority journalists in reporting and management positions in American newspapers.
Karen A. Bordeleau
Karen A. Bordeleau is the assistant managing editor of The Providence Journal, where she is responsible for the production of the daily and Sunday newspapers and supervises the news, suburban, business and sports copy desks. She is past president of both the New England Associated Press News Executives Association and the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. The Providence Journal has been very aggressive in the fight for open records. Bordeleau and other editors at the paper have been instrumental in organizing Freedom of Information Act conferences and Sunshine Week coverage in New England (a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information). Bordeleau has also used the classroom as a platform to encourage journalism students to push for access. Bordeleau began her journalism career in the late 1970s and has worked as a reporter, copyeditor and assignment editor. She has served as the editor of The Kent County Daily Times in West Warwick, R.I., and The Call in Woonsocket, R.I. From 1996 to 2005, Bordeleau worked as an adjunct professor of journalism at several colleges including Emerson College, the University of Rhode Island, Northeastern University and Bryant University. She has taught numerous reporting, writing, journalism ethics and editing/design courses.