John Baer is an award-winning columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, writing about politics in Philadelphia, the state and nation. The National Journal has called him one the country's top 10 political journalists outside Washington, saying Baer, "Has the ability to take the skin off a politician without making it hurt too much." A graduate of Mount St. Mary's University, Maryland; holds a Masters Degree from Temple University, Philadelphia; a former Fellow of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C., under whose auspices he studied at The Brookings Institution and worked a year in Congress; a Fellow of Loyola University School of Law's inaugural Journalists Law School program in Los Angeles. He's won numerous awards for newspaper writing, including Associated Press Managing Editors Awards for both column writing and investigative reporting, and multiple Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers Association Awards for column writing. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Nation, Newsweek, The American Journalism Review, The Columbia Journalism Review, Editor & Publisher and other publications. He's appeared on the Fox News Network, CNN and "Hardball" with Chris Matthews on MSNBC. He is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, a founding member and current president of the Pennsylvania Press Club and a board member and past president of the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondence Association. He taught graduate-level journalism at Temple and has guest lectured at many colleges and universities, including Penn State, Drexel, Gettysburg, St. Joseph's, Villanova, LaSalle, the University of Pennsylvania's Fels School of Government and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. This is Mr. Bear's fourth year as a panelist for Speak Up, Write Out.

Jake Boritt is a documentary filmmaker who has received wide acclaim. His second feature length documentary called Troop 759: Boy Scouts of Harlem premiered in 2009. He is currently in post production on Harlem 11.4: Obama's Election following the day in the black capital of America when the nation elected it's first black president. His first film, Budapest to Gettysburg was selected for the 2007 IFP Independent Film Week in New York and premiered at the Gettysburg Majestic before almost 900 audience members. He recently completed Cooking to Live, for the U.N. and Project Gaia filmed in Ethiopia's Ogaden Desert. Jake was Associate Producer on Rory Kennedy's Moxie-Firecracker production, The Homestead Strike, part of the Emmy winning History Channel series 10 Days That Changed America. Jake has also worked with Sarah Teale on productions for HBO, A&E, AMC and CourtTV and on David Grubin's Young Doctor Freud and Kofi Annan: Center of the Storm (PBS). Ken Burns called Boritt's documentary Adams County USA (WITF) "a really good film." This is Mr. Boritt's third year participating in Speak Up, Write Out.

Harry Deitz Editor of the Reading Eagle and a member of executive committee of Reading Eagle Company. He joined the Eagle in 1978 as a sportswriter. He has held the positions of daily sports editor, design editor, assistant managing editorand managing editor. Before joining the Eagle, he was sports editor of The News-Item, Shamokin, Northumberland County, and editor of the Citizen-Standard, Valley View, Schuylkill County. Deitz is a past president of the Pennsylvania Society of Newspaper Editors and the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors. He has been a member of the PSNE board since 1995 and the PAPME board since 2003. He is a graduate of Bloomsburg University.

Michael Doylehas worked as a reporter in the Washington bureau of McClatchy Newspapers since 1988. He writes for the Fresno Bee, Modesto Bee and Sacramento Bee papers, and covers legal affairs for the chain.
As a freelance writer, Michael has contributed articles to the Washington Monthly, Slate, California Journal, Legal Affairs, and other periodicals.  In 2004, Syracuse University Press published his non-fiction book entitled “The Forestport Breaks: A 19th Century Conspiracy Along the Black River Canal.” This fall, Syracuse will publish his book "Radical Chapters: Roy Kepler and the Front Lines of Peace, Protest and the Paperback Revolution."
Michael graduated from Oberlin College. He earned a Master of Studies in Law from the Yale Law School, where he was a Knight Journalism Fellow. He earned a Master in Government degree from the Johns Hopkins University, with a thesis entitled “The Freedom of Information Act in Theory and Practice.”
Michael is a professorial lecturer at The George Washington University, teaching in the School of Media and Public Affairs. Since 2002, he has served as a volunteer firefighter/EMT with the Arlington County Fire Department.

Dick Hammerstrom , an editor with The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., has worked at newspapers in Virginia and North Carolina. He is the chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee of the Virginia Press Association, the Sunshine chair for Virginia for the Society of Professional Journalists, and a member of the board of directors of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. Hammerstrom has been a lecturer and discussion leader on freedom of information and other press law matters. He also serves as internship coordinator for The Free Lance-Star.

Mike Howells, an alumnus of Gettysburg College, has spent his post-graduate life working for Pennsylvania Legislative Services in Harrisburg. As associate Editor for PLS, the state’s premiere legislative tracking service and media outlet, Howells reviews and compiles stories for PLS’s nightly newsletters, the Pennsylvania Letter, and Capitol Recap; tracks Pennsylvania House and Senate floor sessions; covers committee hearings, press conferences, gubernatorial events and election issues; and writes in-depth stories and updates to keep subscribes apprised of Pennsylvania politics. Born and raised in St. Albans, England, Howells moves to New Jersey and now lives in midtown Harrisburg. He is a published author and a member of the Capitol Press Corps, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, and the Specialized Information Publishers Association.

Joyce Karam

Cindi Lash is currently the Regional Editor for Western Pennsylvania for Patch.com, overseeing online news and information sites for communities around Pittsburgh. She joined the company after serving as Suday Editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and after working for The Pittsburgh Press; The Birmingham (Ala.) News; the Washington (Pa.) Observer-Reporter; and the Indiana Gazette. She has been a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette local news editor and reporter, covering public safety, government, and issues and events of relevance to the people of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and other states. She also has worked in internal communications for a Top 15 global law firm before returning to her first love -- covering the news.

Among the major events she has covered: Super Bowls; national political campaign events; the Sago and Quecreek mine rescue operations; the crashes of United Flight 93 and US Air Flight 427; and numerous high-profile crimes, mass-shooting sprees and natural disasters. She also has broken international stories while assisting with coverage of area soldiers' involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and has supervised breaking and ongoing coverage of major local and national stories. `A 1980 graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she is a member of its journalism advisory board and has won numerous national, state and regional journalism awards. Lash is a four year participant in the Speak Up, Write Out Media Summit.

Peter MacLeod, an award winning journalist, has spent that last 30 years producing, editing and announcing content in the radio industry. He currently serves as Assignments Editor for Voice of America, the official external radio and television broadcasting service of the United States federal government. In his job, he helps to assign stories to correspondents and stringers around the world and edits these stories as they are submitted. Prior to working for VOA, Peter spent a few years at National Public Radio as an Associate Editor and has worked at numerous local stations in the Boston area. He graduated with his bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College in 1968 and completed his masters in special education at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts. This is Mr. Macleod's third year participating in Speak Up, Write Out.

Nancy Nathan, Nancy Nathan has been with NBC News in Washington for 25 years. Her current assignment is Executive Producer of The Chris Matthews Show, the Sunday morning journalists' roundtable, which she and Chris began in 2002. The program leads the Sunday morning public affairs pack in many cities, including NY, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington. Before that, she was executive producer of Meet the Press from 1996-2002, and washington exec producer of The Today Show from 1989 to 1996. She began her journalism career as a politics producer at The NewsHour on PBS. Before changing careers to enter journalism, she was an attorney with the federal election commission and the u.s. conference of catholic bishops. Nancy and David Nathan are parents of three daughters, including Caroline, Gettysburg '12.

Tom Torok heads the five-person Computer-assisted Reporting Team at The New York Times, which has played a role in seven Pulitzer-prize winning projects and two projects that were Pulitzer finalists in the past nine years. The reporting team specializes in obtaining, managing, analyzing and interpreting electronic information for news projects and newsroom resources. Before joining The Times, he was at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 18 years, where he participated in three computer-reliant projects that were finalists for the Pulitzer Public Service Award in 1995, 1999 and 2000. During his tenure there, he was a member of the computer-assisted reporting team, a humor columnist, a rewrite person, a business news reporter and a police reporter. He also was an editor and/or reporter at five other newspapers, with circulations ranging from 13,500 to nearly 400,000. From 2001 to 2009 he was an adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where he taught Computer-assisted Reporting as well as Tools of the Modern Newsroom. Before that, he was an adjunct at Rowan University, where he taught Sources of Journalistic Information. This is Torok's fifth year participating in the Speak Up, Write Out Media Summit.

Amy Worden has been a journalist for more than 20 years with experience in virtually every medium, from print, radio and TV to the Internet. She has worked for The Washington Post, the Associated Press, United Press International, Fox News Channel, APBNews.com (a national crime and courts news service) and freelanced on a wide range of topics for newspapers, news services and magazines. Since joining The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2000, she has covered state government and political campaigns along with statewide features and breaking news. Among the national stories covered for the Inquirer were the Dover evolution trial, the crash of Flight 93, the Quecreek Mine rescue and Hurricane Katrina. She also feeds the Inquirer's politics and government blog, Commonwealth Confidential, and created the paper's pet blog, Philly Dawg.