2020 CAMDEN CONFERENCE

Nicco Mele
Keynote Speaker – Camden Conference 2020
"Remember Rule 1: It Will Get Crazier"

Nicco Mele is on the faculty at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and is the faculty co-chair of the Harvard Council on the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence.

From 2016 to 2019, Nicco was the Director of the Center, where he started new programs focused on understanding misinformation on social networks; sustainable models for local journalism; institutional anti-racism in media and algorithms; and platform accountability. He continues to teach classes on technology’s impact on media, politics, and public policy. Nicco’s prior experience includes founding technology companies, working on political campaigns, and a stint as a media executive at the Los Angeles Times. He advises several startups, including Blueprint Robotics (on-demand manufacturing), Optimus Ride (autonomous vehicles), Plympton (publishing), and Cignify (data analytics). Nicco serves as the board chair of Democracy.Works and MassPoetry. He has published widely, including the international bestseller The End of Big: How The Digital Revolution Makes David The New Goliath published in 2013 by St. Martin’s Press. Longer bio available here.

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Nic Newman
Speaker – Camden Conference 2020

Nic Newman is a journalist and digital strategist who played a key role in shaping the BBC’s internet services over more than a decade.

He was a founding member of the BBC News Website, leading international coverage as World Editor (1997-2001). As Head of Product Development for BBC News he helped introduce innovations such as blogs, podcasting and on-demand video. Most recently he led digital teams, developing websites, mobile and interactive TV applications for News, Sport, Weather and Local.

He has played an important part in the development of social media strategies and guidelines for the wider BBC. Nic is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and a consultant on digital media. He is married with three children and lives in London.

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Joshua Tucker
Speaker – 2020 Camden Conference

Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University.

He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, a co-Director of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory (csmapnyu.org), and a co-author/editor of the award-winning politics and policy blog The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. He serves on the advisory board of the American National Election Study, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and numerous academic journals, and was the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science.

His original research was on mass political behavior in post-communist countries, including voting and elections, partisanship, public opinion formation, and protest participation. More recently, he has been at the forefront of the newly emerging field of study of the relationship between social media and politics. His research in this area has included studies on the effects of network diversity on tolerance, partisan echo chambers, online hate speech, the effects of exposure to social media on political knowledge, online networks and protest, disinformation and fake news, how authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition, and Russian bots and trolls.

An internationally recognized scholar, he has served as a keynote speaker for conferences in Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States, and has given over 100 invited research presentations at top domestic and international universities and research centers over the past 10 years. His research has appeared in over two-dozen scholarly journals and has been supported by approximately $16 million in funding from a wide range of philanthropic foundations, as well as the National Science Foundation. His most recent book is the co-authored Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017), and he is the co-editor of the forthcoming Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Follow him @j_a_tucker.

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Jeff Jarvis
Speaker – Camden Conference 2020

Jeff Jarvis is a national leader in the development of online news, blogging, the investigation of new business models for news, and the teaching of entrepreneurial journalism. He writes an influential media blog, Buzzmachine.com.

He is author of “Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News” (CUNY Journalism Press, 2014); “Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live” (Simon & Schuster, 2011); “What Would Google Do?” (HarperCollins 2009), and the Kindle Single “Gutenberg the Geek.”

He has consulted for media companies including The Guardian, Digital First Media, Postmedia, Sky.com, Burda, Advance Publications, and The New York Times company at About.com.

Prior to joining the Newmark J-School, Jarvis was president of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications, which includes Condé Nast magazines and newspapers across America.

He was the creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly magazine and has worked as a columnist, associate publisher, editor, and writer for a number of publications, including TV Guide, People, the San Francisco Examiner, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News.

His freelance articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country, including the Guardian, The New York Times, the New York Post, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and BusinessWeek.

Jarvis holds a B.S.J. from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He was named one of the 100 most influential media leaders by the World Economic Forum at Davos.

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Camden Conference 2020
Saturday Morning Panel Discussion with Nicco Mele, Nic Newman, Joshua Tucker and Jeff Jarvis

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Courtney C. Radsch
Speaker

Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, is advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. She serves as chief spokesperson on global press freedom issues for the organization and oversees CPJ's engagement with the United Nations, the Internet Governance Forum, and other multilateral institutions as well as CPJ's campaigns on behalf of journalists killed and imprisoned for their work. As a veteran journalist, researcher, and free expression advocate, she frequently writes and speaks about the intersection of media, technology, and human rights. Her book Cyberactivism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt: Digital Dissidence and Political Change was published in 2016.

Prior to joining CPJ, Radsch worked for UNESCO, edited the flagship publication "World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development," and managed the Global Freedom of Expression Campaign at Freedom House. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and Middle East with Al-Arabiya, the Daily Star, and The New York Times. Radsch holds a PhD in international relations from American University. She speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish.

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Maria Ressa
Speaker – Camden Conference 2020

Maria Ressa is the CEO and Executive Editor, as well as one of the founders of the 6-year-old company Rappler.com, that is one of the leading online news organizations in the Philippines.

Maria has been honored around the world for her courageous and bold work in fighting disinformation, “fake news” and attempts to silence the free press. In 2018, she was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” and won the prestigious Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-INFRA), the Knight International Journalism Award of the International Center for Journalists, the Gwen Jfill Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Journalist of Courage and Impact Award of East-West Center, and the IX International Press Freedom Award of University of Málaga and UNESCO, among others. Maria was also listed as on the Time 100 most influential People in 2019.

She has been a journalist in Asia for more than 30 years. She was CNN’s bureau chief in Manila then Jakarta on terrorism in Southeast Asia. She authored two books – Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook.

In 1987, Maria co-founded independent production company, Probe. In 2005, she managed ABS-CBN News and Current affairs, the largest multi-platform news operation in the Philippines. Her work aimed to redefine journalism by combining traditional broadcast, new media and mobile phone technology for social change.

You can find Maria on Twitter @mariaressa

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Lydia Cacho Ribeiro
Speaker – 2020 Camden Conference

Lydia Cacho Ribeiro is a journalist, writer, social activist, human rights advocate and a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Agency against Drugs and Crime. Described by Amnesty International as “perhaps Mexico’s most famous investigative journalist and women’s rights advocate”, Cacho’s reporting focuses on violence against and sexual abuse of women and children.

Her brave journalistic investigations have taken her to 132 countries and made her the most awarded journalist in Mexico with 55 international awards.

Born in Mexico City, Cacho settled in Cancún, Mexico in 1985, where she began working at the newspaper Novedades de Cancún. She has published hundreds of articles, a book of poetry, a novel, several books of essays on human rights and other nonfiction works. She speaks Spanish, French, Portuguese and English.

A fearless and courageous defender of the rights of women and children in Mexico, Cacho routinely risks her life to shelter women from abuse and challenge powerful government and business leaders who profit from child prostitution and pornography. Cacho founded Ciam Cancún, a shelter for battered women and children, providing refuge for countless individuals.

Her writings have resulted in shining the spotlight on issues that are normally not challenged. In her 2005 book, Los Demonios del Edén (Demons of Eden), Cacho accused a prominent businessman of protecting a child pornographer, which resulted in her illegal arrest. While in jail she was beaten and abused. She became the first woman to bring a case to the Mexican Supreme Court; the court ruled that the content of her book was truthful.

Cacho’s books also include Mujer Delfin [Dolphin Woman], a poetry book published in 1997, and Muerdele El Corazon [Bite the Heart], a novel published in 2005 about a woman who is HIV positive. Three of her Best Sellers works have become university textbooks in several Latin American countries. Her books have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

Confronted with countless credible threats against her life, Cacho has refused offers of asylum from the United States, France and Spain. She will not leave her country and abandon the women and children she has dedicated her life to protecting. An April 2007 Washington Post article described Cacho as “one of Mexico’s most celebrated and imperiled journalists.” The article went on to explain that she “is a target in a country where at least seventeen journalists have been killed in the past five years and that trailed only Iraq in media deaths during 2006.

Cacho has received many awards for her work as a humanitarian and a journalist, including the State Journalists Prize, the Amnesty International Ginetta Sagan Award for Women and Children’s Rights, and the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano Freedom of Expression Award. In her acceptance speech for the Courage in Journalism Award Cacho said: “Journalists are their mirrors to the world, so that the world can see them and hear their stories. And that is why I cannot be silenced.”

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Jason & Yeganeh Rezaian
Speaker – 2020 Camden Conference

Jason Rezaian is a “Global Opinions” writer for The Washington Post, a CNN contributor, and a vocal advocate for press freedom around the world and for Americans falsely imprisoned abroad. From 2009 to 2014, he was the lone American correspondent working in Iran for the international press. In July 2014, he and his wife, Yeganeh, were detained by Iranian authorities. The following year, he was convicted of espionage in a closed-door trial in Tehran and imprisoned until his release in January 2016. Mr. Rezaian’s story of his ordeal, Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison, was published in January 2019 and has now been reissued in paperback. He has won numerous awards, including the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the National Press Club’s John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award and the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation’s Press Freedom Award. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University (2017) and a Terker Distinguished Fellow, George Washington University (2016-2018). He is a graduate of Eugene Lang College at the New School in New York.

Yeganeh Rezaian is an Advocacy Associate at the Committee to Protect Journalists. An Iranian journalist now living in Washington, D.C., she has written pieces for The Washington Post and The Lily. She previously worked as the communications director at the World Affairs Council-Washington, D.C. While living in Iran, Ms. Rezaian covered Iranian political, social, and economic news for Bloomberg News and The National until she and her husband, the former Washington Post Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian, were detained by Iranian authorities in 2014.

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Saturday Afternoon Panel with Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, Maria Ressa, Courtney C. Radsch, Yeganeh Rezaian, Jason Rezaian

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Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Speaker – 2020 Camden Conference

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the Walter and Leonore Director of the university’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Program Director of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands.

She has authored or co-authored 16 books, most recently Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President (Oxford University Press), which won the 2019 R.R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers. Including Cyberwar, six of the books that Jamieson has authored or co-authored have received a total of nine political science or communication book awards (Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism, Presidents Creating the Presidency, and The Obama Victory.) She co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication and The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication. Jamieson has won university-wide teaching awards at each of the three universities at which she has taught and has delivered the American Political Science Association’s Ithiel de Sola Poole Lecture, the National Communication Association’s Arnold Lecture, and the NASEM Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education Henry and Bryna David Lecture. Her paper “Implications of the Demise of ‘Fact’ in Political Discourse” received the American Philosophical Society’s 2016 Henry Allen Moe Prize. Jamieson’s work has been funded by the FDA and the MacArthur, Ford, Carnegie, Pew, Robert Wood Johnson, Packard, and Annenberg Foundations. She is the co-founder of FactCheck.org and its subsidiary site, SciCheck, and director of The Sunnylands Constitution Project, which has produced more than 30 award-winning films on the Constitution for high school students. Jamieson is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association, and a past president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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2020 Camden Conference

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2020 Camden Conference

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