Ron Nixon

Ron Nixon is a Washington correspondent for the New York Times who covers federal regulatory agencies. He has covered stories ranging from the U.S. role in the Arab Spring to the US government’s domestic surveillance programs at the US Postal Service and the Transportation Security Administration. Nixon has also reported from Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Prior to The Times, Nixon was database editor at Minneapolis Star Tribune and a member of the paper’s investigative team. Before working at the Star-Tribune, Nixon was on the national training staff of Investigative Reporters and Editors and worked as reporter at the Roanoke Times in Virginia.

He is author of the book Selling Apartheid: Apartheid South Africa’s Global Propaganda War (Jacana Media, June 2015).

Ron is also co-founded two news-related startups: The Ujima Project and TruthBeTold.com.

The Ujima Project, which started in 2009, is a online portal of databases, documents and other information that attempts to bring transparency to the workings and spending of Africa governments, multinational non-governmental organizations and business enterprise operating in African countries. He was a featured speaker at the 2009 TedX talks in Kampala, Uganda discussing the Ujima Project and transparency in development.

TruthBeTold.com, which begin 2015, is a non-profit, non-partisan fact-checking website and digital network, run and edited from Howard University’s Department of Media, Journalism and Film in the School of Communication. It will use journalistic skills and crowd-sourced information to play a leading role by examining claims about the black community in public debate.

Ron is currently the visiting associate for Journalism and Media Studies at The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and was the 2013-14 Hearst Visiting Professional at Howard University in Washington, DC.

Margaret Ebrahim

Margaret Ebrahim, who goes by her nickname “Mishi,” is PBS Senior Director of News & Public Affairs programming.  Ebrahim is an award-winning journalist and producer who has worked at some of the most successful media organizations, including CBS News 60 Minutes and ABC News as well as the Center for Public Integrity and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

Prior to joining PBS, Ebrahim helped re-launch National Geographic’s Explorer documentary series, and developed new digital video series for the media organization. Ebrahim was a producer for the groundbreaking SHOWTIME climate change series Years of Living Dangerously (Season 1) winner of the 2014 Emmy Award for outstanding nonfiction series.  As senior producer at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit journalism organization in Washington D.C., Ebrahim oversaw television, web and feature film projects, including co-productions with PBS FRONTLINE.

Lori E. Gold

Lori E. Gold served on the founding board of 100Reporters as secretary from 2011 to 2015 and on the founding board of Double Exposure: The Investigative Film Festival and Symposium in 2015.  She is president of Lori Gold Consulting, Inc., which advises nonprofit organizations on fundraising, strategic planning and long-term sustainability. She is one of a handful of nationally certified grant professionals in the United States. As a civic activist, Ms. Gold fought the illegal taking of residents’ property by the state of Florida, which the state did for the economic benefit of businesses. She successfully advocated before the state Senate for a law that made partial restitution to millions of affected residents. She also helped send a corrupt agency director to prison, upon discovering that he was siphoning off millions in public dollars. She earned degrees from Columbia University/Barnard College and New York University/Stern School of Business.