Les Payne is a trailblazing investigative journalist and award-winning columnist. A winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for a 33-part series on the movement of heroin from “the poppy fields of Turkey to the veins of drug addicts in New York City,” he was twice a finalist for that most prestigious award for investigative series he did on the black liberation struggle in Southern Africa. A longtime columnist for Newsday, Payne is a founding member and former president of the National Association of Black Journalists. He was the inaugural professor for the David Laventhol Chair at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Tonyaa Weathersbee, is an award-winning opinion columnist for The Florida Times-Union and a national columnist for BlackAmericaWeb.com, as well as managing editor for the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies. A foundation based at Morgan's School of Global Journalism & Communication, the institute works to improve the number of blacks in the journalism profession and enhance the coverage of issues of importance to people of African descent.
Wilma Jean Emanuel Randle, a former business writer for The Chicago Tribune, has been in Dakar, Senegal, since 1998, working throughout Africa as a consultant and media trainer for international organizations that support African journalist, especially women.
Kaylois Henry is a resident journalism advisor in South Sudan for the Community Radio Network at Internews Network. The former BBC reporter also has been a public radio and television freelance producer and reporter and was recently based in Bonn, Germany, as a communications officer at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Jared Ball is an associate professor in the Department of Multiplatform Production in the School of Global Journalism & Communication at Morgan State University. Ball’s research interests include the interaction between colonialism, mass media theory and history, as well as, the development of underground journalism.
Sharan Chandradath Singh is the director of International Studies at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine in Trinidad, managing operations across 16 islands, serving more than 47,000 students - 19,000 of them in Trinidad.
Shiraz Mohammed is a senior information and communications technology professional and manager of Strategic Transformation Projects at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.
5