Discussion: Whither Journalism?

John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author. Currently founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing, he is also a founder and executive producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries and “band manager” with BoingBoing.net. Previously, Battelle was founder, chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures. He is the author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (Portfolio, 2005).

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Marissa leads Google’s efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, – and other consumer-facing initiatives such as iGoogle, Google Earth, Google Chrome, and more. Her contributions have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to over 100 languages, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Google’s first female engineer, Marissa joined in 1999 and led the user interface and web server teams at that time.

Concurrently with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford University, where she earned both her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science. Stanford has recognized her with the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award for her outstanding contribution to undergraduate education.

Marissa has been featured in various publications, including Fortune (“50 Most Powerful Women”), Newsweek (“10 Tech Leaders of the Future”), Red Herring (“15 Women to Watch”), Business 2.0 (“Silicon Valley Dream Team”), BusinessWeek (“Top 25 Innovation Leaders”) and Fast Company.

Eric Hippeau is the Chief Executive Officer of The Huffington Post, a leading news and opinion site which in four years has become an influential media brand – “The Internet Newspaper.” Hippeau joined HuffPost in June 2009.

Prior to joining HuffPost, Hippeau was managing partner at Softbank Capital, a New York and Boston-based venture capital fund specializing in early stage investments in technology and digital media. Hippeau joined Softbank Capital in 2000 from Ziff-Davis, Inc., where he was Chairman and CEO. During his career at Ziff-Davis, Hippeau was early to recognize the growth potential of online media. Under his stewardship, ZDNet became one of the few successful examples of a strong online business model evolving from traditional magazine content, and he was instrumental in SoftBank’s first investment in Yahoo! in 1995. Hippeau was also responsible for founding ZDTV, a cable channel dedicated to technology and the Internet.

Hippeau serves on the boards of several public and private companies, including Yahoo!, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Thumbplay, The Huffington Post, BuddyMedia,and BuzzFeed. He is also on the investment committee for the SB Asia Infrastructure Fund. Hippeau graduated from the Lycee Francais de Londres and attended the Sorbonne University.

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Robert Thomson is the editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. As the senior news executive at Dow Jones, Mr. Thomson directs the news operations of the Journal, WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com and Dow Jones Newswires.

Before joining Dow Jones in December 2007, Mr. Thomson was editor of The Times of London where he presided over a significant expansion of its readership in print and on the Web – the audience of the Times Online grew from less than 1 million monthly to almost 13 million during his editorship. Prior to that, he was editor of the U.S. edition of the Financial Times taking prime editorial responsibility for the FT Group’s ambitious drive into the U.S. market, where the newspaper trebled its sales to almost 150,000. For his work in building the FT’s operations, in print and online, he was named as U.S. Business Journalist of the Year in 2001 by the influential trade journal TJFR.

Before arriving in New York for the Financial Times, Mr. Thomson was editor of the Weekend FT and assistant editor of the Financial Times. He orchestrated a successful redesign of the Weekend FT in late 1996, and that edition became the fastest-growing newspaper in the U.K. market during 1997. He also oversaw the evolution of the occasional “How to Spend It” magazine into an award-winning monthly. From 1994 to 1996, he was the FT’s foreign news editor in London, overseeing the paper’s extensive network of correspondents. Thomson had been a correspondent himself in Tokyo (1989-1994), where he witnessed the rise and fall of the “bubble economy,” and in Beijing (1985-1989), where he reported on the country’s economic and social reforms, and the crushing of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.

Mr. Thomson has been a journalist since early 1979, when he joined The Herald in Melbourne, working as a copyboy and a finance and general affairs reporter before becoming the paper’s Sydney correspondent. In 1983, he was hired by the Sydney Morning Herald as a senior feature writer and, two years later, was appointed to a Beijing bureau then shared by the Sydney paper and the Financial Times.

He is the author of The Judges: A Portrait of the Australian Judiciary (Allen & Unwin) and co-author of The Chinese Army (Weldon Owen). He edited a collection of satirical writing titled True Fiction (Penguin Books).

Mr. Thomson was born in Torrumbarry, near Echuca, in southern Australia, and is married with two sons.

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