Tracie Powell writes about the media and media policy, specifically on issues regarding diversity, piracy, media ownership, government transparency and the business of journalism. A graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, she lives in Washington, DC. She has contributed to Poynter, NPR, and Publica, the first nonprofit investigative journalism center in Brazil. She also contributes regularly to The Washington Post "She The People" blog and is founder of AllDigitocracy.org, a blog about media and diversity.

Jennifer Smith Richards is an education reporter at The Columbus Dispatch. She's covered schools and education for more than a decade at newspapers in Huntington, W.Va.; Utica, N.Y.; Savannah, Ga.; and Columbus. Jennifer's work is focused on statewide accountability, school choice issues and teaching and learning in Columbus City Schools. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University. Richards’ recent investigative work uncovered a scandal where the Columbus School District Columbus City Schools employees — and perhaps others in schools throughout the state — are accused of falsifying students’ records to improve their schools’ standing on state report cards. She did this using data bases and tables. Email: jsmithrichards@dispatch.com Twitter: @jsmithrichards

Hillary Rosner is a science journalist specializing in long-form stories about the environment. She writes for Wired, National Geographic, The New York Times, Scientific American, Discover, High Country News, Ensia, and many other venues. She was a 2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a 2012 fellow of the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Her work has won awards from NASW, SEJ, and AAAS. Beginning in January 2015, Hillary will be joining the faculty of the S.I Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where she'll be helping to launch a new program in science and sustainability journalism.

Cristine Russell is an award-winning journalist who has written about science, health, and the environment for more than three decades. She’s a political junkie, with a strong interest in the intersection of science and public policy, particularly in areas of controversy. Russell is an adjunct lecturer and senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. A former Washington Post reporter, she is currently a contributing editor to Columbia Journalism Review and a correspondent for The Atlantic.com. Russell is the immediate past-president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a former NASW president.

Anne Sasso used to write for magazines and online science outlets but now writes almost exclusively for corporate clients. She contributed chapters on overcoming procrastination and managing a freelance business to The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything you Need to Know to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age (Da Capo Press, April 2013). She is the business manager of the SciLance Writing Group, LLC. Anne blogs regularly about the business of freelancing, science writing and the creative process on the book’s companion site pitchpublishprosper.com. She was a 2007 fellow in the Literary Journalism program at The Banff Center in Canada. She lives on a dead-end dirt road tucked into the western slope of Vermont’s Green Mountains.

Mark Schrope is a full-time journalist and outreach consultant based in Florida who hates bad contracts. Much of his work focuses on ocean topics. His articles have appeared in Scientific American, Nature, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Caribbean Travel & Life, and Scuba Diving, and he wrote the contracts chapter of the Science Writers’ Handbook. Past assignments have taken him into the eye of a hurricane, to the seafloor multiple times by submersible, to remote islands, and to the Sinai Desert.