Keynote Speaker
Dean Baquet was the executive editor of the New York Times from May 2014 to June 2022.
Before being named executive editor, Mr. Baquet was managing editor of The Times. He previously served as Washington bureau chief for the paper from March 2007 to September 2011. Mr. Baquet rejoined The Times after several years at the Los Angeles Times, where he was editor of the newspaper since 2005, after serving as managing editor since 2000.
He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in March 1988 when he led a team of three in documenting corruption in the Chicago City Council, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 in the investigative reporting category. Mr. Baquet has also received numerous local and regional awards.
Respondents
Jodie Ginsberg is the President of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a position that she has held since 2022. A journalist by profession, Ginsberg previously served as Chief Executive Officer for Internews Europe, part of the Internews alliance, one of the world’s largest international media development nonprofits. She was also the CEO of the renowned freedom of expression campaign group, Index on Censorship. A South African and British national, she worked for more than a decade as a foreign correspondent and newsroom leader at Reuters news agency.
Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of six books, including the novels The Tattooed Soldier, The Barbarian Nurseries, and The Last Great Road Bum. His non-fiction Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of Thirty-Three Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller. He is also a journalist, writing for the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and various other outlets. His most recent book is Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” In 2023, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants and currently a literary journalism professor at UCI.
Alan Weisman has worked on seven continents, in the Caribbean and Oceania, and in more than 60 countries. The author of six books, his next, Hope Dies Last, will be a spring 2025 release from Dutton/Penguin Random House.
Alan’s 2007 book The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press), was a New York Times and international bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orion Book Award, the Rachel Carson Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and winner of the National Library of China’s Wenjin Book Prize. In 2020, Slate named it one of the top 50 nonfiction books of the last 25 years. It was named the top nonfiction book of 2007 by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, and Canada’s National Post, and has been translated into 34 languages.
Alan is a co-founder of Homelands Productions. His radio pieces have been heard on NPR, Public Radio International, and American Public Media.
