Journalism Under Siege

Shawn Dwyer
Former Reporter, WEDJ television Roanoke

Shane Dwyer was a general assignment reporter at WDBJ7, the CBS affiliate in Roanoke when Allison Parker and Adam Ward were shot and killed while reporting live. Dwyer, now the director of communications for the Virginia Museum of Transportation, covered politics, crime, courts and police. I was named a Hearst Journalism Award Television News Champion in June of 2014.

Carmen Forman
Reporter, Roanoke Times

Carmen Forman is a state politics reporter at The Roanoke Times in Southwest Virginia. As the Times’ Capitol reporter, she splits her time between Roanoke and Richmond, spending part of the year covering the General Assembly session in the commonwealth’s capital. A Norman native, Forman graduated from Gaylord College in 2013 after spending much of her college years holed up in The Oklahoma Daily newsroom. After graduation, she interned for a semester with Oklahoma Watch and spent the summer at Arizona State University as a Carnegie Knight News 21 fellow. She has been a reporter at The Times for three years and loves living in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

Oscar Cantu
Former Publisher, Norte de Ciudad Juarez

Oscar A. Cantú is a native of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. He practiced law and promoted foreign investment in México as a part of a program to attract new industry. In 1978, at the age of 28, he co-founded the newspaper “El Universal de Ciudad Juárez, which was taken over by the Mexican government. By 1990 he regained the control of it and renamed it “Norte de Ciudad Juarez.” Mr. Cantú has served on the board of directors of the “Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez”, and of the “Technological Institute of Ciudad Juarez;” is founder of the “North Development Youth Program”, and the “Observatory for Security and Citizen Coexistence;” President of the children association “Los Ojos de Dios” (The Eyes of God), an association that takes care of children with cerebral palsy, and also President of the “Cancer Association of Juárez.” On April 2 of 2017, after one of his journalists (Miroslava Breach) was assassinated, Mr. Cantú shut down the newspaper as a protest because of the high risk involved in the exercising of critical and counterweight journalism, and the lack of security and guarantees for the journalists, and high impunity levels. The murder is unsolved but is believed to be related to Ms. Breach’s coverage of narcoterrorists.

Diane Foley
Co-Founder, James Foley Legacy Foundation

Diane Foley is the head of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which she and her husband founded in memory of her son who beheaded in Syria after being held captive for two years after being abducted by ISIS. Foley is working on a memoir about the life of her son and assisted in the production of a documentary about her son. The gruesome killing, captured on video and posted on the Internet, made Foley the first American citizen to be killed by ISIS; it was followed by similar videos of the killings of fellow Americans Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig.

Michael Scott Moore
Author/Reporter

Michael Scott Moore is a literary journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist and Popmatters. He covered the 2011 trial of ten Somali pirates in Europe for Spiegel Online, then traveled to Somalia in early 2012 to research a book. He was kidnapped and held hostage for two and a half years.

His memoir about Somalia is due out from HarperCollins in early 2018. He’s covered the European migration crisis for Businessweek, and politics, travel, and literature for The Atlantic, Der Spiegel, The New Republic, Pacific Standard, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Daily Beast, and The L.A. Review of Books. He has received fellowships or grants from Fulbright, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Carey Institute for the Global Good.

Twitter: @MichaelSctMoore Web: radiofreemike.net

Joshua Benton
Director, Nieman Journalism Lab, Harvard University

Joshua Benton is director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. Before spending a year at Harvard as a 2008 Nieman Fellow, he spent 10 years in newspapers, most recently at The Dallas Morning News. His reports on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from more than a dozen countries, been a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and a three-time finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. Before Dallas, Benton was a reporter and rock critic for The Toledo Blade. He wrote his first HTML in 1994.