• Knight Fellowships

Sixth Knight Reunion and Conference

This will be the biggest reunion so far, with about 175 former fellows, and a total of nearly 400 people from the U.S and 17 other countries. Representatives of 35 of the 39 classes of Stanford Professional Journalism and Knight fellows will be here. Discussions will cover the current state of journalism and its future, as well as the global reach of Islam, avian flu, civil liberties and hip-hop.

Speaker Biographies

Farai Chideya

Farai Chideya is a correspondent and co-host of the NPR program,"News and Notes with Ed Gordon." She is a multimedia journalist who has worked in print, television, online, and radio. Prior to her current position, she hosted "Your Call," a daily news and cultural call-in show on San Francisco's KALW 91.7 FM. Chideya has also been a correspondent for ABC News, anchored the prime time program Pure Oxygen on the Oxygen women's channel, and contributed commentaries to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and BET. She got her start as a researcher and reporter at Newsweek magazine. She is the founder of PopandPolitics.com, and the author of three books:"Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans," (1995),"The Color of Our Future," (1999), and "Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters," (2004). She was a Knight Fellow in 2001-02.

Sandy Close

Sandy Close is executive editor of Pacific News Service and executive director of New California Media.After graduating from the University of California-Berkeley in 1964, she moved to Hong Kong where she was the China editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review. Upon her return to the U.S., she founded The Flatlands newspaper, a raw voice of the inner city communities of Oakland, CA. In 1974, she became executive director of Pacific News Service, helping to develop it into one of the most diverse sources of literary voices and analytical ideas in the U.S. news media. In 1996 Close founded New California Media (NCM), a nationwide association of over 700 ethnic media organizations, producing an awards program, an inter-ethnic media exchange and multicultural, multilingual social marketing campaigns.

Dan Gillmor Dan Gillmor is host ("not The Editor") of Bayosphere, a citizen journalism site focused on the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People" (2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens' media and why it matters. From 1994-2004, Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics.

Marcyliena Morgan

Marcyliena Morgan is a Stanford associate professor of communication and director of the Stanford Hiphop Archive. Morgan teaches courses on hiphop, discourse, language and identity, race, class and gender, the ethnography of communications, and representation in the media. She is the author of,"Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture," (2002) and editor of "Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations," (1994). She founded the Hiphop Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University while on the faculty in African American Studies. She is currently completing a book on hiphop culture entitled "The Real Hiphop – Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the Underground."

Azim Nanji

Azim Nanji has been director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London since 1998. Previously he was professor and chair of the Department of Religion at the University of Florida and has held academic and administrative appointments at various American and Canadian universities. He has also been co-chair of the Islam Section of the American Academy of Religion. Professor Nanji has authored, co-authored and edited several books including:"The Nizari Ismaili Tradition," (1976),"The Muslim Almanac," (1996),"Mapping Islamic Studies," (1997) and "The Historical Atlas of Islam," (2004). He is currently preparing the "Historical Dictionary of Islam" to be published by Penguin. In 1988 he was Margaret Gest Visiting Professor at Haverford College anda Visiting Professor at Stanford University in 2004.

Olena Prytula

Olena Prytula is the editor-in-chief of Ukrayinska Pravda, a web site that focuses on news and political coverage in Ukraine. She was born in Russia and educated as an engineer at Odessa Polytechnic University. Influenced by the dramatic political and social changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, she quit her engineering career and become a journalist,working for Reuters in Crimea, for Interfax Ukraine News Agency in Kiev and in 2000 helped launch Ukrayinska Pravda.The murder of the web site's co-founder, journalist Georgiy Gongadze, who had openly protested against growing government censorship, has focused attention on freedom of speech issues in Ukraine. Prytula returned to Ukraine in 2004 after her fellowship year at Stanford, where she was a Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Journalism Fellow. Soon after her return, Prytula played a pivotal role in providing information to the public during the "Orange Revolution."

David A. Relman

David A. Relman is an associate professor of medicine (infectious diseases and geographic medicine) and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Infectious Diseases Section at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. He received his bachelor's degree in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1994. His major focus is laboratory research directed toward characterizing the human endogenous microbial flora, host-microbe interactions, and identifying previously unrecognized microbial pathogens. Dr. Relman has served on scientific program committees for the American Society for Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and advisory panels for NIH, CDC, the Departments of Energy and Defense, and NASA.

James V. Risser

James V. Risser is director emeritus of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. He worked for 20 years for The Des Moines Register and from 1976 to 1985 was the newspaper's Washington bureau chief. While with The Des Moines Register, Risser won numerous journalism honors. In 1976, for stories exposing corruption in the U.S. grain exporting industry, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. In 1979, Risser won a second Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of articles showing the destructive impact of modern American agriculture on the environment. In 1985 Risser joined the Stanford faculty as director of the Knight Fellowships. He retired from Stanford in September 2000 and is professor emeritus of communication.

Rick Rodriguez

Rick Rodriguez has been executive editor and senior vice president at the Sacramento Bee since 1998, having risen through the ranks after joining the paper in November 1982 as a political writer in the paper's state Capitol Bureau. Prior to becoming executive editor, Rodriguez was managing editor for five years. He joined the Sacramento Bee from another McClatchy newspaper, The Fresno Bee. He began his career with his hometown newspaper, The Salinas Californian. Rodriguez graduated from Stanford in 1976 with a BA in communication. He also attended Hartnell Community College. In April he became president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the first Latino to hold that position.

Kathleen Sullivan

Kathleen Sullivan is the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford and the former dean of the Law School. She earned bachelor's degrees at Cornell and Oxford, and a jurisdoctorate at Harvard. After clerking for Judge James Oakes on the U.S. Court of Appeals, she was in private constitutional appellate practice for two years before joining the Harvard Law School faculty. She has been a member of the Stanford Law School faculty since 1993.While dean of the Law School, she promoted research programs in Law, Science & Technology; Law, Economics & Business; Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy; and Democracy,Development and the Rule of Law. She is the co-author of the casebook,"Constitutional Law" and "First Amendment Law," both with the late Stanford Law Professor Gerald Gunther.

Mark Whitaker

Mark Whitaker has been editor of Newsweek since 1998. He came to Newsweek in 1977 as a reporting intern in the San Francisco bureau, and later reported as a stringer and intern in Boston,Washington, London and Paris. He joined the magazine staff in 1981 and rose to a succession of more responsible positions: business editor from 1987 to 1991, assistant managing editor from 1991 to 1996 and managing editor from 1996 to 1998. Under his leadership,Newsweek won the 2004 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the industry's most prestigious award, for its coverage of the war in Iraq. Newsweek also won the General Excellence award in 2002 for the magazine's coverage of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.