Speakers for 2020 Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Lori B. Duff is the managing partner of Jones & Duff, LLC and the Municipal Court Judge for the City of Loganville, Georgia.  She writes a bi-weekly column called “Legalese” which is geared towards translating complicated legal topics into plain English.  Her humor column, also bi-weekly, has been twice mentioned honorably in the NSNC annual column contest.  She is Vice President of the Council of Municipal Court Judges’ Association (or is that President of all Vice?) and sits on the Board of the NSNC as a Member at Large.  Her fourth book, “If You Did What I Asked in the First Place” is now available, and is hopefully a bestseller by the time you read this.  She can be found at www.loriduffwrites.com.

Dr. Adam Earnheardt is professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Youngstown State University. As a communication and sports expert, Dr. Earnheardt has published two textbooks on communication and media (The Modern Communicator and Public Speaking in the Age of Technology; Kendall/Hunt) that are widely relied upon in the university community, as well as co-edited four collections on sports, media and fans. His latest book ESPN and the Changing Sports Media Landscape (2019) considers the ways the network is reinventing itself as it enters its 5th decade.

He writes a weekly column for The Vindicator newspaper. The column, entitled Connected, examines the effects of social media on society, often with an emphasis on strategies for parenting children who are impacted both positively and negatively by their social media use. He has been identified as an expert source on communication, sports and social media for stories appearing in Men’s Health, Parade, Playboy, Psychology Today, Vancouver Magazine, CNET.com, newspapers including the Baltimore Sun, L.A. Times and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and on several radio and TV news programs. He currently serves as the communication and social media expert for WFMJ-TV (NBC). He delivered a TEDx Talk at the first-ever TEDxYoungstown on the use of social media and sports fandom to better society (see links to talks in Marketing section).

Dr. Earnheardt previously served as the executive director of the Ohio Communication Association and chair of the National Communication Association’s Mass Communication Division. He is a founding member of the International Association for Communication and Sport, serving as that group’s treasurer for several years. In 2009, he was recognized as one of the top 40 professionals under the age of 40 by the MVP 20/30 Club in northeast Ohio, and selected a top 5 “MVP.” He received YSU’s Watson Distinguished Chair award in 2016, the Smith-Murphy Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012. He was named a Distinguished Professor in 2010.

Bonnie Jean Feldkamp is an award-winning freelance writer publishing service journalism articles, personal essays, columns, and op-eds. Bonnie’s work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, Scary Mommy, Medium and more. Bonnie is the Communications Director for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. She is a board member of the Cincinnati Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, a member of Journalism and Women Symposium, and the National Federation of Press Women. Bonnie lives in Fort Thomas, KY with her husband and family.

Rod Hicks is the first “Journalist on Call” for the Society of Professional Journalists, responsible for addressing the issue of dwindling trust in the media by helping journalists understand why the public doesn’t trust them and what they can do to re-earn trust. He serves as somewhat of an ombudsman for the industry, spending time listening to the concerns citizens, local officials and community groups have about the news media and explaining the important role ethical journalism plays in a democracy.

Mr. Hicks spent the first half of 2019 conducting a media trust project with a group of residents in Casper, Wyoming. The project included discussions about their skepticism of news reporting, presentations on topics such as how to discern news from other types of information, and interactions with local and national journalists.

Before joining the staff of SPJ, Mr. Hicks served as an editor for The Associated Press in Philadelphia, helping manage news coverage in 10 northeastern states, and previously held editing positions at newspapers in New Jersey, Alabama, Michigan and Missouri. He managed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch news operation at night, making key decisions on how stories were shaped and presented and ensuring they adhered to high journalistic standards. He was working the night a gunman entered a suburban city council meeting and killed the mayor, two council members, a police officer and two other people. The coverage was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News. Mr. Hicks earned a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of Alabama and a master’s degree in newspaper management from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Hannibal Johnson is an attorney, author, professor and playwright who chairs the Education Committee for the 1921 Race Massacre Centennial Commission, and serves on the federal 400 Years of African-American History Commission, a body charged with planning, developing, and implementing activities appropriate to the 400th anniversary of the arrival, in 1619, of Africans in the English colonies at Point Comfort, Virginia. Mr. Johnson’s books include: Images of America: Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District; Black Wall Street–From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District; Up From the Ashes—A Story About Community; Acres of Aspiration—The All-Black Towns in Oklahoma; and more.  He also wrote and narrated a RSU-TV-produced documentary about Tulsa’s History Greenwood District, Black Wall Street Remembered, that debuted in February 2019.  Mr. Johnson served as an adjunct professor at The University of Tulsa College of Law (legal writing; legal ethics), Oklahoma State University (leadership and group dynamics; business law [MBA Program]), and the University of Oklahoma (ethics; cultural diversity; race & reason; His numerous awards recognize Mr. Johnson for national, regional, and local community service.

Read more: https://www.hannibalbjohnson.com

Randy Krehbiel is a journalist who covers state and federal government and politics for Tulsa World. His new book, Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre, took two decades to research and write, with a primary focus on how the event was presented then in Tulsa’s newspapers. Krehbiel’s amassing of thousands of documents began in 1999, a few years after the Tulsa Race Riot Commission was established, when he was assigned to put together an archive about the Tulsa Race Massacre as a resource for future coverage. A native of Hinton, OK, Mr. Krehbiel joined Tulsa World in 1979 as a sports writer. Email: randy.krehbiel@tulsaworld.com  Twitter: @rkrebiel

David Maraniss is a New York Times best-selling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians, and visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. His new book is A Good American Family. He has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including for one of his books, They Marched Into Sunlight. He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award. A Good American Family is his twelfth book. He and his wife Linda, a retired environmentalist, live in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, their home town.  Visit https://davidmaraniss.com

Tony Messenger won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his column series on debtors prisons in Missouri. Since 2015 he is the metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Mr. Messenger was awarded a Missouri Honor Medal, the highest award bestowed by the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. That same year he won a National Headliner for editorial writing. In 2015, Messenger was a Pulitzer finalist for his series of editorials on Ferguson, and won the  Sigma Delta Chi award for best editorials of the year, given by the Society of Professional Journalists. Born and raised in Colorado, he has worked in Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, South Dakota and Missouri at weeklies, dailies and magazines. Messenger lives in Wildwood, MO, with his wife and two children. He has four grown children and seven grandchildren.

Visit:  https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/tony-messenger/

Email: tmessenger@post-dispatch.com  Twitter: @tonymess

Lisa Smith Molinari writes a syndicated, military weekly column in Stars and Stripes, the worldwide newspaper for the US Armed Forces worldwide. Her new book, The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com, will be released May 1, 2020 by Elva Resa Publishing. Her work appears across the U.S., including The Washington Post and Military Spouse Magazine.  Her stories also appear in various editions of  Chicken Soup for The Soul. In 2018, Ms. Molinari won a First Place in NSNC’s Annual and she currently serves on NSNC’s board as Immediate Past President, and is a licensed attorney.   Visit:  https://themeatandpotatoesoflife.com

George F. Will‘s newspaper column has been syndicated by The Washington Post since 1974. Today it appears twice weekly in more than 440 newspapers. In 1976 he became a regular contributing editor of Newsweek magazine, for which he provided a bimonthly essay until 2011. In 1977 he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in his newspaper columns.
In June 2019, Mr. Will released his most recent work, The Conservative Sensibility. Altogether eight collections of Mr. Will’s Newsweek and Washington Post columns have been published, the most recent being One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation (2008). Mr. Will has also published three books on political theory, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (1983), The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election (1987) and Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and The Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992). In 1990, Mr. Will published Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball, which topped The New York Times bestseller list for two months. In 1998, Scribner published Bunts: Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose and Other Reflections on Baseball, a best-selling collection of new and previously published writings by Mr. Will on baseball. Mr. Will’s most recent book on baseball is A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (2014). In July 2000, Mr. Will was a member of Major League Baseball’s Blue Ribbon Panel, examining baseball economics.
In 1981, Mr. Will became a founding panel member on ABC television’s “This Week” and spent over three decades providing regular commentary. Then followed three years with Fox News where he appeared regularly on “Special Report” and “Fox News Sunday.” Mr. Will is now a regular contributor to MSNBC and NBC News.
Mr. Will was born in Champaign, Illinois, educated at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Oxford University and Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. and he later served as a trustee. He has taught political philosophy at Michigan State University, the University of Toronto and Harvard University. Mr. Will served as a staff member in the United States Senate from 1970 to 1972. From 1973 through 1976, he was the Washington editor of National Review magazine. Today, Mr. Will lives and works in the Washington, D.C., area.