Keynotes Include:

RAMON ESCOBAR
Senior Vice President Of Talent Recruitment And Development
CNN Worldwide

Thursday Keynote Speaker

Ramon Escobar is vice president of talent recruitment and development and the vice president of diversity and inclusion for CNN Worldwide. He is responsible for the recruitment of all on and off-air talent for CNN U.S., CNN International, CNN en Español and HLN. He also advances the internal development of all anchors, correspondents, contributor and producers. Escobar is based out of New York City and has held his position of vice president of talent recruitment and development since 2012. He was named the vice president of diversity and inclusion January 2017.

He came to CNN after several years spent at Telemundo, most recently as executive vice president of network news, overseeing the entire news division including all international news bureaus and the development of on-air talent. While at Telemundo his other roles included senior executive vice president of entertainment and senior vice president of news and creative services.

In addition to his executive work, Escobar has served as a mentor, teaching several classes as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. He is also a lifetime member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Escobar earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and is a graduate of the Institute of Political Journalism at Georgetown University.

MARC LACEY
Managing Editor
The New York Times

Friday Keynote Speaker

From 2016 to 2021, Mr. Lacey oversaw dozens of correspondents across the United States as the national editor of The Times. His tenure overlapped with the Trump presidency, the coronavirus pandemic and the racial justice protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. In 2019, he represented The Times in a live televised debate with CNN that featured a dozen Democratic presidential candidates.

Before that, he was a deputy foreign editor and weekend editor, and in 2016 he served on the newsroom’s 2020 Committee, which outlined The Times’s strategy for jumpstarting its move into the digital world.

Mr. Lacey, who was born in Queens, N.Y., and grew up in Mandeville, Jamaica, and upstate New York, joined The Times in 1999. As a correspondent, he was the bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. In that role, he led coverage of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, Cuba’s transition from Fidel Castro and Mexico’s drug war.

He has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes in the breaking news and international reporting categories. As a reporter at The Los Angeles Times, he contributed to the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. He got his start in journalism at The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper at Cornell, where he majored in biology.

DANA ROBERSON
Executive Producer
PBS NEWSHOUR/WEEKEND

Saturday Keynote Speaker

In addition to working with PBS, Dana is an adjunct at Craig Newmark Journalism School, and was previously a producer at New York Public Radio/WNYC for the daily national news program “The Takeaway.” A television news veteran, she worked at CBS News for 18 years on acclaimed programs such as “60 Minutes” and “CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt.”