Jane Amari has been editor and publisher of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson since November 1999. Before moving to Arizona, she was executive editor of The News Journal, in Wilmington, Del. She has held management positions with Times Mirror and Knight Ridder publications, as well as with the St. Petersburg Times, the Daily News in Los Angeles and the Rockford Register Star in Illinois. At The Kansas City Star, she served as managing editor and then senior vice president. She has taught journalism at UCLA, the University of Kansas and other colleges.

Howard Bray served as the director of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland from its inception in 1987 until his retirement in 1999. The Knight Center provides nationally-competitive fellowships to experienced journalists for intensive courses in such specialized subjects as science, medicine, finance, demographics and economics. Mr. Bray was executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Washington from 1973 to 1987. He is the author of The Pillars of The Post: The Making of a News Empire in Washington. The book, published in 1980, examined how Kay Graham shaped the rise of The Washington Post to national and international prominence.

Rob Dean has been managing editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican since 1992. Under his leadership, the newspaper has won numerous awards for writing, editing and design. In 2000, the New Mexican was named the state’s best daily newspaper by the Associated Press Managing Editors. Mr. Dean has been a reporter and editor at five other Western newspapers, including The News Tribune in Tacoma and the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in his native Montana.

Gloria Flora is founder and director of a Helena-based nonprofit group called Sustainable Obtainable Solutions. She has worked on the razor edge of change in the rural West for nearly 30 years. After college, she joined the U.S. Forest Service to live and work in Western places she loves. In the early 1980s, she persuaded timber managers on the Kootenai National Forest in Montana to curve the boundaries of logging clearcuts to make the land look more like meadows. More recently, she served as forest supervisor for the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana and the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada and eastern California. She has received The Wilderness Society’s Murie Award for courageous stewardship of public lands and the Natural Resources Council of America’s Environmental Quality Award for exemplary resource decision-making.

Jim Godbold has been executive editor of The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore., since August 1999. He has worked at the newspaper for more than 18 years, with prior assignments as assistant city editor, features editor, assistant managing editor and managing editor. He says his current responsibilities include supervising about 100 newsroom employees, directing the overall evolution of the print and electronic news product, responding to telephone calls from readers “who want to know why we did or didn’t do something” and going to meetings. Jim moved to The Register-Guard in 1983 from Idaho, where he was city editor of the Lewiston Morning Tribune. Before that, he spent six years as a reporter and editor at The Herald Journal in Logan, Utah. While serving in the U.S. Air Force, he wrote and edited military publications. His first newspaper job was as a photographer at age 20 for the Conroe Daily Courier in Texas.

Peggy Kuhr is Knight professor of journalism at the University of Kansas. Until recently, she was managing editor for content at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane. Under her direction, that paper’s newsroom has won five consecutive regional awards for general excellence, as well as national recognition for its coverage of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the costs of salmon recovery. Ms Kuhr has been a member of the board of directors of the Associated Press Managing Editors and has worked for The Hartford Courant and the Great Falls Tribune.

Patricia Nelson Limerick is a Western American historian with particular interests in ethnic and environmental history. She directs the interdisciplinary Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her well-known book, The Legacy of Conquest, has helped to raise consciousness about earlier exploitation of natural resources and people. She teaches several courses on the American West. In 1995, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She has written columns and op-ed pieces for The New York Times, USA Today, The Denver Post, Boulder’s Daily Camera, the Rocky Mountain News and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Gerado López has been the editor of La Opinión, a 120,000-circulation daily newspaper based in Los Angeles, since September 1995. La Opinión is the oldest and largest Spanish-language daily in the U.S. Mr. López emigrated in 1969 from his native Chihuahua, Mexico, and started working for the paper in 1977. He has covered national politics, social justice and other issues and events relevant to the Latino communities of southern California. For six years, he covered congressional debates that led to the Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986. He also has served as La Opinión’s metro editor, managing editor and associate editor. As a leader of the InterAmerican Press Association, he helped compose the Ten Principles of Freedom of Speech for the Americas.

Betsy Marston became the editor of High Country News in 1983. She recently passed on the reins in order to concentrate on development of the non-profit organization’s new-media products and services. The biweekly paper is published in Paonia, Colorado, a fruit-growing and coal-mining town on the western slope of the Rockies. High Country News covers trends and issues that affect the environment of the West. Subscribers live all over the United States and elsewhere. About 1,000 teachers use the newspaper in their classrooms. Ms. Marston and her husband Ed moved to Paonia from New York City in 1975, intending to take a year off. Instead, they began a weekly, ran it for six years, then began a regional biweekly. That paper was blended into High Country News in 1983. Under the direction of the Marstons, the paper’s ahead-of-the-curve coverage has become essential reading for many people who care about the West–and a source of story ideas for journalists in many other newsrooms.

Dan Neal has been the editor of the Casper Star-Tribune since May 2000. He joined the paper in 1981 as a reporter and later became city editor, state editor and assistant managing editor. Mr. Neal initiated the newspaper’s coverage of the Wyoming Fish and Game Commission in 1985. Later he was the lead reporter in its coverage of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park. In 1996, he launched and edited the paper’s “Open Spaces” section, devoted to outdoor recreation, wildlife and the environment. The newspaper has a long-standing commitment to covering natural-resource and conservation issues in Wyoming, where nearly half the land is in federal ownership, administered largely by the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service.

James Risser is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and former director of the Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. He worked 20 years for The Des Moines Register. He was the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief from 1976 to 1985. In 1976, he won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for stories exposing corruption in the U.S. grain-exporting industry. That coverage also won the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award and the Associated Press Managing Editors Award for Public Service. In 1979, he won a second Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for articles showing the destructive impact of modern American agriculture on the environment. Subsequently, Mr. Risser was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board for 10 years. He now serves on the Knight Foundation’s journalism advisory committee.

Rick Rodriguez has been executive editor of The Sacramento Bee since June 1998. The Bee is the second largest of 11 daily newspapers published by the McClatchy Company. Prior to his current assignment, Mr. Rodriguez was the paper’s managing editor for five years. Before that, he was an assistant managing editor and a columnist. He joined the paper in 1982 as a capitol-bureau reporter. He began his career as an intern at his hometown newspaper, The Californian in Salinas, to which he returned after graduating from Stanford University in 1976. Before moving to Sacramento, he was a reporter for The Fresno Bee. Rick co-founded the Sacramento chapter of the California Chicano News Media Association. He served on Pulitzer Prize juries in 1994, 1995 and 1999 and has been a judge for the Selden Ring Award for investigative journalism and Scripps-Howard’s Ernie Pyle Award. He has been a member of the board of directors of the American Society of Newspaper Editors since 1997.

Mark Trahant recently became the editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Previously, he had been chief executive of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education since January 2001. He is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe of Idaho. Before taking the helm at the Maynard Institute, he wrote a twice-weekly column at The Seattle Times on subjects ranging from the culture of the West to journalism and society. He was publisher of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, executive news editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, a reporter at The Arizona Republic in Phoenix and the editor and publisher of the Navajo Daily Times. His investigations of federal Indian policy received national awards. In 1989, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His other honors include the Heywood Brun Award, the Paul Tobenkin Award and the Elias Boudinot Award for Lifetime Contributions to Journalism. Mr. Trahant is a founder, former president and active member of the Native American Journalists Association.

Stacy Waters is executive producer for television at ACFnewsource in Tiburon, Calif. ACFnewsource provides news-story ideas and content for commercial television stations. Ms. Waters manages a team of producers who identify and research issue-oriented stories on the environment, science, technology, religion, education and democracy. For nine years, she produced news programs and special shows at KRON-TV, the NBC affiliate in San Francisco. Her documentary on the Loma Prieta earthquake won three Northern California Emmys and an award from the American Film Institute. In 1994, she produced and co-wrote “The New Facts of Life,” a program that delivered sensitive information about AIDS to teenagers, one of the fastest-growing at-risk groups. The show won an Iris Award from the National Association of Television Production Executives and the Service to Children’s Television Award from the National Association of Broadcasters. Her special show “Alaskan Adventure” used local people as narrating “guides” for a journey from the Kenai fjords to Mt. McKinley. It won a Northern California Emmy in 1998.