Margaret “Peggy” Engel directs the Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation and was the managing editor of the Newseum. She was a reporter for the Washington Post, Des Moines Register and Lorain Journal and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She serves on the advisory board of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and chairs the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards board.
Harry Jaffe has been writing columns and reporting on crime, politics, business and sports in the Washington region for 34 years. He began covering local matters with Regardie’s magazine in 1986. From 1990 to 2016 he was National Editor and feature writer for Washingtonian magazine. Jaffe co-authored Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, DC, revised in 2014, with journalist Tom Sherwood. His work has also appeared locally in the Washington Post, DC Examiner and nbcwashington.com.
Denise Rolark-Barnes took over as publisher of The Washington Informer in 1994 and has built the publication into a thriving, multi-media community news organization. She has also served as the director of the Washington Informer Charities and is the executive producer of WIN-TV, a weekly digital news broadcast program aired on Facebook and YouTube.
Terence Samuel is the managing editor for news at NPR. He reported for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and US News & World Report, where he was chief congressional correspondent. He was a director of editorial programming for AOL Black Voices before joining the Washington Post Company to help launch TheRoot.com in 2007. https://nationalpress.org/judge/terence-samuel/
Brian Kelly is Editorial Director and Executive Vice President of U.S. News & World Report, a publisher of news and consumer information products. Kelly is a member of the executive committee with primary responsibility for all the company’s content, which includes the website usnews.com, print and e-book guides on education and health care, and a conference-and-events business. He was formerly a senior editor at The Washington Post and the editor of Regardie’s Magazine. He began his career as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a vice president of the Economic Club of Washington and a board member of The Children’s Inn of The National Institutes of Health.
George Derek Musgrove is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore College where he teaches courses in Post-WWII US History with an emphasis on African American politics. He is the author of Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America (U. of Georgia, 2012) and co-author, with Chris Myers Asch, of Chocolate City, A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital(UNC, 2017). He is currently working on a web-based map of the black power movement in Washington, D.C. and beginning a book project tentatively titled “We must take to the streets again”: The Black Power Resurgence, 1982-97. Professor Musgrove earned his Ph.D. from New York University in 2005. He lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, D.C.
Cheryl W. Thompson is an award-winning investigative correspondent for NPR. Prior to joining NPR in January 2019, she spent 22 years at the Washington Post, where she wrote extensively about law enforcement, political corruption and guns, and was a White House correspondent during Barack Obama’s first term. She was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2002. An investigative journalism professor at George Washington University, Thompson became the first African American president of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) in 2018. She was re-elected in 2019.