The WordCamp for Publishers schedule features a range of speakers who work with journalists and publications on all aspects of digital publishing.
We’re proud to announce the following speakers who will be presenting, leading discussions, and hosting workshops. Keep an eye on this list as we will be updating with more speakers in the coming weeks.
Austin Smith
Austin is the CEO and co-founder of Alley Interactive as well as an experienced leader of digital media organizations and an expert on news products and technology. From September through April 2018, Austin split his time between Alley and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, where he was an Entrepreneur in Residence, researching new revenue models for local news.
Barb Palser
Barb Palser is on Google’s Global Product Partnerships team, focusing on improving web performance on large CMS platforms including WordPress.
Barb developed her career in local online news, working in editorial, product and partnership roles for media companies such as McGraw-Hill Broadcasting and Nexstar Broadcasting, as well as local media CMS. She was news editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and a columnist for American Journalism Review and Search Engine Land.
In 2015 Barb co-founded Relay Media, Inc., a startup focused on helping news publishers adopt and optimize AMP.
Boone Gorges
Boone Gorges is a Core Committer for WordPress and a Lead Developer for BuddyPress. His consulting firm, Hard G, focuses on WP and BP development for universities and non-profits. A former academic, Boone has a special interest in the dynamics of free software communities, and the ethical implications of FOSS and the processes by which it’s created and maintained. He has lived in Chicago for the last three years but has not yet reconciled himself to the fact.
Brian Boyer
Brian Boyer is the VP of Product and People at Spirited Media, home of The Incline, Billy Penn and Denverite. Previously, he was the Visuals Editor at NPR, and founded the News Applications team at Chicago Tribune. Before his career in news, Brian led software design and development teams.
Caroline Porter
Caroline Porter is a journalist and media strategist. Her current projects include researching business models for news as a consultant for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and developing new publishing platforms through the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop. She served as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal in the Chicago and Los Angeles bureaus.
Prior to her time at the WSJ, Caroline worked as an editor for three communities outside Chicago at Patch. She also began producing animation videos on news literacy, which she continues to do today, and served as an adjunct lecturer at the Medill School at Northwestern University. As a Fulbright Scholar, Caroline earned her master’s degree in the UK and researched the impact of digital media on public service journalism.
Chris Van Patten
Chris Van Patten is the founder and creative director of Tomodomo, which helps magazines (and other content publishers) build powerful subscription websites that editors and readers love. He has spoken at WordPress events in Barcelona, Boston, Houston, Toronto, and many other cities around the world. Chris writes at tomodomo.co and chrisvanpatten.com, and tweets as @ChrisVanPatten.
David Parsons
I currently work at USA Today Sports as a Senior Software Engineer. You might also know me as the lead organizer of WordCamp NYC 2017.
My recent passion has been speaking at local meetups and conferences. I have taken a lot away from the community and feels good to give back!
Eric Ulken
A veteran digital leader in local media, Eric works as a consultant and trainer helping to enable insights, tools and business models that support quality journalism. Until December 2017 he was managing editor for digital operations at the Philadelphia Media Network — publisher of The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com — where he oversaw visual journalism, editorial tools and training. He joined the company in 2014 as executive director of digital strategy, responsible for product and audience development, before moving into a newly unified newsroom in 2016 to oversee digital editorial efforts. Eric previously led digital news and product development at The Seattle Times and held a number of digital roles at the Los Angeles Times, where he co-founded the paper’s award-winning Data Desk. He has taught journalism at the University of Southern California and the University of British Columbia and was a 2013 fellow in the Sulzberger Leadership Program at Columbia University.
Ernie Hsiung
Ernie is a front-end developer, writer, speaker, designer, community organizer and entrepreneur with an interest in how technology interacts with communities.
Harry Backlund
Harry Backlund is a Co-Founder and the Director of Operations at City Bureau, a civic journalism nonprofit based on the South Side of Chicago working to build more equitable and locally responsive media practices. City Bureau trains emerging journalists in community-based reporting practices, hosts a free weekly public workshop series, and trains and pays Chicagoans to cover public meetings in their neighborhoods. Prior to City Bureau, Harry was Director of Operations at the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based journalism production company focused on police accountability, and the Publisher of the South Side Weekly, a community newspaper in Chicago.
Jake Goldman
Jake is the President & Founder of 10up, a digital agency that finely crafts websites and tools for content creators, leveraging open platforms like WordPress. Whether you’re a political junky glued to FiveThirtyEight, a car enthusiast reading MotorTrend, a Windows user who keeps up with Microsoft’s newsroom, an Apple fan reading 9to5mac daily, or if you just use WordPress itself, you’ve experienced a sample of 10up’s work. Jake grew 10up from a 1 man show (himself!) to over 140 employees with dozens of brand name clients in 7 years.
Jake started focusing on WordPress in 2006, releasing free plug-ins, building websites with it, and contributing core code. He has been a writer and expert reviewer for Smashing Magazine, taught WordPress engineering at Boston University, and has spoken at conferences, universities, and programs around the country. He helped organize the first WordCamp Boston in 2010, founded Rhode Island’s WordPress meet up, and rebooted the Sacramento meet up as it continues to this day. He is a core contributor to WordPress, and maintains some highly rated plug-ins with over 500,000 active installations.
Jeannette Washington
Jeannette is an educator with nearly a decade of experience working with students that exhibit exceptionalities. Her expertise in the field of dyslexia has been solicited for articles in The Washington Post, GraduateSchool.org, and AccreditedSchoolsOnline.com to name a few. She is an active member of the International Dyslexia Association and has spoken at the Mississippi Dyslexia Symposium and the International Literacy Association Conference in Maryland. Currently, Jeannette works with Microsoft Philanthropies teaching high school students how to code.
Jim Birch
Jim Birch is a Senior Digital Engineer who specializes in planning and developing digital projects for some of the world’s best clients. He is a seasoned writer and technology speaker, the organizer of the Drupal Chicago Meetup Group, and along with a group of great and talented individuals, helps organize the Midwest Drupal Camp, MidCamp.
Jodie Riccelli
A graduate of Millersville University, Jodie brings 15 years of sales and marketing experience to WebDevStudios. Entrepreneurs in the real estate, music, technology and education industries have recognized her marketing expertise and ability to restructure and systemize businesses. A self-proclaimed foodie and music aficionado, she now lends her creativity to create unique web strategies and solutions for clients.
John Eckman
After a first career as an academic, John‘s been working in professional services agencies for the last ~20 years, and as the CEO at 10up for the last 4+.
He’s been focused on open source (primarily WordPress and Drupal) since 2006, as one of the organizers of WordCamp Boston and a frequent speaker at WordCamps (US, Ann Arbor, Toronto, New York, Rhode Island, Maine, and Boston) and DrupalCamps (Montréal, Western Mass, Connecticut, Boston). He’s also presented at many conferences outside of the WordPress community: Gilbane, Confab Higher Ed, CMS Expo, etc.
He received a BA from Boston University, an MA & PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an MIS from Northeastern University.
He lives in Salem MA with his wife and dogs.
Joshua Wold
As a designer turned Product Owner, I’ve worked on a range of WordPress website projects over the years. Currently I’m enjoying the opportunity to help define requirements for enterprise level WordPress site. This gives me the opportunity to have regular interaction with Content Producers, as well as amazing engineering teams. I apply my design background to many of the tickets I’m working on, sketching wireframes and creating prototypes to help bring the tickets to life for our clients.
Using sketches is something that I encourage everyone to do. Whether it’s team leads, our clients, developers, or designers. If you’re trying to explain a technical problem, odds are a quick sketch will help you. Long live the whiteboard; or in the case of remote teams, the digital whiteboard.
Kay Lima
Kay is a Support & Community Lead at INN who oversees the support, documentation and training for Largo and the plugins INN maintains, provides Google Analytics, AdWords, and SEO consulting, some front-end development and also manages website projects.
Keanan Koppenhaver
Keanan Koppenhaver is the CTO of Alpha Particle, a digital agency whose mission is to build out digital teams and shape digital strategy. He is passionate about mentoring other developers and helping publishers and development teams work together more smoothly. He believes that more technology isn’t always the answer, but when it is, it’s important to get it right.
Leo Postovoit
Leo Postovoit is a WordPress consultant at XWP and works as the Product Owner on the AMP for WordPress project. An open source advocate and designer-developer, he is also an organizer for the Long Beach WordPress Meetup and local WordCamps as well as a contributor to WordPress Core’s Accessibility team. In the 11 years since Leo started using WordPress, his work has appeared in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle, the Denver Post, and Lowrider Magazine. Beyond journalism, he’s worked with web development and design in the marketing, education and the film industries.
Libby Barker
Libby is Senior Project Manager at Human Made and a Forte Fellow at the George Washington University School of Business. She is a trained Scrum Product Owner and speaking credits include WordCamp LA and the inaugural WordCamp Gran Canaria. She lives in Vermont with her husband where they enjoy the hiking and local food culture.
Mike Auteri
I’ve been working with WordPress for about a decade, and professionally in the WordPress VIP environment for 6 years. I’ve contributed a few lines of code to WordPress core and maintain a couple plugins as well. I am also one of the co-organizers for the WordPress North NJ Meetup and on the planning team for the first WordCamp Montclair.
In my current position at Penske Media Corporation (Variety.com, WWD.com, Rollingstone.com, Deadline.com, Indiewire.com et al), I am the lead engineer for the subscriptions team. Most of our work is handling our subscriber base and providing them with access to paywalled content on our WordPress sites as well as access to other non-WordPress products.
Prior to PMC, I worked at Interactive One as their lead developer. Both PMC and Interactive One are on WordPress VIP.
Mike Selander
Nick Johnson
At the age of 8 I made my first $100 selling Night Crawlers (fishing worms). Business and commerce development is a way of life for me. I wrote my first program in BASIC on a Commodore 64 when I was 10. I am the brainchild of Pigeon Paywall, a SaaS system that helps content creators grow their business.
My wife is the love of my life, and makes sure I remember to eat. My three boys remind me what’s important in life. I enjoy running and gardening to clear the cobwebs. Faith, family, and business are the three driving forces in my life.
Pattie Reaves
Pattie Reaves is a senior UX developer at Alley Interactive. She has more than 10 years of experience building websites for publishers and non-profits on WordPress. Prior to Alley, she worked as a newspaper editor, where she managed a volunteer blog network, ran social media accounts, and analyzed audience trends.
Paul Schreiber
Paul Schreiber is the lead developer for FiveThirtyEight and The Undefeated at ESPN. Prior to that, he spent eight years as an Mac OS X engineer at Apple, served as the founding CTO at TurboVote, codeveloped the 2008 Obama campaign’s voter registration tool.. Paul can be found baking cakes, hosting house concerts, playing hockey and doing crossword puzzles in ink.
Russell Heimlich
Russell Heimlich has been wrangling the interwebz since the dawn of the century. By day he is the lead developer at Spirited Media, a local news operation for the next generation. By night he is a small human co-wrangler of two daughters with the help from his partner in crime, Kristina. True to his name, he is capable of life-saving choking maneuvers for the greater human good. Milkshakes make him smile.
Ryan Kienstra
Ryan is a WordPress Engineer at XWP, focusing on large plugins and enterprise sites. His team at XWP has been working with Google to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AMP on WordPress. His projects have also included re-platforming News Corp Australia’s online properties to WordPress, then the largest WordPress migration in history. Ryan also has 7 of his own plugins on WordPress.org.
Sally Lehrman
Lehrman is an award-winning reporter on medicine, biotechnology and science policy. Her honors include a 2002 Peabody Award, Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Programming, and Columbia/Du Pont Silver Baton (The DNA Files); the SPJ Wells Key (the Society of Professional Journalists’ highest honor); various other reporting and writing awards; and the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. Byline credits include Scientific American, Nature, Health, TheAtlantic.com, Natural Medicine, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Salon.com, and The DNA Files, distributed by NPR.
She is author of “News in a New America,” a fresh take on developing an inclusive U.S. news media, and chapters for textbooks on covering the sciences. Currently she is co-editing Reporting Inequality: Tools and methods for covering race and ethnicity, with Venise Wagner of San Francisco State University, and working on Skin Deep: The Search for Race in Our Genes, about the quest to address health disparities, for Oxford University Press.
She has long been involved in evangelizing journalism values, ethics and diversity as a local and national leader in the Society of Professional Journalists and the SDX Foundation, and with other organizations such as the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and the Center for Science and Justice at UC Santa Cruz.
Sarah Schmalbach
Sarah Schmalbach is a news product manager, Philadelphia native and former journalist who most recently co-led the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab in New York. The Guardian Lab was a small multidisciplinary team that experimented with mobile-first storytelling formats for two years and shared what it learned with the industry.
At the Institute, she’ll explore ideas for what the scope and outcomes might be for a similar innovation team here in Philadelphia, with a distinctly local news focus. Her research will ensure that the project’s goals align directly with the primary goal of the Institute, which is to develop and support sustainable business models for essential local journalism
Shayda Torabi
Shayda Torabi is one of the most influential Women in WordPress. She’s currently the Director of Marketing for WordPress agency, WebDevStudios. Additionally she runs a popular travel and lifestyle brand called “With Shayda”. Shayda has spoken at over a dozen WordPress related events, and has been to over 30+ WordCamps globally. When she’s not busy traveling the world, you can find her in her hometown of Austin, Texas pursuing her passions for fitness and self care.
Sherry Skalko
Sherry Skalko is the director of the Amplify News Project, a pilot program designed to raise the visibility of work produced by Institute for Nonprofit News members in the Midwest.
A veteran digital news leader, Skalko has a record of creating and leveraging quality journalism to drive audience growth for news outlets, nonprofit organizations and niche publications. She specializes in using technology and data to shape editorial content, audience development and monetization.
Her career spans more than 25 years and across several platforms at national organizations, such as ESPN.com, AOL’s Patch and Tribune Interactive, as well as at local and regional organizations, such as The Chicago Reporter and South Florida SunSentinel. Skalko also worked for the Online News Association, the world’s largest nonprofit membership organization for digital journalists.
A native of Cranston, R.I., she graduated with a degree in journalism from Boston University and began her career at her hometown newspaper, The Providence (R.I.) Journal. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter.
Sina Bahram
Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include technology startups, research labs, Fortune-1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. In 2012, Sina was recognized as a White House Champion of Change by President Barack Obama for his work enabling users with disabilities to succeed in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. In 2017, Sina served as the invited co-chair of the 2017 Museums and the Web conference.
Susan Price
Susan is a full-time freelance WordPress Theme designer and developer.
She specializes in custom themes and using new media with WordPress to entertain, educate, and inspire. She is a strong open-source advocate and gets a thrill out of novel approaches, fast loading sites, exploring new cities, photography, and perfecting her killer eggplant parmigiana.
Tyson Bird
Tyson Bird is a projects designer with GateHouse Media’s innovation team, de//space, based in Austin, TX. GateHouse is one of the largest publishers of locally-based media in the U.S., with more than 550 news websites and 150 daily newspapers. The innovation team helps decide, design and deploy new verticals and platforms for digital storytelling.
Vadim Supitskiy
I’m a VP, Engineering at Forbes Media, LLC. I am passionate about Engineering, Traveling, Good Food and Watches.