Margaret M. Sullivan, editor of The Buffalo News, is a proponent of investigative reporting and journalistic service to the community.

Rising through the ranks, Margaret Sullivan was named editor of The News in 1999, the first woman to hold that position in the newspaper’s 131-year history. Previously, she was the paper's first female managing editor.

In 2001, Sullivan was given the additional title of vice president, another first for a woman at The News.

Paul C. Tash is the chairman and CEO of the Tampa Bay Times and the Times Publishing Company, St. Petersburg, Fla.

A native of South Bend, Indiana, Tash graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University in 1976. He received a Marshall Scholarship and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of laws degree from Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1978.

Steven Hahn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively about the American South, African-American history and the international history of slavery, emancipation and race. In 2004, he won the Pulitzer Prize for history for A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.

Robert Blau, a New York City native, has carved an eclectic path up the journalistic ranks. He wrote about music, reviewed movies and covered the police beat, before turning his attention to investigative reporting and editing. Following a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1997, he began overseeing all major enterprise at the Chicago Tribune, including its years-long probe of the failures of the criminal justice system in Illinois, which yielded numerous reforms and was emulated by news organizations across the country.

Ann Marie Lipinski was appointed curator at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in the summer of 2011. She has was senior vice president for civic engagement at The University of Chicago from 2008 to 2011. Lipinski was senior vice president and editor at the Chicago Tribune from February 2001 to July 2008. Prior to that, she served as its vice president and executive editor.

A creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his best-selling first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

The Pulitzer Board described the work as “a dazzling, richly layered novel about an overweight, nerdy Dominican-American teenager who comes of age in a multi-generational immigrant family, devouring comic books, spinning fantasies and searching for love.”

Eugene Robinson is a columnist and associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1980. His twice-weekly column on the paper’s op-ed page debuted in February 2005 and is now syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group to 262 newspapers.

In 2009, Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his columns about the 2008 presidential campaign and the election of President Barack Obama.