Speakers

Jack Griffin

CEO, Empirical Media

Jack Griffin co-founded Empirical Media in 2011 and serves as its CEO. Jack is a veteran media industry executive who has overseen some of the most respected and well-known content companies and brands in the world. Jack serves as a Director of and Senior Advisor to the Newsweek Daily Beast Company, a unit of IAC Interactive. He is also on the Business Advisory Board of Propublica, the investigative news organization. He also serves as Senior Advisor in the Global Media Practice at AlixPartners LLP, the worldwide management-consulting firm.

Until February 2011, Jack was CEO of Time Inc. as well as the Chairman of MPA, the trade association for the consumer magazine industry, where he had been on the board for seven years. Jack has also served as Chairman of the American Advertising Federation, and as a Director of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Audit Bureau of Circulations. He was a Founding Director of Next Issue Media, a groundbreaking digital newsstand formed by a consortium of five leading publishers.

Before joining Time Inc. in 2010, Jack spent a dozen years at Meredith Corporation. As President of its National Media Group since 2004, Jack led the successful transformation of Meredith into a digitally enabled, diversified media and marketing company. From its print roots, Meredith became a major provider of marketing services through Meredith Integrated Marketing, of which Jack was the founding General Manager in 1996.

In between his two stints at Meredith, Jack worked at the Parade Division of Advance Publications (1999-2003), where he was President and Publisher of Parade Magazine. Prior to that, at Meredith, he was Vice President of Marketing for the Meredith Television Broadcasting Group. Jack started his career as a reporter and editor for a family owned trade newspaper publisher. He also spent five years at the Magazine Group of The New York Times Company before joining Meredith in 1994.

Jack graduated from the Yale School of Management and Boston College. He is currently a Director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights.

Bruce Bergwall

Managing Director, Atwood Capital Partners

With over 25 years of "hands-on" related operating experience and technical know-how with data services, online and traditional business-to-business media, online training and educational publishing companies, Bruce Bergwall brings a strong operating, sales, corporate and business development perspective to his focus on sourcing and executing transactions broadly across the industries that Atwood targets.

Most recently, Bruce held a senior position at Panopto, a SaaS-based video/lecture capture company leading its sales and market development efforts to large corporations and educational institutions. Previously, he had served as Vice President of Business Development with CompareNetworks, a data-based, lead generation solution for the laboratory, dental, ophthalmology and life science markets. Bruce also served as Vice President of Business Development at GlobalSpec, an engineering and manufacturing search engine that provides online advertising sources (lead generation, part search, webinars, display) to the manufacturing and engineering markets. Prior to that, Bruce held Enterprise Sales and Business Development positions at Thomson Learning, a provider of curriculum-based online learning solutions to the Career, Healthcare and Professional community respectively. Collectively, he has spearheaded approximately 30 acquisition and strategic partnership opportunities for media, search and educational firms cumulatively.

Furthermore, Bruce financed and co-founded a television production firm that rode the wave of transition from traditional celluloid-based media to video in education, and was a pioneer in the transformation of video-based instructional programs from the traditional analog to digital format. His company produced over 600 television programs on topics for the career and professional education and training markets, and was subsequently sold to the Thomson Corp in 1998.

Drawing on his background, Bruce brings a wealth of know-how and expertise in dealmaking, strategic planning, operations and a deep understanding of the capital, technology and personnel needs for growing and developing data-oriented, eMedia and eLearning businesses.

Bruce is a frequent speaker on the use and application of technology in education, training and B2B media and is a member of the Business Marketing Association (BMA).

Bruce holds a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and Certificate in TV production from the New School (NY).

Henry Blodget

CEO & Editor-in-Chief, The Business Insider

Henry Blodget is the CEO and Editor of The Business Insider, an online business media company based in New York. Henry is also a host of Yahoo TechTicker, an online finance show watched by more than 1 million people a month, and a contributor to Bloomberg TV. He frequently contributes to MSNBC, NPR, The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and other organizations.

Gordon Crovitz

Co-founder, Journalism Online

Gordon Crovitz is co-founder of Journalism Online, whose Press+ e-ecommerce platform enables publishers to charge for access to their web sites and to their mobile, tablet and e-reader editions, including "all digital access" subscriptions. He is a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and executive vice president of Dow Jones, where he was responsible for the Consumer Media Group, including for over a decade WSJ.com. He was also responsible for the company's enterprise, B-to-B products and services and was a founder of Factiva. He stepped down from those positions in December 2007, when News Corp. completed its acquisition of Dow Jones. He writes a weekly column in The Wall Street Journal, titled "Information Age."
He is a director and advisor to several companies, including technology-based media companies. He is on the boards of ProQuest, Business Insider, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Blurb. He is on the board of advisors of early-stage companies including YouNoodle, Peer39, SkyGrid, Hashed, Halogen Guides, ExpertCEO and Clickability.

Crovitz graduated from the Unversity of Chicago and has law degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar, and Yale Law School.

Kathy Greenler Sexton

VP and General Manager, Content Division, SIIA

Kathy serves as the VP and General Manager of the SIIA Content Division, developing and delivering the many programs and initiatives of the Division.

Kathy is a dynamic, strategic and hands-on executive with deep experience serving Information, Internet and Media companies. After working in broadcast television and international marketing roles, she was a founding member, lead marketer and publisher for the web-based search engine pioneer AltaVista. She has also general-managed or marketed industry-leading online companies focused on news, small business information and general research including: ZoomInfo.com, BLR, Individual.com, Office.com and HighBeam Research. She has a BA in communications from Boston College.

Jonathan Knee

Senior Managing Director, Evercore

Jonathan Knee is a Senior Managing Director at Evercore Partners and an Adjunct Professor and Director of the Media Program at Columbia Business School where he teaches Media Mergers and Acquisitions and Strategic Management of Media. He also co-teaches a Business Journalism seminar at the Columbia Journalism School with James Stewart. Before joining Evercore in 2003, Knee was a Managing Director and Co-head of Morgan Stanley’s Media Group and was previously Publishing Sector Head in the Communications, Media and Entertainment Group at Goldman Sachs. Prior to becoming an investment banker, he was Director of International Affairs at United Airlines and served as Adjunct Professor of Law at Northwestern University. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic. He is also the author of The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade that Transformed Wall Street (Oxford: 2006) and co-author of The Curse of The Mogul: What’s Wrong With the World’s Leading Media Companies? (Portfolio: 2009).

James Kollegger

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Genesys Partners, Inc.

Jim Kollegger is CEO of Genesys Partners, Inc. a venture capital/investment
banking/development firm that specializes in early stage information
technology ventures. He is one of the pioneers of the digital information
industry and an industry leader who helped build the Information Industry
Assn., who named him their first "Entrepreneur of the Year" in 1987.

Genesys Partners follows a jewel-in-the-rough strategy, with a strong
hands-on approach to developing its portfolio companies. Genesys was
financial and strategic advisor to Wave Systems (NASDAQ: WAVX), Folio Corp.,
the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX); Solbright Digital Solutions; Ingram
Entertainment, e-workflow provider Knovel, analytics venture Enkata, and
legal videobank pioneer Courtroom Connect.
He was founder and CEO of EIC/Intelligence, one of the industry's first
database publishers, sold to Reed Elsevier in 1988. EIC tracked new
technologies from laboratory to marketplace for large corporate, government
and academic clients. Databases included artificial intelligence,
biotechnology, CAD/CAM, environment, energy, robotics, and
telecommunications.

He is co-founder of the annual Information Industry Summit, now in its 11th
year, and anchors the popular CEO Outlook keynote panels, featuring industry
luminaries such as Ken Auletta, Esther Dyson, Tom Glocer, Ted Leonsis, and
Martin Sorrell.

Randy Marcinko

Chief Executive Officer, Marcinko Enterprises, Inc. (MEI)

Randall Marcinko is the CEO of MEI (fka Marcinko Enterprises, Inc.), a California-based information consultancy that he founded in 1996. MEI assists publishers with the monetization of their digital assets, providing professional services in content licensing, sales and distribution. Skilled negotiators design and establish content licensing strategies and execute deals on behalf of primary and secondary publishers with aggregators, syndicators and redistributors within the information industry. In 2002 and 2003, Marcinko joined Nstein Technologies as its President and COO. Nstein focused on innovative content management software solutions based on linguistic artificial intelligence. In 2008 and 2009, Marcinko joined Groxis, Inc. as its CEO. Groxis focused on solutions for the dynamic clustering of search results and information discovery. Randy is a participant in various industry organizations. He is on the Board of Directors of the SIIA, was on the ASIDIC board and is a member of the SLA. He is a frequent speaker at information industry conferences and events.

Ed Reiner

Director of Business Development, Quintiles

Larry Schwartz

President, Newstex, LLC

Larry Schwartz is a co-founder of Newstex and President of the company. Larry has guided numerous entertainment and new media ventures, from start-up through growth, development and maturity, including Bolenka Games Online (Trivial Pursuit Online), GFI Group (Nasdaq:GFIG - financial), Wizard World (publishing), Patron Technology (technology) and Tickets.com (Purchased by MLB.com). Larry attended Bates College and the Yale University Graduate School of Drama. He serves on the Content Board of Directors for the Software Information Industry Association, and is a frequent speaker on content, product development, start-ups and turnarounds. When he's not adding value to content, Larry is a show manger for hunter/jumper horse shows, is on the Board of Directors for the Connecticut Horse Show Association and maintains several horse web sites and blogs (www.chsaonline.com, www.srostables.com). Larry, a confirmed gadget geek, also spends time on Broadway with his theatrical agent wife and two daughters.

Charlie Stryker

Chairman & CEO, Venture Development Center

Ken Wasch

President, SIIA

Ken Wasch's involvement in SIIA is based on both personal and professional interests. His long-standing interest in computers and software, coupled with the industry's need for a central trade association, led him to establish the Software Publishers Association (SPA) in 1984 with an initial group of 25 software firms. Wasch has led the association from its infancy to its merger with the Information Industry Association in January 1999, resulting in the formation of SIIA.