Astrid Ascar  

IAB SA Head of Education & Transformation, South Africa

Astrid Ascar has 25 years’ experience working in the media industry across radio, television, print and digital platforms. She began her career as a journalist, working as a reporter, producer and presenter in current affairs, news and entertainment. In 1999 Astrid made the transition to management, and has over the years launched two TV channels, as well as radio and digital content businesses for some of South Africa’s leading media groups.

She has been running her own media, marketing and content consultancy for the past seven years, and regularly gives talks and facilitates workshops, conferences and training sessions for her clients – these range from digital media integration strategy sessions to media skills.

Astrid is particularly passionate about training and education, and volunteers as the Head of Education for the IAB SA (Interactive Advertising Bureau SA), the organisation that represents the digital marketing, advertising and media industry in South Africa.

Peder Bonnier  

CEO and co-founder, KIT, Sweden

CEO and co-founder of KIT, a digital media startup focused on high-quality journalism. Prior to that, most recently he ran the digital business division at Bonnier Tidskrifter. He has held marketing and digital media roles at Unilever and NBC Universal, among others. He currently serves on the board of Bonnier Corporation in the U.S., Mediafy, Beckmans College of Design and IAB Sweden. He has a B.S. from the London School of Economics and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

Catherine Gicheru 

Country Lead, Code for Kenya, ICFJ Knight Fellow, Kenya

Catherine Gicheru is an award-winning Kenyan journalist who is currently serving as a Knight International Journalism Fellow with the International Center for Journalists and leader of the Code for Kenya team working to bring together data journalists and technologists to produce innovative storytelling.  She previously worked at the Nation Media Group where she rose to become the first woman news editor and investigations editor. More recently, she was founding editor of the Star newspaper in Nairobi. A Nieman Fellow and 1992 recipient of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Award winner, Catherine is co-authored of “S.M Otieno: Kenya’s Unique Burial Saga.”

Bella Hurrell 

Assistant Editor, BBC News, UK

Bella Hurrell is deputy editor of the BBC News Visual and Data Journalism team. Her focus is the team’s online output and she works creatively with designers, developers and journalists to produce cross-platform story-telling and compelling digital content.  

Raymond Joseph 

Freelance journalist, journalism trainer and media consultant, Cape Town, South Africa

Raymond Joseph began his journalism in 1974 as a cadet reporter at South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail. He has worked for mainstream, community and tabloids newspapers in senior editorial positions.

Peter Lamb 

President, Lamb Consulting, USA

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Lamb is a Strategy Consultant, now living in Miami, Florida, and specialising in media companies. "The goal of my consulting practice is to utilise the sophisticated strategic marketing principles and techniques, learned while doing my MBA at Harvard Business School, meshing them with a hands-on sales approach, to generate new revenue streams for publications and websites. ROI is achieved by focusing on NEW-NEW revenue ... from customers that have never used our products before: print or online."

Herman Manson 

 Founder and editor, MarkLives.com, South Africa

Herman Manson is the founder and editor of MarkLives.com. MarkLives.com offers a fresh, independent and investigative view of southern Africa’s changing comms landscape and is a must-read for top-level advertising, marketing and media execs.

Lene Pettersen

Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway

Dr. Lene Pettersen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway, yet lectures at several academic institutions in Norway. She researchs and writes about strategy, digital economy, internal communication, public relations, social media, social enterprise media, business models in the new media landscape, privacy, collaboration, the sharing economy, interaction design, universal design, artificial intelligence, amongst others. 

Her doctoral research concerned social enterprise media for internal collaboration in a multinational organization located in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

Andy Rice  

Brand strategist, public speaker, and advertising commentator, Johannesburg, South Africa

Andy has been passionate about the linkage between creativity and commercial effectiveness throughout his career. This led to his involvement in the APEX awards, South Africa’s equivalent of the Effies, almost 15 years ago.  He has served as Chair of the APEX Jury for over 10 years, and in 2015 was chosen as a judge in the Creative Effectiveness category of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, which is recognised as the world’s premier creative awards programme. 

In 1997, Andy co-founded Yellowwood Brand Architects, the first specialist brand strategy consultancy in South Africa.  Yellowwood became part of the TBWA Group in 2009 and is recognised as a leader in its field across Africa.  Andy remains involved as Chairman of Yellowwood.

He recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from his peers in the brand communications industry.

Dmitry Shishkin  

BBC World Service Digital Development Editor, BBC, UK

Dmitry is responsible for developing and implementing the BBC’s digital editorial offer for all 28 non-English foreign language new services (soon to be 40 due to expansion in Asia, Africa and Europe). Originally from Moscow, Russia, Dmitry has worked in various editorial-development roles for the digital section of BBC News. These roles have required liaison between editorial, product and strategy teams in order to drive innovation and develop new ways of reaching audiences, increasing engagement across the world and, crucially, driving culture change is newsrooms.

Josef Talotta

Executive head: commercial, retail & precinct development,  South Point, Johannesburg, South Africa

Talotta joined South Point, an award-winning Johannesburg-based property development company in August 2010 to head up the retail portfolio, transitioning to the property sector after a 25-year career in lifestyle-media (Style, Business Day Wanted, Condé Nast House & Garden, GQ magazines and the Sunday Times newspaper in South Africa, with regular contributions to Wallpaper, Time Out and Condé Nast Traveller in the UK), as well as successful stints in brand consultancy and advertising.

Oscar Westlund 

Associate professor​ at University ​of Gothenburg, Sweden and professor (II) at Volda University College, Norway

Westlund is associate professor at University ​of Gothenburg (Sweden) and professor (II) at Volda University College (Norway). He is an award winning researcher and teacher. He has researched the production, distribution and consumption of news through various methods for a decade, focusing especially on the shifts towards digital technologies such as mobile media.

He has also done research on technological dependence, media innovation, mobile search, media trust, etc. Westlund has authored more than 100 different publications, including articles in approximately 20 different journals, official inquiries for the Swedish government and the EU-commission, and many book chapters. He serves on the editorial board of six different journals, and has guest edited special issues/sections for two different journals.

From 2017 to 2020 he leads a major research project on digital journalism, for which he received a large grant together with professors in Sweden and the US. He is also an external collaborator/professor for research grant projects focusing on mobile media and other ICTs in relation to journalism, in Singapore and Spain respectively.