Shanth Kumar has been a printing technologist, editor and director with The Printers Mysore since 1983. He has driven the editorial coverage at Prajavani and helped it retain a leadership position in Karnataka over the last decade. Under him, the daily has seen several developments, including a redesign and new supplements. Shanth is a director of the Press Trust of India, where he recently completed his term as chairman and Wan-Ifra India. He is a former chairman of the Audit Bureau of Circulation. He has covered the last eight Olympics as a photojournalist for Deccan Herald and Prajavani. Shanth oversees the Nettakallappa Sports Foundation, a charitable trust started by his father K A Nettakallappa, that promotes the Deccan Athletic Club and provides scholarships to athletes. He was a former board member of the Indian Golf Union (IGU) where he promoted junior golf in India. He has the distinction of representing India in golf as a non-playing captain at the Asian Games in 2002.

Cherilyn Ireton heads up the World Editors Forum, the global network for editors within WAN-IFRA. She is a seasoned newspaper professional, having spent more than 20 years on South African newspapers, as journalist and editorial manger on the country's leading titles, the Sunday Times and Business Day. She rose to be Chief Operating Officer of BDFM Publishers, the business media joint venture between Pearson, owners of the Financial Times, and Times Media in South Africa which published Business Day newspaper, the Financial Mail magazine and Summit TV. She relocated to the UK in 2005 and owned an ran a London-based media consultancy, Presslinks, which advised a variety of international organizations and foreign governments.

Yagna Balaji is Founder-Editor of DT Next, an English daily from Tamil Nadu's Daily Thanthi group and the website dtnext.in. She heads the content for the website dtnext.in, as well as the paper’s other social media and online properties.

A journalist with two decades in the field, Yagna was instrumental in the launch of the Deccan Chronicle newspaper in Tamil Nadu in 2005. Under her leadership, Tamil Nadu’s first tabloid, Chennai Chronicle was launched. A decade later in 2015, she once again launched a brand new city-focussed newspaper for Chennai – DT Next. In a short time, DT Next has built a young and loyal readership, and is poised for growth across the state. Investigative reports, hard-hitting stories and a reader-first approach has been instrumental in the paper’s success.

Yagna has led workshops on developing communication skills, and has also been the recipient of awards for articles on developmental journalism. She has served on panels of graduate level media study programs to promote ethical journalism.

Yagna completed her graduation from St Francis College in Hyderabad, and her post-graduation in Journalism & Communication from the Symbiosis, Pune.

About DT Next: DT Next is a daily broadsheet from the 75-year-old Daily Thanthi group, which is circulated in and around Chennai. The group also brings out India's largest circulated Tamil newspaper Daily Thanthi, leading news channel Thanthi TV and the top rated regional radio station Hello FM.

Corinne Podger is a results-driven consultant and training facilitator, through her consultancy, the Digital Skills Agency. She has a proven track record of supporting newsrooms, NGOs and social impact organisations in more than 50 countries to implement digital innovations that grow audiences and support business priorities. Corinne’s expertise draws on more than 30 years in the media industry as a reporter, editor, lecturer and author. Her specialisms include digital-first newsgathering, online verification, mobile journalism, social multimedia production, podcasting and audio storytelling, and strategic audience engagement that drives brand awareness and media revenue. Her clients include WAN-IFRA, Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, European Journalism Centre, Thomson Reuters Foundation, BBC Media Action, and ABC Australia. She also works with science and public health organisations to tackle misinformation and disinformation. Corinne teaches on a sessional basis at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and speaks regularly at international journalism conferences.  She is a firm advocate of media diversity and inclusion in all her work. 

Jayant Mammen Mathew is the Executive Editor and Director of Malayala Manorama Company, one of India’s largest media companies with a significant presence in Print, Television, Radio and Onine. He was the President of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS), for the year 2018-19.

Malayala Manorama is India’s largest selling regional newspaper with a daily circulation of 2.3 million. The company also publishes more than 40 titles in various languages and operates Radio Mango, Kerala’s No. 1 FM station and ManoramaOnline, one of the largest portals. Jayant played a major role in the company venturing in to television broadcasting.

He spends considerable time expanding the television business. MM TV, broadcasts Manorama News, a 24-hour news and current affairs television channel and Mazhavil Manorama, an entertainment channel. Both the television channels, have won numerous awards, including the best regional news channel of India. Recently MM TV launched ManoramaMax, the first Malayalam news and entertainment OTT streaming service.

In addition to his role at MM TV, he continues to provide leadership in Malayala Manorama Company, where he oversees several publications and continues to write for the newspaper on business, economics and technology.

Prior to joining Malayala Manorama, he was an Associate Editor at Electronic News, a unit of Cahners Publishing in New York, where he specialized in finance and technology coverage. His articles at Electronic News won the Gold Award for feature series instituted by the American Society of Business Publication Editors. Jayant wrote for Malayala Manorama and The Week from New York for several years. He co-wrote the Man of the Year feature for The Week that won a South Asian Journalists Association Award in 2000.

Jayant also worked for Bridge News, a financial news service in New York. His articles have appeared in several publications, including Business Week Online and The Economic Times. Prior to this, he worked in corporate finance for News Corp. in New York and Fox Television in Los Angeles. He received a BE in electronics and communication engineering from Mangalore University, an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and an MS in journalism from Columbia University, New York.

Suhasini Haidar is the Diplomatic Editor of The Hindu, one of India’s oldest and most respected national dailies (www.thehindu.com), regularly writing on Foreign policy issues. Prior to this, Suhasini was Foreign Affairs editor and prime time anchor for India’s leading 24-hr English news channel CNN-IBN (2005-2014), where she presented the signature show “WorldView with Suhasini Haidar”, and Correspondent for CNN International’s New Delhi bureau before that.

Rohini Mohan is an Indian journalist who writes on politics, environment and human rights in South Asia.

For over 16 years, she has written for several publications and websites including TIME, The New York Times, The Economic Times, The Hindu, New Indian Express, and news channel CNN-IBN.

Rohini has a Masters in political journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York, and a PG Diploma in Print Journalism from Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. She speaks four South Asian languages: Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada. She is based in Bangalore, India.

Rohini has won the Chameli Devi Jain Award for outstanding woman journalist, 2019.

Her first book is the award-winning THE SEASONS OF TROUBLE (2014), a nonfiction account of three people caught up in the aftermath of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

​Her second is Mission Cycle, a children's book set in Kashmir. It's available in 5 languages.

Zuraidah Ibrahim is Executive Managing Editor of South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. She oversees the Hong Kong, Asia and International desks and also a Sunday magazine, This Week in Asia, which won the Best News Website award from WAN-IFRA in 2017. She was previously deputy editor of Singapore’s largest English newspaper, The Straits Times. She has published several books, among them Lee Kuan Yew, Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going (2011), a monograph on the Singapore opposition (2017) and Rebel City: Hong Kong’s Year of Water and Fire (2020).

Mariam is a Director in the Data Insights Group at the New York TImes, where she supports the advertising business through data-driven insights and analytics. She and her team have most recently been working on the company's first party data program. Previously, Mariam ran analytics at an insurance startup in Boston and worked in management consulting at Innosight.

Sheena has been leading programs on the Google News Initiative since its launch in APAC in 2018. She has worked with partner newsrooms on programs that span the full spectrum of newsroom operations and strategy, from diversity, equity, and inclusion to analytics and data. She has designed and executed programs like the GNI APAC Subscription Lab, Design Accelerator & Data Labs in 2019-2020, helping newsrooms develop ideas for news products that serve the needs of both their audiences and internal constituencies.

Sheena's professional background also includes experience in brand strategy, programmatic ad technology, mobile app productization and sales, and media production - in both corporate and non-profit settings. She also possesses rich geographical experience having worked in different Asian markets including Tokyo, Sydney, and now Singapore.

Alex Chapko is a General Manager at Piano Software, overseeing company growth, partnerships, and client relationships across India, Central Asia, Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Alex has been working with the Indian market for over 8 years, starting as a CEO of Newzmate - a content marketing cloud acquired by Piano in 2018. He is today working alongside hundreds of brands and content publishers across 30 countries, helping them identify and implement the necessary strategies and technology stack to improve audience understanding, engagement, and monetisation.

Girish Agarwaal is the Promoter Director of Dainik Bhaskar group and has been on the Board since October 1990. He has approximately 29 years of experience in the publishing business and has been with the organization for same number of years. He heads the marketing and related operations. He is also an active member of Indian Newspaper Society (INS). He holds the distinction of being the youngest chairman of INS for Madhya Pradesh region. He has also been awarded the Entrepreneur of the Year, for the year 2006 in the Media & Entertainment category by Ernst & Young. Further, he is also award recipient for "Outstanding Entrepreneur" in APEA (Asia Pacific Entrepreneur awards).

Dainik Bhaskar today is the 3rd largest circulated newspaper  in the World. The 1st and 2nd ranks are with the Japanese newspaper. And Dainik Bhaskar group is also India’s largest circulated newspaper group.

The launch story of ‘Dainik Divya Marathi’, Marathi language Newspaper of the group has been presented as a case study by Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore and was featured in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). Similarly, launch story of Gujarat (2003) became a subject of case study at the IIM, Ahmedabad.

Mr. Agarwaal is Managing Director of DB Power Ltd and has been spearheading its 1200 MW thermal power plant at Chhattisgarh which won the recognition from Government of India.

Dmitry is an expert in digital transformation, content strategy, and innovation. He worked for 21 years at the BBC in London where he was responsible for developing and implementing the BBC’s digital editorial offer for 40 non-English foreign language new services. Originally from Moscow, Russia, Dmitry worked in various editorial-development roles for the digital section of BBC News. These roles 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. He is an experienced digital leader in content creation, specialising in growing audiences across the world, driving editorial changes in newsrooms and adapting the way organisations work in digital space, especially around content innovation and audience engagement.
After his years at the BBC, he joined Culture Trip, a startup operating at the intersection of media and travel. He is now pursuing new adventures. Dmitry's main area of expertise is on the intersection between Editorial, Organisational, Strategy and Product sectors.