Megan Garvey

Deputy Managing Editor, The Los Angeles Times
@garveylatimes

Megan has broad responsibility for many digital projects at the Times, including breaking news on the web, the home page, the data team and the presentation of online projects. She was promoted to the position in March 2014, after working as assistant managing editor for digital.

Megan has worked at The Times since 1998, covering the 2000 presidential election, a variety of Metro topics, homicides in Compton, the gubernatorial recall and was part of the team that won the 2004 breaking news Pulitzer for coverage of the wildfires. By 2008, she served a new dual role as the assigning editor for health and county government and the editor for online data projects. She has managed a series of innovative online projects, including Mapping L.A., Crime L.A., the Homicide Report and the Los Angeles Times Teacher Ratings database.

She graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with a degree in history and lives in Long Beach with her husband, Steve Carney, and two children, Declan and Brendan, and her dog, Conor.

David Smydra

Editorial Director, Google Play Newsstand, Google
@smydrad

David works on News Partnerships at Google, where he manages the participation of national and international news organizations in Google Play Newsstand. Since 2008, he has also helped online news publishers by developing metatags, indexing tools and user-facing features in Google News. In the spring of 2014, David conducted a visiting fellowship at the custom writing Nieman Foundation at Harvard to explore how future news events could be expressed in structured data.

David has worked in digital media for more than ten years, beginning with internships at small publications and various freelance assignments before earning an M.A. at Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism. His Master’s thesis explored the tensions that arose for print magazines when they tried to go online amid the explosion of social networking and digital communities. He worked as a local beat reporter for the Half Moon Bay Review, where his economic and breaking news reporting earned accolades from the California Newspaper Publishers Association. His freelance writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere.

Robert Hernandez

Associate Professor of Professional Practice at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Board Liaison
@webjournalist

Robert Hernandez, aka WebJournalist, has made a name for himself as a journalist of the Web, not just on the Web. His primary focus is exploring and developing the intersection of technology and journalism – to empower people, inform reporting and storytelling, engage community, improve distribution and, whenever possible, enhance revenue. He is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, but he’s not an academic… he’s more of a “hackademic” and specializes in “MacGyvering” Web journalism solutions. He connects dots and people. He has worked for seattletimes.com, SFGate.com, eXaminer.com, La Prensa Gráfica, among others. Hernandez is also the co-founder of #wjchat and creator of Learn Code for Journalism with Me project. He is currently serving on the Online News Association board and a lifetime member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

See the ONA15 Program Team.