Jennifer LaFleur teaches at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism where she also  works with the school’s Investigative Reporting Program.

LaFleur was formerly a senior editor at the Center for Public Integrity, an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization focused on investigating the root causes of inequality. She joined CPI from the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, where she was data journalist in residence. At IRW, LaFleur helped launch The Accountability Project, a public data search tool with more than 1.8 billion government records.  LaFleur previously served as a senior editor for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, where she managed an award-winning team of data journalists, investigative reporters and fellows.

Throughout her career, open-records have been the core of LaFleur’s work.  She has written extensively about FOIA and open records, including starting public records columns at the Dallas Morning News and the San Jose Mercury News. She was 2002/2003 fellow for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press where she produced a guide on Access to Electronic Records and The Lost Stories, a white paper about the impact on journalism of post-9/11 closures of government information. She also contributed to HomeFront Confidential, a series of reports about what happened to the public’s right to know post-9/11.

LaFleur’s journalism career includes serving as the director of data journalism at ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit investigative newsroom, where she investigated the federal pardon system. prescribing patterns under Medicare Part D and disparities in the benefits for Alaska Native Corporations. She held similar roles at The Dallas Morning News and other newspapers.  Her work on the Morning News’ “Striking Differences” revealing racial bias in jury selection has been cited widely. She is a former training director for Investigative Reporters & Editors, a nonprofit trade organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting, and previously served on IRE’s board of directors. She is a board member of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, an independent grant-making organization, and is a member of the advisory board for the National Center for Disability and Journalism, a nonprofit, educational organization that provides training to improve coverage of disability in the media. 

(Updated April 2025)

Rick Blum is the founder and CEO of Sixteenth Street Consulting LLC, which helps advocacy organizations expand and diversify support, create and sustain coalitions, and build winning strategies.

Rick has organized numerous coalitions and initiatives to protect press freedom and promote open government. For over a decade, Rick coordinated News Media for Open Government, a coalition of major news media associations promoting open government policies and practices. He led the coalition (until 2017 known as the Sunshine in Government Initiative) in its work supporting enactment of the 2007 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016. His work defending against unnecessary, overbroad or self-serving secrecy lead him to any number of topics, such as tracking space junk, the farm bill, and high-speed rail. He also helped explain to Congress how the news media keep the public informed based on unauthorized disclosures of classified information (“leaks”), addressing concerns about WikiLeaks and successfully pushing back against anti-leaks proposals in the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2013.

Blum testified numerous times before Congress on FOIA implementation and exemptions, science and disclosure, and federal legislation to shield journalists from revealing confidential sources. He helped numerous experts and news media representatives prepare for appearances before Congress on press freedom and open government topics. 

Blum was the founding director of OpenTheGovernment.org, a broad coalition of journalists, labor, and free-speech and environmental advocates. Rick served as the first policy director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where he helped the organization define its policy work on a wide range of topics affecting newsgathering and transparency.

He holds a master’s degree from Indiana University, where his studies focused on democratization efforts in Russia, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. 

(Updated May 2025)

Debra Gersh Hernandez is director of communications for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and is a coordinator of the national Sunshine Week open government initiative, in partnership with the American Society of News Editors. Previously, she was the first full-time Sunshine Week coordinator for ASNE. She has served in various communications roles for the Newspaper Association of America and the American Advertising Federation.

For many years, Gersh Hernandez was a reporter and editor for Editor & Publisher magazine, first in New York City and later in Washington, D.C. She has worked asa consultant/freelancer for various organizations, including the Open GovernmentPartnership, National Judicial Education Program, the Student Press Law Center, andthe National Newspaper Association.

A graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University,Gersh Hernandez is currently an alumni board representative to The Daily Orange, theindependent student newspaper at Syracuse.

Jameel Jaffer is the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was established by Columbia University and the Knight Foundation to promote the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. Since its inception in 2016, the Institute has taken on major litigation and research projects relating to free speech online, social media, artificial intelligence, new surveillance technology, algorithmic amplification, wartime censorship, the rights of whistleblowers, and government secrecy.

Between 2002 and 2016, Jaffer was a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, ultimately overseeing all of the organization’s work on free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. He led or co-led litigation teams that compelled the Bush administration to disclose the “torture memos,” compelled the Obama administration to disclose the “drone memos,” and forced the National Security Agency to abandon its dragnet surveillance of Americans’ call records. He played a major part in the ACLU’s decision to take on the representation of Edward Snowden. The New York Times described one of his transparency cases as “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure.”

Jaffer’s recent writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, the Guardian, and Foreign Affairs. He is an executive editor of Just Security, a national security blog, and his book, The Drone Memos, was one of the Guardian’s “Best Books of 2016.” He was named to Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” list in 2012, received the Vox Libera award from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression in 2015, and was inducted into the Newseum’s Freedom of Information “Hall of Fame” in 2016. In recent years he has delivered the inaugural Peter Zenger Lecture at Columbia Journalism School; the Or’ Emet Lecture at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School; the Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum; and the Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. He was also the honoree at the Columbia Law Review’s annual banquet in 2015 and the Harvard Law Review’s annual banquet in 2022.

Jaffer is a graduate of Williams College, Cambridge University, and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He served as a law clerk to Honorable Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then to Right Honorable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada. 

Royce C. Lamberth was appointed United States District Judge for the District of Columbia on Nov. 16, 1987. He assumed senior status in 2013.

Prior to his appointment to the bench, Judge Lamberth served as chief of the Civil Division of the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia for nearly 10 years. He joined that office as an assistant United States attorney in 1974. A native of San Antonio, Texas, he attended the University of Texas for both his bachelor’s and law school degrees. He served as a captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the United States Army from 1968 to 1974. After serving in Vietnam, he served in the Litigation Division of the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the Army at the Pentagon from 1971 to 1974.

Judge Lamberth was appointed in 1995 by Chief Justice William Rehnquist as the presiding judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. His served until 2002.

Judge Lamberth is a former chairman of the Professional Ethics Committee of the Federal Bar Association, which drafted the Federal Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct for Federal Lawyers. He also served as a member of the Committee on Automation and Technology of the Judicial Conference of the United States from 1990 to 1996. From 2003 to 2008, and from 2013 to the present, Judge Lamberth served as chairman of the Committee on Inter-Circuit Assignments of the Judicial Conference of the United States.

He became a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States in May 2008. A former chairman of the Federal Litigation Section of the Federal Bar Association, he is a member of the American Bar Association, the Bar Association of the District of Columbia, and the District of Columbia Bar. Judge Lamberth is married to the former Janis K. Jost of San Antonio.

Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter on the Bloomberg News investigations team.

Leopold is a recipient of the 2023 Gerald Loeb award for investigative reporting, a 2022 George Polk award for health reporting and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. In 2015, Leopold was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy award for producing The Architect for VICE News, the first ever interview with retired Air Force psychologist James Mitchell, the man credited with developing the CIA’s torture program whose story Leopold had pursued for a decade.

Leopold’s Freedom of Information Act work has been profiled by dozens of radio, television, and print outlets, including a 2015 front-page story in the New York Times. He has testified before a congressional oversight committee about the shortcomings of FOIA and steps the government needed to take to improve the law.

In 2020, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research organization out of Syracuse University, identified Leopold as “the most active individual FOIA litigator in the United States today.” Politico has also referred to Leopold as “perhaps the most prolific Freedom of Information requester.” In 2016, Leopold was awarded the FOI award from Investigative Reporters & Editors.

He publishes the weekly newsletter, FOIA Files.

(Updated April 2025)

Miriam Nisbet was the founding director of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Created in 2007, OGIS is the federal FOIA ombudsman office, charged with providing mediation services to resolve disputes between FOIA requesters and federal agencies and with improving FOIA administration. In addition to establishing OGIS, Nisbet represented the National Archives at the Administrative Conference of the United States; the International Council on Archives; the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions; the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO; and the International Conference of Information Commissioners.

Nisbet was chair of the FOIA Advisory Committee, established in 2014 as a government commitment under the National Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership. She retired from NARA in November 2014. She previously served at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris as director of the Information Society Division; from 1999 to 2007 as legislative counsel for the American Library Association. Nisbet was special counsel for Information Policy, National Archives and Records Administration, from 1994 to 1999. Prior to joining the Archives, Nisbet served since 1982 as deputy director, Office of Information and

Privacy, U.S. Department of Justice.

Nisbet received a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a J.D. degree from the University’s School of Law. She is a member of the District of Columbia and North Carolina bars. Nisbet was elected in 2005 as a member of the American Law Institute. She received the Sunshine in Government Award in 2014 and the American Society of Access Professionals President’s Award for Distinguished Public Service in 2013. She taught as an adjunct lecturer, 2013 to 2014, at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies.

Seth Rosenfeld is an independent investigative journalist and author of the New York Times best-seller, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. He began the research that would lead to Subversives in 1981, as a journalism student at UC Berkeley writing for the campus newspaper. The work would become a three-decade Freedom of Information Act odyssey, with five lawsuits under the FOIA in a precedent-setting legal fight; and that the federal courts would order the FBI to release some 300,000 pages and pay his pro-bono attorneys’ fees of more than $1 million.

Rosenfeld’s FOIA lawsuits not only revealed what the courts called unlawful FBI operations at one of the nation’s preeminent public universities but strengthened the public’s right to know: they produced a series of decisions reversing exaggerated FBI claims that records must be kept secret; directing the bureau to make more thorough searches for records; and requiring it to waive processing fees in the public interest.

Rosenfeld pursued this FOIA project separately from his work of 25 years as a staff reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, where he received the George Polk Award and other national awards. Published in 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Subversives is a cautionary tale about the dangers of secrecy and power, revealing how J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI tried to silence the 1964 Free Speech Movement, fire UC President Clark Kerr because bureau officials disagreed with his campus policies, and gave Ronald Reagan personal and political favors. The New York Times Book Review called Subversives “electrifying,” NPR’s On the Media cited its “stunning revelations,” and the Christian Science Monitor called it “crucial history.” Rosenfeld lives in San Francisco and is continuing his FOIA work.

Pete Weitzel served as managing editor of the Miami Herald, where he worked as a reporter and editor for nearly 40 years. When he was president of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors in 1984, he established the Florida First Amendment Foundation to serve as a government transparency watchdog. He was its president until 1995. In that role, he helped draft an amendment to the Florida Constitution guaranteeing citizens a right of access, and served on a Florida Supreme Court commission that modified state court rules on court records.

Weitzel served on the board of the Florida foundation and he also helped launch the National Freedom of Information Coalition and served as its second president. In January 2004, he moved to Washington, D.C., and started the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, an alliance of 32 journalism-related organizations working on open government issues. Working with the American Society of News Editors, Weitzel helped launch the first Sunshine Week in 2005. The Coalition was subsequently merged into the Sunshine in Government Initiative, which he also helped start.

In 1997, Weitzel was selected as one of the initial inductees in Florida’s Freedom of Information Hall of Fame. In 2007, he received the John Aubuchon Freedom of the Press Award from the National Press Club. The National Freedom of Information Coalition inducted him into the State Open Government Hall of Fame in 2015.

Weitzel died Sept. 15, 2024, in Juno Beach, Florida.

(Updated April 2025)

Cori Zarek is a lawyer, technologist, and civic entrepreneur with expertise in tech policy, civic tech, digital rights, open government, freedom of information, and press freedom. Cori recently joined Apolitical, the world’s largest network of public servants, to expand its models of learning and communities of practice to North America. From 2022-2024, Cori served as Deputy Administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, the 200+ person technology team based at the White House to partner with agencies to implement policies and programs through design and technology. And previously, Cori served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer where one of her roles was to lead U.S. participation in the Open Government Partnership, the 75-country consortium working to improve transparency, public participation, and accountability.  

Outside of government, Cori has been on the faculty at Georgetown University and previously served as Executive Director of Georgetown’s Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, a 50-person applied research center focused on using data and technology to improve public systems. Cori previously was the Freedom of Information Director and legal fellow with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, held a fellowship researching open source software in government with the Mozilla Foundation, and advised Code for America. In recent years, Cori co-founded civic tech organizations including U.S. Digital Response in 2020 which pairs pro bono technologists with governments for emergency support, Technologists for the Public Good in 2021 which is the first professional association for the field of public interest technology, and the Judicial Innovation Fellowship in 2022, housed at the Georgetown University Law Center, which partners technologists with state court administrations to improve access to justice with data and design.

Cori is on the advisory council for the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law and the advisory board for the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she received her BA. She has also consulted with more than a dozen governments around the world on right to information, open data, and digital government efforts.

(Updated May 2025)