How to become a star: building your brand from scratch

DATE/TIME: Saturday, October 23, 2021, at 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT

DURATION: 90 mins

SPEAKERS:

Benet Wilson
Senior Editor for The Points Guy
@benetwilson

 Benét J. Wilson is the Senior Editor/Training and Development and a travel/aviation writer for The Points Guy. She serves on the boards of the Online News Association and Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism and served on the Online News Association and the National Association of Black Journalists boards. She is a strong advocate for media diversity, mentoring and career navigation. She has moderated workshops and webinars on topics including digital journalism, branding and social media. She graduated from American University in Washington, D.C., with a B.A. in broadcast journalism. She resides in Baltimore, Md.

 Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Kimbriell Kelly is the Washington Bureau Chief at the Los Angeles Times. She is the first person of color, and second woman, to serve in this role since at least the 1940s when the bureau began operating in Washington. Kelly formerly served as the bureau’s enterprise and investigations editor after joining the Times in 2019. Previously, Kelly was an investigative reporter on the Investigative Unit at the Washington Post, where she was one of the lead reporters on the Pulitzer Prize-winning project “Fatal Force,” examining officer-involved shootings which won the Pulitzer for National Reporting in 2015; and “Murder with Impunity,” on unsolved urban homicides, which in 2019 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Explanatory Reporting award. Kelly was the editor and publisher of the Chicago Reporter before joining the Post.

Talia Buford is ProPublica's talent development director. She joined ProPublica in 2017 as a reporter, covering disparities in environmental impacts, and most recently, focused on racial disparities of the coronavirus pandemic. Previously, she was an environment and labor reporter at The Center for Public Integrity, where her work focused mostly on wage theft and the Environmental Protection Agency’s lackluster enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. She also covered energy for POLITICO Pro, and started her career covering municipal and legal affairs at The Providence (R.I.) Journal. Buford was part of team of ProPublica reporters whose coverage of the pandemic won several awards, including the George Polk Award for Health Reporting, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Buford graduated from Hampton University, where she was editor in chief of the student newspaper, the Hampton Script. She earned a master’s degree in the study of law from Georgetown University Law Center.