Keynote Speakers and Panelists

Solana Larsen

Ms. Solana Larsen is working as the Managing Editor of the Global Voices Online, focusing on countries outside of Europe and North America USA. She is a Danish-Puerto Rican journalist and activist in New York.

Before this job, Ms. Larsen was an editor with the global politics website openDemocracy.net for nearly five years. She was also a freelancer for Denmark’s radio (DR). She taught a postgraduate journalism class about illegal immigration at New York University in 2005.

She secured her MA degree in international journalism from the City University in London.

Ms. Larsen is the founder and president of PuertoDansk: the Danish-Puerto Rican Society. She lives in New York, USA.

Steven Lang

Mr. Steven Lang is an Editor-in-Chief of the Grocott’s Mail, the Grahamstown’s community newspaper in South Africa.

He studied Portuguese in Brazil before joining the SABC where he worked in the current affairs section of Channel Africa Radio. In his 21 years career in the SABC, he worked as a reporter and producer in radio, new media and television within the news division.

Mr. Lang was the founding editor of the Highway Africa News Agency (HANA) and led a team for the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) in Geneva 2003 and in Tunis 2005.

The Panelists

Host: Sigrun Rottmann, BBC World Service Radio

Discussion with
Werner D’Inka, Member of the Board of Editors-in-Chief of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany

Daoud Kuttab, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmmanNet, the Arab world’s first Internet radio, Jordan

Ritu Kapur, Editorial and executive producer of The Citizen Journalist Show at CNN-IBN, India

Rezwanul Islam, Editor of Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices, Bangladesh

Richard Kavuma, editor with The Observer newspaper, Kampala Uganda.

Saqib Riaz, Assistant Professor at the Department of Mass Communication, Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad, Pakistan