Posted By Robert Williamson

Maybe it’s the expected desert sunshine and highs in the 70s, or the fact that they represent jaw-dropping backgrounds in business journalism, government regulation or entrepreneurship. Or a little of both. Nonetheless, you’ve got six big reasons to attend the March 19-21 SABEW national conference in Phoenix.

They include:

• Arthur H. Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, whose newspaper just announced a new monetization that includes some free and some paid news content.

• Leonard Downie Jr., recently retired executive editor of the Washington Post, the successor to Benjamin Bradlee. Downie is co-author of a groundbreaking and controversial report proposing how to restructure U.S. journalism.

• Kenneth Feinberg, whom President Obama appointed special master for executive compensation, and has become known in the mass media as the White House’s “compensation czar,” with sweeping authority over the compensation given to executives of corporations receiving federal bailout money.

• Ricardo Salinas Pliego, chairman of Mexico’s Grupo Salinas, ranked 63rd place in the 2010 Forbes magazine list of the world’s richest people.

• Robert Khuzami, SEC Director of Enforcement, who until 2004 served as general counsel for the Americas at Deutsche Bank

• Amit Singhal, who has worked in the field of search for more than 15 years

Downie and co-author Michael Schudson of Columbia University wrote “The Reconstruction of American Journalism: Six New Tools for the Job,” excerpts of which appeared in the October-November 2009 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

The two, according to a CJR editorial in that issue, “propose a number of public-policy strategies that could help to create a framework of public and private support for accountability journalism. Their most radical suggestion would require broadcasters, Internet service providers and telecom users to pay into a fund that would be used to support local accountability journalism in communities around the country.”

During Downie’s 17 years as executive editor, The Washington Post won more Pulitzer Prizes, 25, than any U.S. newspaper under one editor.

Downie’s appearance is being announced days after SABEW said that New York Times Co. Chairman and Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. will also speak at the same conference.

Sulzberger will be the keynote speaker at a Saturday, March 20, luncheon. On Sunday, March 21, Downie will speak to attendees on “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” the topic of a report he co-wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Since retiring as Post executive editor in 2008, Downie became Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He continues as the Post’s vice president at large. According to the Cronkite School Web site, he spent 44 years at the Post, starting as investigative reporter, editor on the local and national news staffs, London correspondent and managing editor.

Downie helped supervise the newspaper’s Watergate coverage in the 1970s. During his time as executive editor, the Post won 25 Pulitzer Prizes. He is a founder and board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. and a board member of the Center for Investigative Reporting and chairs the board of advisers of Kaiser Health News. He is also the author of four non-fiction books and a novel, “The Rules of the Game,” published earlier in 2009.

Registration for the conference is now open.  Register here. The conference fee is $299 per person.

For more on SABEW, visit: http://sabew.org/. For conference information, contact SABEW executive director Warren Watson in Phoenix at (602) 496-5186 or at watson.sabew@asu.edu.

Tentative Conference Schedule