Posted By Cody Shotwell

By JILL JORDEN SPITZ, SABEW Secretary

TUCSON, March 2 — Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who has worked in the field of search for more than 15 years, will deliver a keynote address during SABEW’s annual connference in Phoenix later this month. His topic will be “the future of search.”

He will be the breakfast keynote speaker 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. Saturday, March 20, at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in downtown Phoenix.

Singhal first studied Web search as an academic researcher and now does the same as a Google engineer. He works with Google’s Search Quality team, which is responsible for Google’s search algorithms. Those ever-changing algorithms help searchers get the best, most relevant results, but remain a mystery to people trying to drive traffic to their web sites.

Before joining Google in 2000, Singhal was a senior member of technical staff at AT&T Labs. Singhal has an undergraduate degree in India from IIT, Roorkee, a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in computer science.

SABEW’s annual conference runs from March 19-21 at the Cronkite School. Other keynote speakers 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 on 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

Registration for the conference is now open. The conference fee is $299 per person. Register at http://sabew.org.

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@asu.edu.

Conference Schedule

(Jill Jorden Spitz is assistant managing editor/business at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson and is SABEW national secretary.)