Featured Speakers

Mike Blinder is known internationally for his expertise in media, sales and marketing. Today over 250 media companies world-wide are clients of The Blinder Group. Mike's workshop "Multimedia Street Fighting" will show newspapers how to make more profits on the web. It can be done! He has experienced it in hundreds of markets large and small at newspapers with varying history and cultures, worldwide. Newspapers can make money with their web sites and the traditional sales people can sell it! The process of adding web components to existing day-to-day sales calls has to be simplified. The value propositions the web brings to advertisers must be made clear and easy to understand. The sales force needs to understand how much more they can benefit their advertisers by adopting a multimedia approach in their day-to-day tasks. More importantly, the sales people have to see how they can make money as well! The Blinder Group is doing it all over the world!

Jeff Greene is a retail advertising specialist and heads his own marketing company, THE GREENE GROUP. Mr. Greene provides customized retail sales and media marketing services, including personalized consulting and product development, across all retail categories, to retailers and newspapers.  The majority of his time is spent conducting customized seminars and inter-active workshops throughout the United States.  After living in Arizona for 10 years, he relocated to Idaho four years ago.

For almost 10 years, Jeff was a vice-president of the NEWSPAPER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, after spending 20 years as a retailer.  Originally from the midwest, he was a manager and buyer for Macy’s in Kansas City; store manager for The May Company in Los Angeles; store manager for Dayton’s in St. Paul, Minnesota; and vice-president/director of regional stores for Diamond’s in Phoenix.  He also worked for Carlson Companies in their catalog showroom retail company as Director of Field Merchandising.  Mr. Greene has also been a special consultant to Lee Enterprises, a multi-media company based in Iowa.  More recently, Jeff has worked on Internet marketing projects bundling print and online media and providing Web optimization to local merchants in Boise, his hometown.

Gary Dimmock is an investigative reporter with the Ottawa  Citizen newspaper. He has won several awards for investigative reporting, including the inaugural National Newspaper Award for Explanatory Work, in 2002.   This year, Dimmock is nominated for a National Newspaper Award  in the politics category for an alleged bribery scheme he exposed. Dimmock is  also nominated this year for a Canadian Association of Journalism Award for an  investigative report on an RCMP agent.

He has worked for six newspapers  across 17 years -- five daily, one weekly -- in Atlantic Canada and  Ontario. He has also taught journalism on a part-time basis at Ottawa’s  Algonquin College. He has filed stories locally and across North  America, covering school shootings in Taber and Dawson College, the tainted  water scandal in Walkerton and from Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. He has  also filed from Africa, Turkey and Qatar, where he filed daily newspaper,  television and radio reports on the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He is also a  beginner gardener.

Rob  Begg is an online and product marketing executive with over 16 years of experience in the media, interactive and technology industries. He  currently serves as President of Village Communications, a marketing  consultancy that works with publishers and marketers to grow their audiences  and revenue online.  In addition to consulting Rob also holds the  position of Vice President – Marketing at Zip.ca, Canada’s leading online  video rental service and one of the largest Internet marketers in the  country.

Most recently Rob  was Vice-President Of Marketing at SportsDirect, one of North America’s  largest online specialty sports publishers. Prior to SportsDirect Rob lead marketing and communications at iMagicTV, an interactive television  company in the UK.  Rob began his career in Internet product management  with leading telecoms providers.  Rob is often sought to speak on the  topics of online marketing, media and interactive television.  When he’s  not in an airport lounge he resides in Halifax with his young and very busy  family.

Born Halifax, Nova Scotia, David has appeared on appeals to the Supreme Court of Canada on four separate occasions and participated in over 170 reported decisions. His practice includes representing a number of institutional clients including Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian National Railways, Meridian Construction Inc., National Bank, Nova Scotia Power and Amica. David appears regularly in the Supreme Courts and  courts of Appeal of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. His practice includes class actions / mass tort work.

David is a Partner and practices in the areas of Business Litigation, Civil Litigation, Estate Litigation, Employment Law, Media Law, and Construction Law. David is presently the Chairman of the firm's litigation section.

Robert Woodhouse, is a 27 year veteran of the printing industry working for over 9 different Community Newspapers and 2 Daily Newspapers. Starting out in newspaper ad production, becoming a junior creative artist, senior creative artist and finally the first Art Director of Trader Media Corporation (Yellow Pages Group). Robert’s position as Art Director of Marketing involved redesigning over 70 publications, launching new publications, software testing, corporate branding, copywriter, advertising campaigns, making marketing sales kits, billboards, product stands, logo designs, outdoor signage, promotional items and more.

Robert has taken courses at  both Sheridan College and Humber College, specializing in Illustration and Package Design. Robert is an employee of Metro Graphics out of New York, designing speculative ad layouts for over 6 years. Robert has won over 10 Provincial awards, 2 National awards and 4 International awards in the Canadian Newspaper industry. Robert has been a consultant to the industry in training newspaper staff in Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark. Robert is a MacIntosh font management specialist and oversaw the Hamilton Spectator’s Mac computers. Robert is a specialist in color photo reproduction. Robert has also been a Production Manager for a community newspaper, editorial cartoonist, newspaper designer, editorial layout designer, co-owner of a community newspaper, Apple technician, Powerpoint and Flash multimedia designer. Robert resides in Eel River Crossing in Restigouche county in Northern New Brunswick and works for the BNI group of newspapers.

Rick MacLean is a graduate of Mount Allison University (chemistry and history) and of the masters in journalism program at the University of Western Ontario. He edited the twice-weekly Miramichi Leader from 1984 to 1996 and again from 1998 to 2000. He was a reporter for the New Brunswick daily the Telegraph Journal from 1996 to 1998. He is the co-author of three books, the scholarly The Rebel Bureaucrat published in India in 1983 and two books on serial killer Allan Legere, Terror and Terror’s End. The Front Page Challenge seminar forces editors and reporters to make difficult ethical decisions under the demanding deadlines of the online environment, then defend those decisions in the discussion afterwards.