Samantha Grant

Samantha Grant, award-winning documentarian, journalist, and educator, delivered Marquette University's 2016 Burleigh Media Ethics Lecture. Grant has produced content for national and international television channels and corporate clients like Pandora, AT&T and Electronic Arts. Her feature documentary A Fragile Trust tells the shocking story of Jayson Blair, the most infamous serial plagiarist of our time, and how he unleashed the massive scandal that rocked the New York Times and the entire world of journalism.

Zizi Papacharissi

Zizi Papacharissi is professor and head of the Communication Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. As the 2016 Nieman Symposium Lecturer, Papacharissi will examine how social media influenced the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. In her lecture, Affective Publics: News Storytelling, Sentiment and Twitter, she will present data from recent studies undertaken at the University of Illinois-Chicago that explicate the relevance of the platform for contemporary news storytelling, framing, and gatekeeping.

Michael Smith and Jemele Hill

At this year's Pete and Bonnie Axthelm Memorial Lecture, Michael Smith and Jemele Hill hosted a version of their show His and Hers for the lecture and discussed substantive topics like concussions, race and gender within the sports world.

A show that centers around sports discussion, His & Hers airs weekdays on ESPN. The show previously centered around sports statistics and was re-branded in the fall of 2014 to include discussion.